Thursday, December 6, 2001
Here’s a bit of housecleaning from my big roundup of the past week or so. I mentioned that I hadn’t made a copy of the marriage record for Angiolo Pietrosimone and Anna Antonia di Luisi. Now I have, and I remember why I hadn’t before. This thing is a mess. I’ve done some substantial cleanup work on it, and I can now read a fair portion of it, but it’s still pretty brutal. You can look at page one and page two and see what I mean. I still can’t tell exactly when they got married from this, but the index said 12 March 1818, so I’ll go with that since it’s unreadable on the record itself. There’s something about 16 Jun 1815 or 1818 at the bottom of page one; I’m not sure what that’s about yet. I need to find my copy of Trafford Cole’s book about Italian records to help decipher the whole record. Anyway, I do know that it gives Angiolo’s parents as the late Giovanni and the still-living Vittoria Masuccio and says that he’s their eldest living child and 32 years old, and gives Anna Antonia’s parents as the living Antonio and the late Francesca Bianchino. She was 22 years old and the eldest living child of her parents. The banns were read on the 1 Mar and 8 Mar, and I don’t think anyone objected. Their witnesses were Luigi Antonucci, Marino Pito, Giuseppe Ferrazza, and Francesco del Toro.
I also didn’t have copies of Antonio Rapa’s death record when I wrote the roundup. I’ve since gotten them. There are two pages. The first is a handwritten addendum to the records completely out of the normal format of the death records. It’s basically a copy of the death record from Piedimonte, before the mayor of that town, N. Onoratelli. It says that he died in the "Casa di detenzione" of that town, which I take to mean jail. I know it’s the right Antonio Rapa, because it says he’s the husband of Angiola d’Amato. I think they’ve got the age wrong, though; it says he was 70 years old, where my records say he was only 56. But I’m willing to give a little slack for a record in another town. The second death record is the account of San Potito’s mayor in the form of a regular death record, where instead of people appearing before him, he says he received a death record from the mayor of Piedimonte on 16 Nov 1816 that detailed the death of Antonio Rapa, husband of Angiola d’Amato and son of the late Domenico Rapa and Cecilia Missere, while detained in the jail ("detenuto nelle carcieri") of Piedimonte on 20 Sep 1816. I am really curious what he was doing there, and wish I knew more Italian to understand what the nuances are of the language describing where he was, whether it’s jail or prison, whether this was something like he was in the drunk tank overnight and died or whether he was serving a sentence or what.
Posted at 9:51:42 PM
