It is hard for me to believe that it has been four and a half years since I last posted on this blog. If you look at my second to last post about Irene Veri – you’ll find a clue as to why my blogging stopped. Irene was my biggest fan (others may disagree but that is how I felt) and my reliable source. After she died, I felt like it didn’t matter anymore. Who really cares about all that ancient history. Whenever I talked to Irene, I knew she was happy to have someone interested in her family. That she enjoyed pouring out her memories to me. Plus, I could always count on her to set me straight if I got one Louis or Nick George linked to the wrong parents – easy to do when so many brothers named their first son after their father.
I know Irene would want me to keep this up, but for some reason I lost interest. It probably made me sad to keep blogging without her here to read what I wrote. All I know is that I’m very thankful for every minute I got to spend with Irene in person (once in 2013 and again in 2016) and even more grateful for our five years of correspondence about the Giorgio family.
One reason for stopping is that I’d already posted what I could easily find on the George family from family interviews, newspapers and online sources – so the work was getting harder. As I begin to think about retirement in the next few years, blogging and genealogy are at the top of the list of how I imagine I will spend my retirement days. I know that without blogging regularly, my WordPress skills, as primitive as they are, will completely disappear, so there’s another good reason to pick it up again.
Another reason I stopped blogging is that I struggled with finding the balance between writing what is factually documented and what I’d heard from people’s recollection of things. If I write the basic facts – it’s not that interesting. If I “interpret” what I think about a certain event, or what I extrapolate from a series of documented facts, I might get it wrong. I need to find a way to distinguish between what is fact and what is speculation, without using footnotes.
The final reason I think I stopped blogging is that the answer to the biggest mystery in my husband’s family -“WHAT HAPPENED TO ADRIANO GIORGIO/GEORGE?” – kept eluding me. He left Dunbar, Pennsylvania in May of 1912, almost 111 years ago. According to Irene, whose father Nick George was Adriano’s son from his first wife in Italy, Adriano returned to Italy. That story lines up with Italian records that show him getting married in Italy in 1913. Family stories suggest he may have gone to Argentina, before he returned to Italy.
My husband’s grandfather, Frederick William George, is the first son from Adriano’s marriage to Custode Iacobucci. They married in Pittsburgh in February 1899 and soon thereafter moved to Dunbar, Pennsylvania where their other children were born and raised. When Adriano left Pennsylvania, his oldest son was twelve and his youngest son, Victor Americus George was one. Another son was born later in 1912. When Adriano left, there were five sons and two daughters. Another daughter had died when she was six in 1909. I really want to know why Adriano left and where he went. Did he maintain contact or provide any support to his American family? Did his family in Italy know about his American family? So many unanswered questions.
So, I’m going to make a return to blogging for a while at least if for no other reason than because it is a lot easier to find things I’ve written on this blog than in my genealogy notes. Maybe the mystery that has eluded me for ten years will finally be resolved.
Trovando Famiglia 