Originally published 13 October 2020
I’ve started a new Ancestry Tree called The Town of Acerra, Naples, Italy. For the past six years I’ve been working on various families in Acerra and I was having trouble finding individuals since I have about 30 trees, it is time to bring all the trees together into one big tree.
And it’s been good to revisit my research. I’ve found mistakes I’ve made, things I needed to fix on Family Search (most of you can guess why), and things that didn’t quite look right and needed more research.
I can’t tell you how many times I’ve recorded an estimated death based on the birth of a child with the same name and written, “and it wouldn’t make sense to have two children with the same name alive at the same time.”
And then I found the sisters Maria Giuseppa di Nuzzo. One was born in 1831 and the other was born around 1831. I found death records for each of them – one died in 1905 and the other in 1915. One married Raffaele Lombardi in 1853 and the other married Francesco di Balsamo in 1860. It was the first marriage for both of them and neither of them remarried when their husbands died.
I learned all of this in 2016 so when I revisited my research yesterday, I dug deeper. I found the Marriage, Processetti and there was the same 1831 birth certificate for the 1853 marriage to Raffaele Lombardo and the 1860 marriage to Francesco di Balsamo. My first thought was the girl was a bigamist. The birth dates of the children could work if she were constantly pregnant and the children were premature. Not likely and that did not explain the two death records.
So I went with the next unlikely but logical conclusion, there were two sisters both with the name Maria Giuseppa. But in 2016 I had made a note that I thought one of the girls might be Marianna di Nuzzo born in 1827 but I would need to do more research on the family.
Today, I looked at all the children of Maria Giuseppa di Nuzzo and Raffaele Lombardi. On all their records, the mother is listed as Marianna di Nuzzo. It is only on her marriage and death records she is listed as Maria Giuseppa di Nuzzo. It seems more than a clerical error and I wish I could find the story behind the apparent mix up.