Finding my great great grandmother
And learning how to do genealogy research in the process
Update 26 Sept 2022
As it turns out, my analysis of the behavior of the website was flawed. The website simply transcribes whatever it is seen on the books, and it has not done any record linking or anything like that.
For that reason, my assumption around the website is incorrect. Fortunately, thanks to the help of experts, I obtained the baptism record of Benvenuto Giuseppe and, in the end the mother was Luigi Aurelia.
Context
I am working on the family tree and, as usual, I am not sure of what I am doing. I’ve stumbled upon an obstacle and I am writing it up here so that others can help me solve it :-)
The objective
As far as this write-up goes, the objective is to find the actual name/record for my great great grandmother. The mother of Benvenuto Giuseppe, whose picture I include below…
The beginning of the thread…
The search begins with the marriage document for my great-grandparents on my mother’s side, which I’ve pasted below.
Fortunately, this document is clear, and it has the date (8 Sep 1871) and place of birth (Larido nel Bleggio) of Benvenuto Giuseppe Jori (my great grand-father on this part of my tree) as well as the names of his father (Luigi) and his mother (Luigia Benedetti).
I also happen to know, from family lore, the names of some of Benvenuto's brothers and sisters, and the names of his parents (Luis and Luisa, as I heard them, since by then they’d all moved to Argentina, where I was born)
Searching Trentino Records
Armed with this information I headed over to https://www.natitrentino.mondotrentino.net/ to search for records.
The parents first
The first part was easy. Let’s confirm the names of the parents of Benvenuto. The following search, as broad as I could make it (to avoid missing records), shows the results.
The above is a stroke of luck, as there are exactly two Benvenutos born in the entire period for which there are records (1815–1923). I happen to know that Pietro is the brother of Giuseppe (my great grandfather) and, as expected, Luigi and Luigia were their parents. Both were born in the same parish, so it all looks rather good.
Not so fast… If you check the marriage record you’ll find Giuseppe’s birth date as 5 Sept 1871, whereas the above record puts it as 5 Dec 1871. I honestly do not know what to make of this, and I believe this is probably a mistake on either document (probably the marriage record). Perhaps, however, this is a fatal flaw in my analysis and if so…let me know :)
Double-checking with the names of sisters and brothers
The next step I took was to re-confirm that the above Luigi and Luigia were indeed the parents and that this Benvenuto Giuseppe was indeed the one I am interested in.
I searched for *all* Joris born to a Luigi and a Benedetti (any first name), and I got the following:
This was, again, good news, for several reasons:
- It appears there is exactly one set of parents for this family (this Luigi, with this Luigia), as evidenced by the parents’ names.
- The birth dates of the progeny work out as well, with a child every couple of years, give or take.
- The names of the brothers and sisters *also* work out, as I know from family lore of “Teresa”, “Corinna”, “Pietro” and “Probo”.
One piece of corroborating evidence (in addition to family lore) that I have been able to find is the marriage of the last daughter of the couple (Teresa Yori) to one Pedro Garino. This happened in Mendoza, Argentina, in 1901, as you can see from the record here, pasted below:
The text, poorly (and partially) translated by me, reads something like this:
In this the Main Church of Mendoza, on 25 March of the year 1901…marriage of Pedro Garino, …, single, mechanic, Italian, of 32 years of age, legitimate son of Mauricio Garino and Margarita Bianco. With Teresa Yori, from Austria, … of 20 years of age, legitimate daughter of Luis Yori y Luisa Benedetti…
The bolded parts all seem to fit the Teresa Jori found in the Nati in Trentino database. Name, age, and parents fit. It must be said that the provenance of Teresa is claimed as “Austria” in this document whereas it is not Italy, but that region has been all over the place, so I am not that concerned about that part. Should I be?
This is not the only Argentinian record pointing to this Yori family, mind you. For instance, here’s Probo Jori’s marriage record, from 1907, showing Luis Yori and Luisa Benedetti as Probo’s parents
In a nutshell, at this point, I am convinced that the family from S Croce del Bleggio parish is, indeed, part of my tree. Almost everything seems to fit. Let’s move on!
Finding Luigi…
The next step in the search is to go one level up in the tree and try to find Luigi Jori, the father of all these Joris that emigrated to Argentina.
Heading back to Nati in Trentino, I search for all Luigi Joris in the database, sort them chronologically, and this is what I get.
Now, at this point, I know that Luigi’s first child was born in 1868 and the last one in 1881, and I get an idea of the date ranges during which Luigi could have been born.
Furthermore, I know that Luigi’s primogenito is named Benvenuto Giuseppe and thus it is likely that Luigi’s father is named Giuseppe (I have no idea what I am doing, but I thought to discard Benvenuto because of two reasons: 1-it means “welcome” in Italian, and 2-Pietro is also named Benvenuto, so it reminded me of my aunts, who are all called “Maria” :)
Warning, warning, warning… Is this analysis above a mistake? I mean, I am summarily discarding all other Luigis simply because they did not have a second name listed in the database. Granted, this family had more than 10 children and the names of the parents are similarly recorded in each of these instances, but still…
In short, I have made the *assumption* that the Nati in Trentino website shows *all* names for a given record in its results pages. If this is not the case, then probably much of my findings are incorrect.
Later in this write-up, I will explain why I arrived at this assumption, but for now, let’s go with the assumption being correct.
The above caveat notwithstanding, we have exactly four Luigis in the record above, these ones:
I know that the last two are non-starters, as they were born too late. By 1868 Maria Teresa was born and in 1881 Teresa was the last one born, and thus Luigi must have been “of fathering age” during the period 1868–1881.
This leaves the first two, one born in 1826 and the other in 1847. If I were to pick the first one, he would have been about 60 years old by the time his last daughter, Teresa, was born. While not out of the realm of possibility by any means, the other one (born in 1847, about 40 at the time of the birth of Teresa) works much better.
If you couple the above analysis with the fact that the one born in 1847 had a father named Giuseppe, and he named his first-born son the same, the scale begins to tip.
So, for the two reasons above, I picked this one as the Luigi Jori of my tree.
Now, is the analysis above sound? Have I made a mistake? Is there a better way to go about this? Hopefully, you can share your views.
Finding Luigia…
Trying to follow the same process to find Luigia Benedetti proved a bit more complex…
Doing a simple search for all Luigia Benedettis born in the period yielded too many records. Therefore, I chose the range (1830–1855) as the range to search, which means that Luigia could have been as young as 14 when she had her first daughter, or as old as 51 when she had her last.
I obtained the following results…
A lot of possibilities. How to discern which is the one?
The approach I took, of which I am not at all certain for the record :) is the following:
- Look at names again. Under the assumption that the website is not stripping second names, there are only two Luigias, and Luigia alone in the list
- The names of Luigia’s children can be indicative, given the propensity of naming children like their grandparents. In this case, we know that Luigia’s children are named Maria, Teresa, Giuseppe, Pietro, Corinna, Emma, Ida…
- The location of these women. None of them were from the same parish (S Croce) or comune (Bleggio Superiore) as Luigi Jori (the husband) so there had to have been some travel involved.
There are two Luigias whose name is nothing but Luigia in the list, these two:
The first Luigia in this list would have been 33 years old by the time her first daughter was born, and 46 when the last one was born.
The second Luigia would have been 14 years old by the time her first daughter was born, and 27 when the last one was.
I don’t like either of these answers. The first Luigia appears to be way too old at 33 to be having the first of her daughters (not to mention the last) whereas the second one is young across the board.
That said, the second one had Maria as a mom, and Luigia’s first daughter is indeed Maria Teresa and there are Antonios further down in the tree. Conversely, I have not been able to find a single Gregorio or Margherita in the part of my tree that descends from this person.
Finally, a high-level location analysis (did I mention I am winging all of this?) shows that the provenance of all these Luigias was roughly equidistant to Bleggio Superiore, as the map below shows. If anything, Ronzo Chienis appears to have a very slight edge.
Therefore, between the two, I am going with the second one, this one:
What if the website strips second names?
As I’ve shared before, I am working under the assumption that the Nati in Trentino website does *not* strip second names anywhere when it presents its results (and I will share later in this write-up why I think this assumption might hold), but what would happen if such assumption is incorrect in the case of Luigia? Let’s revisit…
The picture below shows the same results shown before, with a few annotations.
First, the green rectangle shows the “preferred” birth dates for these mothers. Selecting any of these Luigias would put their age range as follows:
- Maria Luigia: 29 years old first daughter, 42 last
- Luigia Aurelia: 25 years old first daughter, 38 last
- Silvia Luigia Maria: 20 years old first daughter, 33 last
Second, in blue rectangles the analysis of the male names. In solid line the father names that are present in Luigia’s direct progeny. Dotted lines if the name is found later on in Luigia’s descendants.
Of the solid lines, the more interesting is Maria Luigia, born in 1834, to a father named Pietro. This would fit perfectly as Luigia’s second male son is indeed named Pietro, as expected (i.e. the firstborn son gets the name of the father’s father, the next male the name of the mother’s father).
The age analysis for this one makes her 47 at the age of the last daughter… Plausible perhaps, but not ideal.
Third, and finally, in pink rectangles the name analysis of the daughters. here we have Teresa and Maria. Interestingly, Luigia’s first two female children are called Maria Teresa and Emma Teresa, so indeed Teresa plays a role. Perhaps the first daughter died and then the second daughter inherits the name of the first. In any case, recall that Luigi Jori’s mother’s name is Maria, which would have gone to the first female born.
When you put it all together, the only Luigia that has tells on all three axes of analysis is the following one,
One more check, locations. In the map above you see that #3, Mori, is nominally a bit further away than Ronzo-Chienis (the location of our forerunner) and thus I don’t think that would have played a major part. In other words, this Luigia passes the location test I suppose.
When all is said and done, if you believe that the website strips second names from its results, you probably would have picked Luigia Aurelia.
Why do I think the website does *not* strip second names…
I am of course not sure about this, nor much of anything else. However, I feel that it would be a very poor design if the website would strip second names when it shows results. A lot of these families gave the same first name to their children (we’ve seen Benvenuto above, but there are Marias all over the place in Argentina, etc) and thus if you were to strip second names, you will deny researchers a way to disambiguate results.
Secondly, while on the topic of the website, why not make the results “clickable”? That way *all* guessing would be completely taken out. Not sure why this is not enabled. Perhaps there are cases where the developers of the website themselves cannot disambiguate given the written record but even in those cases, the website could return a “set of records” that might match one of the people shown. Food for thought.
The above, admittedly, is just conjecture and pontification, and thus it’s of little value. More probatory value, though, is found in examples. So I did a number of searches on the site trying to see if I could see second names in the results or not. I was disheartened for a bit when I could not find them…. but eventually, I did. See pics below for some examples
As a matter of fact, I’ve already provided not one, but two such examples :-) Please go back this write-up and check the list of “All Luigi Joris”. Check the third row, and you will find “Gerardo Martino” as the father’s name. Then, further down the same list, you find this:
As you can see, Teresa Adelaide is the name of the mother; precisely the use-case we had with Luigia.
Negative testing to the rescue
Then, I proceeded to do some “negative” testing, to see that even if the website strips the second names when displaying results, we can still use them in searches. So, for the baseline case, I used the results above (namely, the birth of a male, Luigi Ludovico Jori, from Lorezo Jori and Teresa Adelaide Crosina). I wanted to check if the result above would show up if I were to search for this birth using only the mother’s second name (in bold). So I ran this search, and indeed, I found the record.
Notice how in the search above I used just “adelaide” as the mother’s name, without surnames or anything else. I was able to find the record without problems. I am only searching for a given Last name for the infant, and a second name for the mother.
Using the same method, I can cross-check to see if the runner-up in our Luigia race has indeed mothered my ancestors. The theory would be that while we only saw Luigia in the results for the births of the Benvenutos, the Teresas, etc, the real name behind the scene was truly Luigia Aurelia (the runner-up).
So, if this hypothesis were true, searching for Joris born of an “Aurelia” should show the list of children or at least some. This is the identical use-case shown above with “Adelaide”, which we’ve proven works.
However, when running the search, we get not a single Jori birth to a mother with second-name Aurelia, as you can see below.
At this point, I need to clarify that while in the preceding paragraphs I have been using “second-name” as the ones I am searching for, to be precise I am searching for a given name as EITHER first or second (or third, or fourth). I have used “second-name” above only to drive home the use-case for which we are testing, namely one where the website drops anything but the first name when displaying records, but does not do so when searching for them. Hopefully this is clear.
What this means, in plain English, is that there were no Joris born to a mother that had Aurelia in either their first or second names, in the entire period for which the website has records.
Beating a dead horse?
Using the exact same approach as above with Aurelia, I decided to use all the other non-Luigia second-names from the list of possible Luigias shown above. I wanted to be sure it all came together.
The picture above shows the search I used for the name Maria. I am only interested in my relatives, so the date range is those of the children of Luigi (1868–1881). Remember, the theory is that if the website showed me Luigia above but it was really “Maria Luigia” or “Luigia Maria” or any other combination with Maria in it, the search would pick it up, just as it picked up the “Adelaide” case.
As you can see above, the one birth is not my relative.
The pictures below show the results for each of the names seen in the list of possible Luigias above…
In Conclusion
I believe the above tests are stronger than any age-based or name-based conjectures and for that reason, I have picked the Luigia Benedetti born in 1854 as the mother of my great grandfather.
Using the same approach (somewhat), I traced it back as far as I could, up to a Girardo Jori. Unfortunately, the Nati in Trentino website has records starting in 1815, and thus some of the data before that time I have picked up from other trees and added it to mine in Family Search. In any case, it looks like this now:
Caveat
I’ve tried to explain the process and reasoning I used because I do not know how to do family trees. If you do and can point out mistakes, it’d be much appreciated. Thank you in advance.