My great grandfather (my mother's father's father) Cosimo Bini (aka Charles Beno, Charles Bino, Cosimo Bino, Cosmo Bino, and Cosmo Bini) has been an illusive man with many aliases for quite some time now. My family seems to know very little about him, except that he came from Alberobello, Bari, Puglia, Italy. (My great aunt claims that he did not like to talk about himself, Italy, or his life there.) There were arguments about his year of birth among his children and while it is believed he had at least 2 siblings (a brother who immigrated to Brazil and a sister who went to California) no one seems to even know their names. It was claimed that he came here around the age of 16, but with no one being able to agree on his birth year, I have no idea whether this is accurate. Researching him has been a long and difficult process and I'm still not finished but the mystery that is my great grandfather has lead to my pronounced interest in genealogy and southern Italy.
When I became interested in the possibility of becoming an Italian citizen this past spring it required me to learn more about my great grandparents who immigrated here from Italy. The first step in my becoming an Italian citizen was to determine whether or not my great grandfather had been naturalized when he came to the United States. If he became a naturalized US citizen before my grandfather was born, he would have given up his Italian citizenship and, thus, the citizenship of his unborn children. If he was never naturalized, I would technically be an Italian citizen jure sanguinis, or "by the right of blood". For reasons still unclear to me, one cannot gain citizenship through their maternal side, so even if my great grandmother had not been naturalized and her husband had, I would not be able to apply for citizenship through my ancestry.
When my grandfather died he left us a wealth of documents, including some from his father Cosimo and his mother Angelina Giacovelli. My mother and I searched through every document we could find pertaining to Cosimo. We found a baptismal certificate (probably an extract, dated February 25, 1916) and a birth extract (dated May 22, 1957) that he requested from Italy for whatever reason (the baptismal certificate, perhaps was needed for his marriage in 1917) but that was all. In my research I found out that you can write a letter to the National Archives for a copy of an individual's naturalization record or lack thereof (in fact, it is one of the required documents for applying for citizenship), but I didn't feel like spending the money just yet. So my next step was to sign up for the free 14 day trial with Ancestry.com to see if I could find any interesting information there. This is where my obsession with learning my family history began.
I spent hours and hours every day on Ancestry trying to learn more about my family. It became overwhelming at times as I kept finding new people to add to my family tree (my mother's father's family, my mother's mother's family, my father's family, their husbands, wives, sisters, brothers, cousins, etc.) and frustrating at other times when I couldn't find information that I knew should be there, particularly for Cosimo, who changed his name a few times over the years and simply had his name misspelled in various ways by the census takers or whomever. Needless to say, after immersing myself in all this information for weeks and driving myself crazy, his naturalization papers materialized out of thin air (I still have no idea how we managed to overlook them multiple times...) and my dream of becoming an Italian citizen and getting a vacation home in Alberobello or Locorotondo came to a screeching halt. Shortly after, my free trial ended and, while I was happy with all of the information I had gained about what my family was up to after coming to the US, I still knew practically nothing new about Cosimo. During my initial subscription to Ancestry I found his WWI Draft Card, his name in the 1920 and 1930 Censuses, his name in the 1927 and 1932 Utica Directories, and a Social Security Death Index. I couldn't find his immigration record (although I did find another Cosmo Bini from Alberobello who was born in the same year, 1889) or anything else that would help me learn more about his life or family in Italy. Basically, I resigned myself to the fact that he seemed to be a pretty complicated fella and that to learn more about him I would need to venture out further than the laptop in my bedroom. My interest slowly dissipated and eventually I forgot about the whole messy genealogical situation...
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