FRUSTRATED

 It's time to organize my messy thoughts, do so summaries of what I know, and speculate on what I don't.

• Cosmo came to Utica, NY in 1906. 

• In the ship manifest, it says he had a brother Giuseppe Bini in Utica.

• There was also a ship manifest from 1905 with Cosmo's name, and brother Giuseppe already in Utica, but his name was crossed out.

• I haven't been able to find any ship manifest with a Giuseppe Bini prior to 1905 that appears to match his description, but he must have been here.
• Mariangela (granddaughter of Giuseppe) says that Giuseppe, Cosmo, and Francesco all came to the US (according to her mother). She thinks they came together, but I see no evidence of that.
• She spoke to Pierino Bini today, who does remember that Francesco went to Brazil, but no one had heard from him. They were told he was in Argentina last.
• I have found no trace of Francesco in the US.
• I have found very little about Cosmo between 1906 and 1917, when he was married.
• I could not find him in the 1910 or 1915 census
• I could not find him in directories until 1916, but then he disappears again until 1921
• Cosmo got married to Angelina Giacovelli in 1917
• The WWI draft card 1917-1918 says that he lives at 922 Catharine St
• Angelo Antonio Giacovelli (Tony) also lives at 922 Catharine St according to draft card
• The 1920 Census says he rents a home at 922 Catharine St
• In 1921 there is a Charles Bino in Cortland
• Uncle Phil said Cosmo started his first restaurant in Endicott, maybe it was actually Cortland?
• I may try to document all of appearances in directories to map him out better
• In 1925 Cosmo is living at 933 Elizabeth St
• This is their address until they move to Johnstown around 1934
• Bino's Restaurant in Johnstown opened in summer 1934
• Didn't find him in Johnstown directory until 1937 - need to search better
• Cosmo's mother Antonia Annese died around age 90, circa 1935. Still waiting on confirmation from records in Alberobello
• There is a photo dated 1938 that includes Antonia, so she must have died after 1938?
• Cosmo's sister Maria came to the US in 1921
• Ship came in to Philadelphia, but she was going to her brother Cosmo in Utica
• Cousin Maria Annese, who married Tony Giacovelli, was on samae ship
• Future husband Antonio Palmisano was also on ship
• Mariangela was told that Giuseppe went back to Italy to bring Antonia and Maria to the US.
• Did Giuseppe live in the US until 1921? 
• My grandfather's notes say that Giuseppe went back to Italy when Cosmo was 16, which would have been immediately, since Cosmo was actually 17
• Why is there no ship record for Giuseppe? Is it misspelled or indexed incorrectly?
• Is there anywhere else I could look for records of his travels?
• Maria's husband was blamed for her death
• My grandfather said Cosmo blamed him
• Mariangela said Giuseppe and Antonia blamed him
• Supposedly, he pushed her down the stairs while she was pregnant
• I found no evidence that he had anything to do with her death - death certificate said she died of eclampsia
• Did her brothers just blame him because they didn't like him? Did the doctor not notice or investigate any injuries indicative of abuse? Why were they so convinced he was responsible? How would they have found out that he pushed her? He was never arrested or charged with anything, that I could find.
• Could Cosmo have blamed Giuseppe or Antonia for not stopping Maria from moving to the US with her boyfriend?
• Is that why he never responded to letters?
• We have photos of the Binis and Giuseppe's children dating from around 1922-1946.
• There is a photo of Ninetta Bini at age 10 months, and she was born in 1921, so this photo was from 1922
• There is also a photo of Antonia Annese dated 1922
• There is a photo of Ninetta with her husband and infant son (identified by Mariangela), who was born in 1946
• 2 photos are dated 1938 and 1939, but none of the others are dated
• Most of the photos are of the Bini children at different ages, likely the late 1920s-late 30s, plus the photo from 1946 of Ninetta, and another photo, with the same handwriting, of Nina - probably also the 1940s, maybe the same year
• Photo of Maria Bini, must be before 1922 when she died, possibly sent from Italy
• There were no letters with Aunt Betty's box of photos, so there's no way to know if the photos were sent all at once, or sent every year
• Some photos were written on by Ninetta at different times, so I'm guessing they were sent every year and not all at once, unless she wrote on them after they were taken, but the weren't sent until years later
• This doesn't sound likely - Mariangela made it sound like they wrote him several times, probably with new photos each time
• Giuseppe's family had a trunk of photos/mementos that were stolen, so there's no way to double check if they had any photos/letters from Cosmo
• Mariangela does not know when the last time anyone heard from Cosmo was
• Google translate kinda sucks, but I think Mariangela said that:
• In the last letter Antonia received from Cosmo, he asked if there was something he could do for her. She said she didn't need anything except a nice dress to wear when she died, and she did not receive a letter back. Her mother Ninetta remembered this well, because she would write letters for Antonia.
• I don't think Mariangela knew when this happened
• She said that when her mother learned to write, she was the one who would write letters for her grandmother
• I still can't figure out whose handwriting is on the back of most of the photos, and if it's the same handwriting on all of them
• The photos of Antonia and Ninetta from 1922 appear to be the same handwriting
• The R's are identical and unique, the d's and a's also look similar
• Since both are from 1922, they might have been sent in the same letter
• I don't think it is Giuseppe's writing, unless it changed a lot between 1922 and 1946
• Mariangela says that the handwriting on the photo of her mother from 1946 is her grandfather's
• She compared it to a letter written by her grandfather to her mother
• The A in Antonia/Antonietta on the 2 photos is COMPLETELY different
• At least 2 of the photos were written on by Ninetta, probaby in the early 1930s
• The handwriting looks different from the older photos, but the photo with Uncle Rufino appears to have been written by Ninetta, as it says "alla destra dello zio sto io" -I'm on my uncle's right- and that her sister Nina is on the left
• The handwriting on the 1939 photo kind of looks like the handwriting on the Rufino photo, but I can't be sure
• Where is Francesco????

• I feel like a major nuissance to cousin Mariangela, but I have so many questions. Google translate works, to an extent, but it's really challenging to communicate with someone in another language. The sentence structure and writing style is different in Italian, which makes words not translate properly, which makes the stories more confusing than they already are. I've asked her so many questions, and want clarification on so many things. She's been very patient but I keep asking more. I'm just waiting for her to either tell me to stop bothering her, or stop answering me entirely.

•  If only memories were more reliable...But we are all remembering things 2nd or 3rd hand, which makes it difficult to know what is the truth, what is a false memory, and what is just a story someone made up. I don't want to insult her or anyone else in the family, but I keep wanting to ask, "Are you sure???" or "Where did you get this information from?" or "Could your mother/uncle/grandfather be wrong?" "Could your memory be wrong?". I have the same questions for all of the stories from Aunt Betty and my grandfather. Where did Aunt Betty come up with this stuff? A lot of the information was partially correct, but some of it was just crazy. I want to ask my grandafather when he wrote on that piece of paper about Cosmo's siblings. Was it actually in 1972? Or years later? If it was in 1972, Cosmo was still alive. Was he talking to him when he wrote it all down? Or was he writing it from his own memory? I feel like he must have written it a long time ago, because my mom didn't know the information on that paper. Unless my grandfather did tell her and she just forgot it all. I really wish my grandfather were still alive so I could talk to him again. My genealogy journey didn't start until a few years after he died, so I never had the chance to ask him any questions, and I'm sure if he had told me anything I wouldn't have cared much or remembered it. Of course, talking to Cosmo would be the amazing. 

• I really want to know why Cosmo saved all of the photos of his nieces and nephew, but never wrote back to any of them. Did he write back and the letters got lost in the mail? Did he not want to talk to his family anymore? Did someone do something that upset him, to cut ties? Or did he just decide he was done with his life in Italy? Did the letters to him somehow get lost because he moved from Utica or changed his name, and find their way back to him years later, when everyone was dead? I just don't understand, and apparently I never will. I don't know why all of this is so important to me. These are all people I've never met, and never will meet. Knowing why Cosmo and Giuseppe stopped speaking will not change anything about my life or anyone else's. It's just my annoying and obssessive curiosity that won't let me let inconsequential things go. I am incredibly caught up in unraveling the mysteries of the past, but to what end? I've found our long-lost family. What more do I really need?

I WANT TO KNOW EVERYTHING

Giuseppe Bini, I've finally found you

A scrap of paper - written on by my grandfather circa 1972, hiding in a box for who knows how many years, naming Cosmo's brother Joseph (Giuseppe) Bini and indicating that he had a son Peter and 2 daughter - this was a clue I'd been looking for for nearly a decade. I wonder how many hours I wasted trying to find out what happened to Giuseppe after 1906 and Maria after 1921, and which brother moved to Brazil... So with this new information, I really began scouring my photos for clues. Were any of these people from Italy? Could any of them be identified?

I had sorted everything as best I could into people we recognized and people we didn't. I took the pile of photos of unrecognized people and began reading the backs. While most didn't have any names or identifiable information, I noticed that many were postcard photos, and a small subgroup had writing in Italian, and/or said CARTE POSTALE on the back. I sorted these from the rest, and then realized that a good handful of the postcards looked to be of the same 2-3 children (2 girls and a boy, from the time the boy was an infant to about 10 years old). Because none of the postcards had stamps and some were blank on the back, I can only assume that they were included in letters (which I wonder if my aunt could have had somewhere in her house...(let's not go there!) But, man, I would kill to get my hands on those letters. More to come later on this.) While hardly any had dates written on them, the most recent looking postcards were dated 1938 and 1939. So I estimated the postcards were sent between the late 1920s and early 1940s. One of the photos had the names of the 3 children written next to each of their faces - Ninetta, Nina, and Pierino (did Cosmo write this?). I translated another that was signed by Ninetta and wished her uncle a Merry Christmas. Another translated to something along the lines of "My nieces Ninetta and Nina" (also written by Cosmo?). But the most telling of all was a postcard of the 3 children addressed to their uncle and signed "Ninetta, Nina, e Pierino Bini". OMG!

Now someone else wrote on a few of these photos in English and with more modern looking ink. Some were as simple as "Relatives in Italy" but others stated that these children were relatives on my great grandmother's side. One even said that the child's (Ninetta) last name was Rosato. I have to wonder why my aunt, who was most likely the one who wrote these descriptions, didn't notice that these photos were all of the same children, and that one was signed with the name Bini. How long ago did she look at and label these photos? Where did she get the idea that these were relatives of Angelina? Why didn't she ask anyone to translate the Italian writing to English? If she had, she'd have found out that Ninetta, Nina, and Pierino Bini were the nieces and nephew of Cosmo, and, based on that piece of paper from my grandfather, could very well be the children of Giuseppe. I have learned that Pierino is a diminutive of Pietro, Ninetta of Antonietta, and Nina of Anna Maria. So, based on Italian naming patterns, I would expect Giuseppe's first born son and daughter to be named Pietro and Antonia/Antonietta after his parents, which seemingly fits with what I found in the photos. 

My next mission was to try to find Ninetta, Nina, and Pierino. Pierino looked to be about 8 or 9 years old in the 1938 and 1939 photos, and his sisters in their mid-late teens. While there was a chance they could still be alive, I figured that I might at least be able to track down their children. I reached out to a Facebook friend from Alberobello who had offered to help me in the past, sent her a few of their photos, and asked if she could try to find any information on them. She messaged me back the next day with more than I could have hoped for.

She had shown the photos to her mother, and her mother recognized them! Her grandmother had actually been friends with Ninetta and Nina, and had a photo of Nina with her husband and infant son. She knew the names of their children, where they lived (they had all moved away from Alberobello), and, most importantly, the names of their parents: Giuseppe "Giose" Bini and Maria Grassi. She visited the cemetery in Alberobello and found Giuseppe's grave, which had a picture of him! When I saw that he was born in 1885, I was pretty positive I had finally found our Giuseppe. He died in 1952, and I wondered whether Cosmo ever knew this.

She continued to help me translate the backs of the photos, and reached out to Maria Grassi's nephew, who recognized his father and uncle in 2 of the family photos. I've had so many questions for her and have been pestering her every day this week, trying to learn as much as I can about Giuseppe and his family. But today was the most exciting day yet.

Today, I spoke to the daughter of Ninetta - my second cousin once removed. My mom's second cousin. The daughter of my grandfather's first cousin. The granddaughter of my great grandfather's mysterious brother. In all the years I've been trying to learn about Cosmo, for some reason I never thought that I would get to speak with close family. I have no idea if I'll ever find our relatives in Brazil (if there even are any), and previous queries to residents of Alberobello led nowhere. I even found a distant Bini cousin a few years ago whose father had been born in Alberobello. He asked his aunt (in her 70s at the time) about my family and she knew nothing of them. So I thought we were at a dead end. Yet, all this time, my grandfather's sister was holding the keys to finding our lost family.

While I am incredibly excited to have found this new cousin, and can't wait to ask her a million more questions, I was saddened to hear what she knew of Cosmo. According to her mother Ninetta (who died in 2009), Giuseppe wrote many letters to Cosmo that always went unanswered. He tried to locate him, but was unsuccesful. He and his family, including Cosmo's mother, believed that Cosmo was dead. Little did they know that he would actually outlive Giuseppe by over 20 years. She's currently on vacation (in Greece!) and said she would tell me more later, about why her mother thought that Cosmo didn't write back. 

This leaves me with so many more questions. He moved to the US to live with his brother. So why did Giuseppe go back to Italy? Giuseppe and family must have had his address, if they sent him letters and photos. Did he write back initially and then stopped? Why did they continue to write letters if he never answered? Cosmo moved from Utica to Johnstown in 1935, and some of the photos are dated after 1935, so did they know he moved? Did they mail the letters to someone else, another relative maybe, who then passed them on to Cosmo? But then, wouldn't the relative have told them that Cosmo was still alive? Ninetta's daughter said that Giuseppe couldn't locate Cosmo, but then how did they know where to write to, and how did he get all of the photos? Cosmo kept at least some of the photos (now do you see why I wish I had the letters too?!?), and looks to have even written on some of them, indicating that the children were his nieces and nephew. Why save them if you want nothing to do with them? What happened to his relationship with his family? I hope that my next conversation with her will give me at least some answers.

I think I've made great progress with Giuseppe, much more than I really expected, but without knowing why there was an apparent falling out between the brothers, I feel like the mystery hasn't been completely solved yet.

Until next time...buonanotte.

The BIG update

Here we are, folks, nearly 10 years since my first post about the Bini family, and 10 years since I began my genealogy journey. I've continued to dabble in my family tree, but haven't devoted a lot of time to the Italian side in quite a while. 

My great aunt Betty, youngest and last living child of Cosmo and Angelina Bino, died in November 2020. I don't know how many years it had been since I last talked to her, but I'm guessing it was sometime around 2014/2015. I apparently never shared it here, but in August 2012 she gave me a few old family photos from her collection. They were mostly photos of her and her siblings as children, their parents (Cosmo and Angelina), and great grandparents (Filippo and Comasia Giacovelli). She did not want to part with any of the rest of her photos, and I remember her telling me that I could have them when she died, that she didn't know who most of the people were, and she couldn't bear to look at them all because they made her depressed. I think I tried a few times to get more photos from her, but she eventually stopped answering my phone calls and that was that. Unfortunately for the family, she left everything she owned to a friend, and we never had an opportunity to go through her possessions to see if there was anything of sentimental value that the family might want. My only request to the friend was to please give me the family photos that I had been dying (poor choice of words?) to see for years. Last Saturday, my mother finally heard from the friend, and she met with her to get what little my aunt left to her family. There was a large box of photos (YAY!), a few needlepoints of Locorotondo done by my great grandmother, some paintings done by family members, and a bag of sympathy cards from when my great grandparents died. Betty had labeled all of these boxes/bags to give to my mother. I try hard not to wonder what could have been left behind that she did not label. Were there more photo albums that her friend just threw away? Items from Italy that had belonged to my great grandparents, or great great grandparents? I am trying to just be satisfied with what we did receive. But I wish we'd had a chance to see everything she left behind. 

But on to the point! The photos I received have consumed me day and night for the past week. I've seen so many pictures of my great grandparents and my grandfather's siblings, and plenty of unknown people who I've been trying tirelessly to identify. I'm shocked by how many photos she had that have probably been sitting in boxes since my great grandmother died in the 80s (or maybe longer). Why she never wanted to share these with my mom and I I'll never know. I wonder how my genealogy journey may have been different if I'd seen them 10 years ago. I wonder what she'd say if she were here to see me identify all of these unknown relatives that she'd wondered about, or if I told her I'd finally found what happened to her uncle Giuseppe.

My mom and I spent an entire day going through all of the photos, sorting them by sibling so that she can give her cousins all of the photos of their parents, and then sorting out all of the aunts, uncles, cousins, and mysteries. Over the next few days I worked on re-organizing them, trying to group photos that looked like they contained the same people, and reading the backs of the photos for any clues. We had a mix of those big family photos that are pasted on a cardboard frame (mostly weddings), postcard photos, and the ones with the white boarders and deckle edges. I also read every sympathy card (there had to be over 100), hoping to find one from a relative in Italy, but no luck.

Then I found a scrap of paper, folded up and tucked in an envelope with photos of some random cousins I'd heard of, but never met. My mom recognized the handwriting and paper. It was my grandfather's, written on a piece of paper from his 1972 General Electric Log Book. I went digging through all of the stuff I have of my grandfather's and found the log book. Sure enough, the May 28 page was missing, along with the previous page. I'm not sure what happened to that page, but I can make out the faint impression of writing on the page before. Unfortunately, I can't figure out what it says. (Any forensic experts out there?) But this torn out page was full of useful information. As I mentioned in one of my first entries, my mom remembered my grandfather telling her that Cosmo had a brother who went to Brazil or Argentina, and a sister who went to California. She knew nothing about a second brother. By the time I began this genealogy journey, my grandfather had been gone for 3 years, so we couldn't ask him to confirm anything, and who knows how accurate my mom's memories were. But this piece of paper, this shows that my grandfather knew a lot more than my mom thought. 

Dad had 2 brothers

1) Frank to Brazil

2) Joseph Bini: had 1 boy - Peter, 2 girls

    Came before Dad - brought Dad - then went back when Dad 16

Aunt Mary (in Italy)

3) Sister - to Penna

Did my grandfather write this in 1972? Why did he write it on this particular page, and then give it to his sister? If she's had it for the last 50 years, why didn't she know any of this? Why didn't my mother know this? So many unanswered questions! But based on all of my genealogy research, almost everything checks out.

• Cosmo did have 2 brothers and 1 sister.
• I found that Giuseppe did come to the US before Cosmo, and that his sister went to Pennsylvania. 
• I was never able to find a trace of Giuseppe in the US, aside from Cosmo's ship manifest, so it makes sense that he went back to Italy. 
• Cosmo was 17 when he came to the US, so the part about Giuseppe going back to Italy when Cosmo was 16 appears inaccurate, but probably not far off.
• I'm not sure what exactly "Aunt Mary (in Italy)" means. Is this Cosmo's sister Maria, who came to the US, or the wife of Giuseppe? It's written under #2, so I'm leaning towards this being Giuseppe's wife.
• I've never found any proof of Francesco going to Brazil, but I can only assume that it is accurate, since the rest of the information appears to be. 
• The part about Giuseppe having 3 children was particularly intriguing. 

And this is how I began unraveling the mystery of Giuseppe.

Maria Bini - small (but exciting) update

Well, it's been quite a while now since I've made a new entry. I've learned quite a bit about the Binis over the last 7(?!) years, but the past week has been a whirlwind. I don't have too much more to say about Maria at this point, but thought she was worthy of a new post. 

Sidetracking a bit: I have tested my and my mom's DNA on Ancestry, 23andMe, MyHeritage, and FTDNA. I spent a lot of time in the early days trying to understand why my mom had Scottish ethnicity (her grandparents were Italian and Slovak) and why we had so many unknown cousins. I then made the shocking discovery that my maternal great grandfather was not who we believed. Michael Luknar, born in Ivanka pri Dunaji, Slovakia and married to my great grandmother Ernestina Kassa from 1909-1939, was not my grandmother's father. I have no explanation for what exactly happened between my great grandmother and a man by the last name Sneddon, but she apparently had some sort of relationship with him that led to the birth of my grandmother in 1923. I don't know who else knew about this, but it was certainly news to my mother and aunt. If my grandmother knew, she took the secret to her grave. I managed to get in contact with Sneddons still living in Uniontown, PA where my grandmother's family lived, and my mom and I took a road trip to meet our new found cousin, see where my grandmother grew up, and detour to a cemetery in Northern Cambria, PA.

Maria Addolorata Bini, born March 2, 1895 in Coreggia, Italy arrived in Philadelphia on April 21, 1921. She married Antonio Palmisano on July 9, 1921 in Utica, NY, where my great grandmother's brother Antonio Giacovelli was a witness. She then moved to Barnesboro, PA and died less than a year after her marriage on June 7, 1922. On our way home from Uniontown, we stopped at the cemetery where Maria was buried, Mount Carmel Cemetery in Northern Cambria, PA. I'm not sure why the gravestone says August 7, or what D.A.P. stands for (perhaps initials of the name for their child?). But it was bittersweet to have finally found Maria, after years of my family wondering what happened to her. I imagine we were probably the first visitors to her grave in many decades. I hope someday we can venture out that way and visit her grave again.

While I have more posts to write with more groundbreaking information on my new photo collection, I believe I now have a photo of Maria. Written on the back of the photo, it appears to be addressed to Signora Angelina Giacovelli (my great grandmother). In the same handwriting it says "Ricordo Della tua ?osciuta Cognata Bini Maria". I'm not sure if there was anything before the word "osciuta", but it appears to roughly translate to "I remember your well-known sister in law Bini Maria". In what is likely my great aunt's handwriting, it says "sister Maria Italy". I'm not sure who wrote the Italian part, or why it was addressed to Angelina and not Cosmo, but it seems highly likely that this is Maria.

While I don't know if there's anything more to learn about Maria at this point, I'm now considering whether it would be worth tracking down Maria's husband's family, to see if they have any photos or information about her. If I get the nerve or ambition to do this, and happen to find out anything new, I'll be sure to post another update. 

Until then, I'm happy to say that the mystery of Cosmo's sister Maria has been solved!