The Search for our Ancestry (LVIII)

Reading Between the Lines

By Angelo Coniglio

Dear readers: I have enjoyed writing for Il Regno for the past five years, and I hope I have in some way helped you to connect with your ancestors. The time has come for me to lay aside my writing tools; this will be my last column. Many of my columns have dealt with researching original Sicilian/Italian church and civil records. For most of our ancestors, who weren’t noble, rich, or famous; who were illiterate and therefore couldn’t record family history, those records are the only bits and pieces of their lives that have been passed on for posterity.  Here is one of those records, my father Gaetano Coniglio’s record of birth. With a little imagination, we can put ‘flesh’ on the document’s bare bones.

In Serradifalco, Sicily, on Friday, 26 April 1889, the sun rose at 5:04 AM and set at 6:39 PM.

But my grandfather, Gaetano Coniglio the elder, never saw it rise or set, because he was down in the bowels of Stincone, one of the local sulfur mines, working to earn a meager living for his wife Maria Carmela Calabrese and their family.
 
Maria Carmela had borne him eight children, but Raimondo, the eldest, had left for Argentina, and three others had died in infancy, including little Leonardo, three years earlier.

Gaetano had entered the mine long before sunrise, and as the hour approached eight in the evening, he packed his gear and made the long, slippery climb out of the mine. He trod on footholds barely carved in the rock, slippery from the sweat of the labors of the carusi, the mine-boys who toiled all day, carrying the raw sulfur to the furnace outside the mine.

The moon was new, and invisible, but even so, as he left the black mouth of the mine, the starlit sky shone like dawn by comparison.  His cumpari, pick-men like himself, were the brothers Vincenzo and Salvatore Barile.  They accompanied him as he walked the three miles to his humble home at Via Migliore number ten.  Like them, he was virtually exhausted, but his thoughts were about Maria Carmela.  She was in her final days of pregnancy, and it had not been an easy one.  He knew that his only daughter, thirteen-year-old Maria, would not only be tenderly caring for her mother, but also would have a bowl of hot minestrone ready for him when he arrived, perhaps even with a shred of the lamb they had relished on Easter, the previous Sunday.

But as he approached the corner of Via Roma and Via Migliore, he saw Maria anxiously pacing there.  When she spied him, she ran to him, shouting "Papà, Papà, sa veni, sa veni, lu bambinu arrivà!" (Papa, Papa, come sir, come sir, the baby boy has arrived!)

He and his friends hurried into the building, scattering the family livestock kept on the ground floor - two hens, a rooster and one remaining lamb. Gaetano rushed upstairs to the living quarters to see Maria Carmela calmly suckling a red-cheeked, black-haired cherub.  A stoic who did not often show his emotions, Gaetano laid a tender hand on his wife's cheek and muttered "Ha fattu beni, cara."  (You've done well, dear.)

Carmela took the praise demurely, and jokingly responded "Unn'ha statu? Era natu a li cincu. Iddu già sapi parlari!" (Where have you been?  He was born at five o'clock.  He already knows how to speak!).

The rest of the evening, into the early hours, was spent by Gaetano and his friends 'Cenzinu and Turiddu in an alcove of the living area, made somewhat festive by the decorations and baskets of palms that Gaetano had woven two weeks earlier to celebrate Easter.   The cumpari nursed a small skin of wine that Turiddu had magically produced from his pack, while Gaetano sang the praises of his new son, not omitting the fact that he had fathered the child at age fifty-three!  Home-made bread dipped in the wine helped to sustain their revelry, as his friends cried "Tanuzzu, tu puru ha fattu beni!"  (Gaetano, you, too, have done well!)

The night deepened, and they realized they must return to the mine that morning: each found a warm spot on the floor and napped as best he could, while Maria tended to the needs of her mother and her new baby brother.

As Saturday morning approached, the men shook themselves awake, grabbed crusts of bread and their packs, and began the walk back to Stincone.  Dawn was staining the sky, and they approached the mine with trepidation.  The mine owner was Mastru Licalsi. They called him 'Mashu Babbu', 'Master Dummy'.  He was standing arms akimbo in the mine's entranceway, and he berated them for being late, threatening that he would dock them for the lost time.

Emboldened by his new fatherhood (and perhaps by last night's wine), Gaetano retorted "Go ahead, and while you're at it, you can dock me for a half-day, because this morning, I'm taking my son to the municipiu to have his birth registered!"
  
Before Mashu Babbu could sputter a response, 'Cenzinu and Turiddu piped up "You can dock us, too, because we're going as his witnesses!"  And they turned on their heels and trudged back into town.

So it was that at ten that morning, 27 April 1889, 'Cenzinu and Turiddu, with Gaetano gingerly cradling his baby boy, took the short walk to the town hall on Via Duca di Serradifalco.
 
Gaetano presented the child for Town Secretary Pasquale Vaccari to see, while a clerk recorded the details:

"Your name?" - - "Gaetano Coniglio" 

"Age?" - - Gaetano, with obvious pride, replied "Fifty-three!" 

"Occupation? - - "Sulfur miner." 

"Date and time of the birth?" - - "The twenty-sixth of this month, at five in the afternoon." 

"Address?" - - "Via Migliore number ten." 

"Mother of the child?" - - "Carmela [her common name] Calabrese, my wife." 

"What do you name the child?"

There was a rigid naming convention in Sicily, requiring the first and second child of each gender to be named after their respective grandparents.  This tradition had already been met with Gaetano's earlier children, so he responded "I'm not likely to have any more sons. I'll give him my own name, and the name of my grandfather: Gaetano."

"Have you brought witnesses to this registration?" - - "Yes, my friends Vincenzo and Salvatore Barile. They're sulfur miners, too."

"Can any of you write?" - - "If we could write, would we be sulfur miners?"

It may not have happened in exactly that way, but who can say it didn't?  The clerk wrote down only the names and dates as reported by my grandfather.  The ‘meat’ of the story comes from my heart.

Coniglio is the author of the book The Lady of the Wheel, inspired by his Sicilian research. Order the paperback or the Kindle version at www.bit.ly/SicilianStory Coniglio’s web page at http://bit.ly/AFCGen has helpul hints on genealogic research. If you have genealogy questions, or would like him to lecture to your club or group, e-mail him at genealogytips@aol.com.