Heermans-56 52 in 52 - 2024

Date: 1 Jan 2024 to 31 Dec 2024
Location: [unknown]

Prompts and Answers

Week One: Family Lore

My great-grandfather, often after polishing off an amount of wine best lost to history, would often regale us with stories of our family both in Italy, and after they moved to New York. This included Uncle Danny’s supposed involvement in organized crime, and interestingly Aunt Angelina’s tragic but strange death. He, and my great-grandmother, both told me she had died after being hit by a streetcar, but after getting a copy of her death certificate she passed away from pneumonia while pregnant. While both are equally tragic, I do have to wonder why the family made up a different cause of death, though I can probably imagine my great-grandfather would claim that the certificate was falsified in some way. Uncle Frank very soon after Aunt Angelina’s death married back into the family as was very common back then. He married Angelina’s (and my great-grandfather’s) sister Aunt Carmela.

Another story he was absolutely consistent on, and would not hear anything else, is that of his grandmother. He swore up and down that his grandmother was an illegitimate daughter of a royal. He always called her a “Princess”. He told us her mother was a royal of some sort, and that she fell in love with a man she shouldn’t have. To spare some sort of embarrassment, someone lost their station, or some sort of title was lost. The way he spoke about this, you could tell he fully believed it. He passed before I started genealogy (and when I was a child), so I never could ask him about the nitty-gritty. What I did find out was very interesting though. His grandmother was a foundling! She was given up in infancy. She was left in the wheel at the Cathedral in her city, where she was found by the nuns at about 3 pm. She was swaddled with white canvas, and while it was common for mothers to leave some sort of memento (commonly a ripped prayer card or something similar) to help them identify their children later in life, my ancestress was left with nothing but that piece of canvas. She never learned who her parents were, and I can’t find who raised her, but interestingly her godfather was the city mayor and head of a local baronial and military family. I do have to wonder if she later found out, and told the story to her children, who passed it down, or if she made this story up to fill the gaps in her own family, or perhaps it’s even an invention of my great-grandfather.

Giuseppe L'ammendola and Josephine Franco