Sometimes researching your genealogy is a bit like trying to put a puzzle together without an idea of what the final picture looks like. That's where I'm at trying to find links for my mother's side of the family. The Elders didn't really talk about their families or maybe were waiting for us in the younger generations to ask. And we didn't.
The above photograph is my grandmother seated on the right when she first arrived in this country from Italy. She was about 16 or 17 years old the picture is from 1910 or so. The young woman on the left is her cousin. My mother had told me that but she never mentioned the woman's name and the photograph is not labeled.
Recently, I connected with a first cousin on Facebook. My grandmother lived with his family when he was young. Maybe he would know the answer to my questions.
He didn't have the answers I was looking for, but he had a couple of clues. When he was between the ages of 8 and 11, he went with my grandmother to Yonkers, New York. to visit her cousin. He had the last name of the family and he said Grandma's cousin's name sounded like Sipipinella. He also mentioned the name of a cousin close to his age. He told me this cousins profession and the last place he worked/lived in New York. This cousin would be the grandson of Grandma's cousin and our third cousin.
My cup of tea and sticky note pad where I scribbled the information while chatting with my first cousin.
Through Ancestry, I was able to search through records and came up with the name of the woman I think may be my grandmother's cousin. Her name was Giuseppina. Which to a kid half paying attention to old ladies talking might sound like Sipipinella.
An Internet search on the male cousin's name brought me to LinkedIn. I sent my first cousin a message asking him if the name of Grandma's cousin was Giuseppina and the LinkedIn link for the third cousin. Yes!
The hard part was sending a 25 word or less note (LinkedIn restricts the message size) with all my bona fides to my third cousin without trying to sound like a stalker, axe murderer, or a relative looking for a handout.
I was excited last night to get a note from him saying he had tried searching at various times for that part of his family and he sent me his contact information. And now I'm another step closer to fitting this section of the puzzle together.
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