Where Did You Find That Story-Part 5
Up to this point, the story was just an interesting work of research. I knew bits and pieces, now, of some people who had appeared as names in a one hundred year old newspaper article. The site, italiangenealogy.com had given me a number of ship manifests and a marriage certificate but I still did not know much about these people. Until I searched the 1910 census. There was no Giuseppe and Carmela Amato anywhere in Hartford. Giovanni Tassone and his family were there. Carmela’s sister and her family were there. Suanj did more research for me and analyzed everyone at that address in Hartford. Her discovery was that Giuseppe had taken on an alias for the census. The number and ages of his girls was right, but the names were wrong. He was Garsten Karmarter. Why he chose that alias became part of the story. Then I was introduced to ancestry.com. This is an amazing site. I only got the American version, which did not give me access to European files. I began by reviewing anything I could about the four main principles in the book, Giuseppe and Carmela Amato and Giovanni and Rafaella Tassone. Every piece of information I could find, small announcements about the birth of a child in the paper, directory entries, were recorded on small notepaper and put on the walls in chronological order. I started finding information about the police officers involved in the investigation. Who was married, who was good at baseball, what the children’s names were. Much of the information also came from a book I found at Google Books, “The History of the Hartford Police Department” with information from its start until 1906. Many of the men who were involved in the investigation were mentioned in there and included their baseball stats where appropriate. Other books were the annual records of the city of Hartford which included finances, like the fact that the supernumeraries (part timers on at will call) were paid $2.50 a day. Ancestry.com had forums which I went to when I had exhausted any other route. There I looked under all the last names I found related to the story and left notes behind at several threads. I finally got some responses, some leading up to blind alleys and others which opened new perspectives. Great nieces and nephews on the Amato side began to write. I discovered that Carmela had a sister who, with her husband, had moved to British Columbia. I met three of her descendants through the ancestry.com forum and we began to communicate. One of them, Cory, had studied his family extensively and had even gone to Serra San Bruno. He was a wealth of information on buildings in the village and on family names. Due to his research previous to our meeting, he had compiled a genealogical chart of Carmela and Concetta’s family. I found people I had not known. I also found that a story I had heard years before was true. Carmela did lose a little boy before coming to America. As ancestry.com expanded, I learned more. I met a man who called himself Tooch, who had access to a complete set of the marriage, birth and death records of Serra San Bruno, much like the LDS. But he could read them and tell us what they said. His grasp of Italian is better than mine. He was able to send me several documents.
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