One of the things I've realized over the past few months is that, while looking through the same records multiple times may be time consuming, I generally seem to find new, important information each time that I didn't notice initially or didn't pay attention to before gaining some other new piece of information.
This summer I worked in a library, where I spent a lot of time reading fiction novels and playing on Facebook. About halfway through the summer, and I'm not really sure why, I began doing my genealogical research again. I had spent a little bit of time in the spring on FamilySearch.org, where I found a marriage record for Cosimo Bini and Angelina Giacovelli but not much else. I don't know what brought me back there but somehow I ended up at work searching for Binos and Binis on the older version of their site (their older version has limited information but contains names and birth dates and marriage dates for some individuals in Italy, while their new site contains mostly US information that Ancestry and Ellis Island have). Shockingly (I almost fell out of my chair), I found a birth date for a Frencesco Bini, son of Pietro Bini and Antonia Annese (the parents of Cosimo). I was ecstatic.
This tiny piece of information led to another full-blown obsession with my family history. I checked out about half a dozen books on Italian genealogy and researching Italian ancestors and spent the rest of my summer reading through them and learning about the history of Italy, the history of their record keeping, the various types of records I should investigate and how to interpret them, how to request records from Italy, and a number of other invaluable pieces of information. I signed up for another free trial at Ancestry using a different username and dove back into the world of records.
This time I had an excellent new resource at my disposal, a website containing PDFs of newspaper articles for Utica, NY and Johnstown, NY (where Cosimo and many of my other relatives lived) going back to before my relatives came to the US. I found a large number of articles pertaining to Cosimo/Charles Bino, particularly in regards to his restaurant business. While this still didn't take me back to Italy, I got to learn more about his life when he first settled in Utica and then moved to Johnstown. Using this site in conjunction with Ancestry and Ellis Island and FamilySearch I managed to find quite a few new people with the same surnames (Bini, Annese, Giacovelli) as my family (who may or may not be relatives - I'm in the process right now of ruling many of them out).
One of my favorite pieces of information I've found so far is from a ship manifest. In the spring I found a ship record for a Maria Annese going to Utica to stay with her cousin Cosmo Bini and wife in 1921, traveling with another cousin Maria Giuseppa Annese who was going to Utica to stay with a cousin Orazio Annese. Maria Annese just so happens to have married Angelo Antonio Giacovelli, the brother of Angelina Giacovelli, wife of Cosimo (this was already known to my family, though). I'm not sure how I missed this before, but I was on Ancestry searching for Binis for about the 100th time and I happened to come across the record of a Maria Addolorata Bini. When I saw who she was coming to the US to stay with my jaw dropped. It was the illusive Cosmo Bini. When I saw what year it was I was again startled. It was 1921. Did Cosimo not have a cousin Maria Annese who came to visit him in 1921, as well? I went back to her record and discovered it was the same ship! Their names were not listed on the same page (Maria Bini was 2 or 3 pages later, I'm still not sure why) but it would appear that they came over together. I then went searching for Maria Bini in the Utica newspapers and found her marriage announcement to an Antonio Palmisano only 2 months later. Naturally, I then searched for his immigration record and, low and behold, he was on the same ship, his name immediately under the cousins Maria Annese and Maria Giuseppa Annese! I had scanned over his name at least a dozen times when I was pouring over Maria Annese's record but never had any reason to associate him with the Anneses or Binis (he was heading to Pennsylvania, not Utica). But I'll talk more about Maria Bini in a later post. Back to Cosimo...
Something that had really been bothering me about Cosimo since the spring was his place of birth. I was always told he was from Alberobello. The record I found of his brother Francesco said his birth place was Alberobello. However, at the top of Cosimo's birth extract it says COMUNE DI MONOPOLI and a stamp at the bottom says the same. His baptismal certificate is also written on a Monopoli form. Now Monopoli is also in Bari, but it is some 20 miles away from Alberobello. I could not for the life of me understand what this meant. But upon careful inspection of his records I extracted some new information. Italian records are stored in volumes and this information is included in the extract. It indicates on his birth extract that his record was found in Part I, Series Coreggia. At first I was confused. What the heck is Coreggia? I tried Googling it but for whatever reason didn't come up with anything helpful. I then noticed that on his baptismal certificate it says that his record is found under Vol. Coreggia. There it was again. Now normally a number would be included here. So I again searched for it and, using some helpful information I had gained from one of my Italian books, I eventually found out that it is in fact a place. Further, it is a frazione, or parish/hamlet, of Alberobello. This REALLY threw me for a loop. Why on earth would Monopoli hold the civil records of Coreggia if it is a frazione of Alberobello?! It made no sense. Did something happen to Alberobello that Monopoli had to store their records? If so, wouldn't I have read something about that? I had been planning to write letters to Alberobello asking for civil records of the Binis, but now what? Do I request records from Monopoli? Would all the records for his family be this confusing or was he the only one of his family to be born there? (I still don't have a good answer for this.) However, after a lot of searching for Coreggia and avoiding Coreggia, I downloaded Google Translator and began searching through Italian websites for information about the pesky little frazione. Eventually I found a page, part of a website for Alberobello, about the history of Coreggia. Based on what I found, it would seem as though Coreggia was once a frazione of Monopoli, but in 1895 it officially became a frazione of Alberobello, instead. This cleared up a lot of my confusion. But it still didn't answer the question of where to send for civil records.
Instead of sending out letters and money to all the Comunes of Bari looking for Cosimo and his family (whom I didn't even know the names or birth dates of), I went on the FamilySearch website, found the microfilm numbers for Alberobello birth and marriage records, and finally ventured to the local Family History Center. I ordered 4 microfilms containing the birth and marriage records of Alberobello from 1866-1900 (fingers crossed that they would hold some valuable information and that I would be able to interpret them when they arrived). Two weeks later they were in and I got my first taste of post-unification Italian civil records...
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