POINTers IN PERSON Minutes
Chapter # 10 Central Texas/Austin
Laurie GUGINO Riester (#3878)
Lin ONOFRIO Brinkman (#1388) opened the club's monthly meeting at Round Rock
Library at 6:40pm with 24 people attending. Lin distributed the 2004 meeting
schedule, which is also available on our chapter web site at http://www.main.org/pip10.
It's a new year and time for 2004 PIP dues. Dues are $12 per person. If
you missed the meeting and the dues envelope that came around, you may bring
your dues to the next meeting or give them to Lin. Checks should be made
payable to Lin.
Lin has a new e-mail address: italian-princess@earthlink.net Our members'
email addresses are also listed on the chapter's web site.
Lin mentioned several recent donations made to our club library. They
include the book Passage to Liberty and the Rebirth of America: The Story of
Italian Immigration, donated by Jamie CANNONE and some Italy travel books,
donated by Marilyn MANISCALCO Henley (#1653). Italian Neighbors by Tim
Parks was also donated.
Marilyn MANISCALCO Henley has been sharing information with cousin Frank CULMONE in Baton Rouge. Marilyn's husband Arthur relocated his company to Houston, and they will soon be moving. Marilyn and Arthur are celebrating their 37th wedding anniversary today. They welcomed a new grandson, Daniel Ryan Jones born November 25th in Houston.
Pat and Don Oxley and also welcomed their first grandchild. Granddaughter Katherine Elizabeth Simmons was born November 15 in Round Rock to Suzi and Brian Simmons. Pat & Don moved to Round Rock from Georgetown. Pat announced that she is inviting John COLLETTA to speak in Austin in August 2005 at the Austin Genealogical Society Seminar.
Warren Luken received a "cold call" from a Michael Martin who turned out to be a second cousin in Duluth, Georgia. Michael is very interested in genealogy and sent Warren a big packet of information, including a nice write up on and description of life in Greenwich Village from the 1890's.
Scott Patrick (#4819) has had a breakthrough since the last meeting. He was looking for GARAGUSI'S but didn't know what town they were from. After a lot of effort and piecing together various clues, he now knows that some of his family were from the town of Anzi. He's also added the name MARONE to his family tree, through the discovery of a second marriage. All three Marone's in the POINT directory are from Laurenzana. Scott has also been interested to learn that there are several variations of the name Garagusi, for example, he has also seen the name GARAGUSO. Scott brought an album of old family photos to share with the group.
Jim and Virginia MACRI Gerick (#2730) Jim brought a historical picture he
found on the Haskell County, Texas Historical & Genealogical Society's 2004
Calendar. It was a Weinert School Class of 1908 picture. Two of Jim's aunts
are in the picture.
Virginia happened to notice in Scott Patrick's album that a cousin of his
was born in New Haven and attended Larsen Junior College which was absorbed
by Quinnipiac College where Virginia was Librarian.
Sherry PACELLI Haddox (#4883) received a response from a gentleman she had contacted in Italy regarding information on her grandfather, but unfortunately, no information was found. There were several suggestions from the group on possible next steps or other avenues to try.
Joe MASTRANGELO (#2614) is still extracting records, and has uncovered a couple of folks related to his grandmother on the PUGLIESE side. To date, Joe has extracted and entered about 2600 records. He is also working on his presentation for the October POINT conference in Kansas City.
Jeannie MARSALIA (#4251) told the group about an old letter her cousin found in a bookshelf recently. Her cousin had no idea how it had gotten there, but thankfully she sent a copy to Jeannie. The letter was from Italy and it is written in Italian and mentions several family members by name and relationship. Like Scott, Jeannie has been interested to see variations on her family name in various places. Her family name is MARCHETTI, but Jeannie's grandmother's birth record says MARCHETTO. Her marriage record says Marchetti. Jeannie is working on finding naturalization info now.
Don VILLONI (#3985) and his family enjoyed their trip to Germany and Austria over the holidays. Don continues to correspond with a double-cousin in New York, Nick DI RUBBO. His cousin enjoys information of all kinds relative to Italian heritage, and he has done some interesting research on Judeo-Italians. Don mentioned to the group that Google (www.google.com) has a counterpart for many foreign countries, including www.google.it and www.google.fr. These can be great resources. (Notetaker note: Several other search engines have foreign counterparts; for instance, www.yahoo.it and www.altavista.it. Very helpful for research, and also fun for travel planning and/or working on language skills.)
Ursula PASSAFUMA Rader (#4467) has about 10 new names to add to her surname list. She has been looking through county records online, and has found a lot of information this way. Next steps include heading to Texas Tech to look for family information in the library there. Bill and Ursula have moved to Austin permanently now.
Jamie CANNONE has been checking new additions to Cyndi's list. He found someone who had published obituary information on the web for her family in Johnstown, Pennsylvania (Cambria County). Jamie's family is also from Johnstown, so he decided to look it over. A reference in the website included a link to newspaper obituaries for Johnstown indexed and in pdf form online. Jamie found 57 surnames of possibly direct interest, plus 102 names of possibly less direct interest.
Barbara Bachman's cousin went to Salt Lake City and found that their grandfather was born in Toritto, Bari in 1850. Barbara's father was born in Toritto too. Barbara shared a pedigree chart for her family sent by her cousin. Italian surnames on the chart include D'AMATO, ROSATO, SPANA, FORELLO, TOTO and DE VITO.
Joyce TIANELLO Snodgrass recently played her violin at a friend's wedding. Joyce is anxious to return to Buca di Beppo where the rehearsal dinner was held; she hopes to go there for her birthday.
Bill Brinkman is in contact with a mutual researcher from California who may have found an ancestor of Bill's in the newspaper. Bill talked about the subscription genealogy sites, Heritage Quest and Ancestry.com. Ancestry has an online digital historical newspaper collection. Both genealogy sites can be accessed in the Genealogy Collection at the Texas State Library and at the Round Rock Library if you do not want to subscribe to them. Bill opted to go to the State Library. He also talked about the future of genealogy, and the role that DNA will play in that. Developments in this area are exciting, as they should make genealogy much easier. We should be hearing more about this in the years to come.
Laurie GUGINO Riester (#3878) just returned from a two-week trip to the Tuscany and Emilia-Romagna regions of Italy. Highlights - both unplanned - included seeing Italian tenor Andrea BOCELLI in person while window shopping at the Galleria in Bologna and seeing a performance of Guiseppe Verdi's La Traviata at Teatro Reggio in Parma.
The meeting adjourned at 8:45pm.
Our next meeting is Wednesday, February 18 at 6:30 pm to 8:55 pm at the
Round Rock Library.