Research updates and stories from along the way, originally posted at blog.sassanochicago.org. Full posts, with comments, live there — these are entry points back to them.
A research goal from the 2019 book finally paid off: finding the family of Francesco Cavallone's brother Vincenzo, who was killed by a train in Chicago in 1911. His two young sons had returned to Italy with their mother, and only a 1924 passport application survived as a lead. In early 2020, one of those boys' granddaughters turned up on Facebook — leading to months of correspondence and a phone call, and eventually a wedding photo of her grandparents that the family generously shared.
Read the full post →A case study in why copied genealogy data needs to be verified, not just trusted: tracing every "Rosa Libretti" born in Sassano between 1800 and 1899 turned up mismatched photos and incorrect information circulating under her name, including confusion with an "Anna Rosa Libretti" variant. A reminder that once wrong information gets copied into someone else's tree, it spreads — and that responsibility runs both ways.
Read the full post →The origin of the Families with Twins research on this site. With three centuries of records finally indexed, the first real question asked of the data was simple: which families have twins, and is there a common ancestor? An early pass through the 1700s and 1800s records alone turned up 84 twin sets in the 1700s and 143 in the 1800s, plus a single set of triplets in 1823 — with the full analysis promised to take months.
Read the full post →A childhood memory from moving into Chicago's Wrightwood neighborhood in 1975: a new friend's mother recognized the surname "Cavallone" on sight, having grown up alongside Cavallone families on Federal Street herself. A small, early reminder of just how tightly connected the old neighborhood really was.
Read the full post →A progress report after a quiet year on the blog: all of Sassano's church and civil records indexed back to the mid-1600s, a new list of twenty-three founding Federal Street couples posted with hyperlinked pedigree charts, and an ongoing effort with Peter Barbella and Pasquale Cirullo to go back through the indexes correcting misspellings and documentation errors as the family trees take shape.
Read the full post →The blog's opening post, and something close to a mission statement: the responsibility to tell the stories of those who came before, before that history is lost. Written a little over a year after discovering Peter Barbella's Sassano Project, by which point the trail had already reached back seven generations to the earliest recorded Cavallone ancestors, Giovanni Antonio Cavallone (1643–1722) and Vittoria di Raho (1659–1726).
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