This week the post is brief, as we have a 16 year-old celebrating her birthday, and we are getting things ready for friends, food and fun. The week’s theme is Translation, and I will add a some records that required many rereads, zooming in and out, posts in foreign language and paleography boards, and the help of the almighty Google.
One interesting ancestor record I have is the marriage between my 4th great-grandfather Peter Joseph Schneider and his first wife, Gertrud Schaeffer, celebrated in Weierweiler, Saarland, Germany, on 25 Feb 1808. The region was historically German-speaking, but had been annexed as part of the French Republic in 1792. Civil registration followed the rules and regulations of the Napoleonic Code and lasted until 1815, producing records written in French. Gertrud was a widow when she married Peter, and passed away in June of 1811. Later on that same year, Peter married my fourth great-grandmother Eva Klossen, you can see that other record, too.
Peter Joseph Schneider and Gertrud SchaefferPeter Joseph Schneider and Eva Klossen
By the time my third great-grandfather Nicolaus Schneider was born on 4 Sep 1820, the German language and the typeface had made a return. Fraktur characters are very aesthetically pleasing, but hard to read.
Peter Joseph would later have documents written in another foreign language. He became a widower for the second time on 16 Oct 1837. He did not have any children with the first wife, but had six with Eva. Of those, four immigrated to Brazil along with the father in 1846, receiving plots of land in the Colony of Santa Isabel in my home state of Espírito Santo.
When I began researching the family, and got in touch with the cousins that had already started mapping out the Wagner family, I noticed the name Anália showed up a few more times than I anticipated. This was a name I knew, it was Grandma Julia’s grandmother’s and older sister’s name, and it was also the name of a few cousins born around the same time, which probably made family reunions interesting. I wanted to find out more about the first Anália, so I went to the digital newspaper library.
A small note tucked away into the Monitor Campista published on December 8, 1887, told me of how her story ended prematurely, aged only 45. She had died at 5 o’clock in the morning the day before, leaving her husband João Wagner dos Santos, and eleven children. Her burial happened the same day in their parish of São Gonçalo, as it was the custom.
With my grandmother Julia gone, my questions arising when I could no longer turn to her for answers, and with this death having happened before the time when we had civil records in Brazil that would give me more information, I thought I would not find out more about why Anália’s life had been cut short. A few years after, a cousin’s journal would bring me answers.
Born to a family of doctors and lawyers, Anália received a good education, which wasn’t the rule, specially for women, at that place and time. Incidentally, her future husband, an only child who grew up helping his widowed mother Delphina Wagner run their farm, felt he needed some tutoring. So, João Wagner dos Santos hired Miss Anália Leonor da Costa Guimarães for that job.
Anália’s father, Joaquim José da Costa Guimarães, a lawyer, likely born in Portugal (this is an ongoing research), died not long before her wedding, and I found out he knew his future son-in-law well. When João Wagner dos Santos’s father died in 1860, José Joaquim was appointed as his legal guardian, even though João’s mother Delphina Wagner was alive. I cannot be sure of the reason for that, whether this was because she could not write or read, posing a legal impediment, or if there was another reason. Regardless, we know João and Anália certainly knew each other for some time, if not for that, for the fact that they went to the same church and Campos wasn’t a big place. They got married on 14 September 1867.
Anália’s mother was Anna Maria da Costa Bastos, whose father was born in Santiago de Figueiró in Portugal, and whose mother descended from an enslaved woman, according to notes on baptism records. A mitochondrial DNA test confirmed that, showing my matrilineal line in the L0a1 haplogroup, related to the transatlantic slave trade. I do not know when Anna Maria died, but I suspect it was at a young age. Anália had only one brother, born one year before her. He followed in the family tradition and became a doctor. He passed one year after his sister, in 1888.
Anália and João Wagner had twelve children together. Firstborn João made his appearance a little under six months after the parents’ wedding, which methinks may have happened in a hurry. The second child was Joaquim, who died in a tragic accident that my cousin Mário Wagner, who wrote the family’s memories, credits as being the reason for Anália’s decline, and eventual death. My great-grandmother Alda was the third child, then came Anália Leonor carrying both of the mother’s names, Carlos, Delphina, Gil, Adauto, Júlio, Otávio, Otto, and Maria José.
There is a slight discrepancy between Mário’s memories and what I was able to confirm in a news clipping about the accident, regarding the victim’s name, whether it was Alberto or Joaquim. Since it happened decades before Mário was born, I believe the correct name would be the one published the day after it occurred: Joaquim. This would also make sense because this was his maternal grandfather’s name; his eldest brother had been named after the paternal grandfather.
The account of what happened is correct, the boy aged around 13 fell into the moving sugarcane mill on the family’s farm. Mário’s memories give us more context. The eldest brother had gone to Great Britain to learn more about steam-powered engines that could replace the old horse-powered mill and stay competitive in their business. The younger brother took on some of his duties during the absence, and on the morning of the accident he went to the mill carrying a kerosene lamp. He dropped it and started a fire that startled the horses, abruptly starting the wheel that crushed him.
After this tragedy, Anália moved out of the farm into a house in the parish’s urban area, as she could not stand to hear the turning of the wheel anymore. There is another small discrepancy between what Mário heard from older people living on the family farm, and what the newspapers reported, and it is the timeline between the passing of son and mother, which did not occur in short sequence. Rather, five years passed, which does not make it any less heartbreaking. Some of my great-grandma siblings were very little, just out of toddlerhood, when they lost their mother. I suspect Alda, who was a teenager and the oldest among the girls, quickly had to take on some of the responsibility of rearing her brothers and sisters.
Anália’s memory lived on with the granddaughters who were named after her, on the name of oldest son João’s own farm. I would love to know if there is a portrait of hers with one of the many cousins I do not know, and I hope it would make its way to my hands as cousin Mários memoirs did.
The single biggest joy in doing family history is finding an ancestor’s picture. Even better: finding a family picture. Looking at each face, turning the picture around searching for a date, names, any notes.
The Wagner de Barros Family – Campos dos Goytacazes, RJ, Brazil – Circa 1920
Being able to see the faces of the people we devote so much of our time researching is a powerful feeling. When I saw my great-grandparents Alda and Miguel, not only did I recognized them, I relived a stream of memories of my talks with my grandmother Julia, with the added knowledge I gathered from the broader family thanks to the ability to connect with cousins through genealogy websites. Some had held on to notes, journals, news clippings, composing a patchwork of family history that we share and piece together as well as we can. This picture added to the mosaic of the Wagner, Ribeiro da Motta and Barros families. Now I had the faces to match the names of my grandmother’s family unit. There is more to that feeling of recognition, though.
As a child, I traveled to visit my grandmother’s hometown of Campos, in the Northern part of the state of Rio de Janeiro. The city was several decades removed from its most prosperous days, when sugarcane crops covered the fields, the mills and smokestacks were a ubiquitous sight, and the downtown area had a Gilded Age flair. There were still many old buildings around town, houses with small interconnected rooms and high ceilings. The family home I remember had once belonged to my great-uncle Armando Wagner de Barros, the young man with the tan suit standing behind great-grandma Alda. By the time of my visits, Armando’s only child Aldano was living there with his mother, whom we called Aunt Zica. Uncle Armando was long gone, as were all of grandma’s siblings.
Some of my fondest family memories from Campos involve cousin Aldano, who was nothing short of a perfect gentleman and one of the most cultured people I have ever met. I have a vague memory of him showing me old family pictures when I was a child aged 7 or 8. I believe the photo above was one of them, and that is why recognition struck me so strongly when I saw it last year, framed and hanging on the wall in my late aunt Aldinha’s bedroom. I spent my whole life until 2006 going regularly to my Grandma Julia’s house, but this picture was not on display. This doesn’t mean her family was not on her mind, though. She told me many stories, she spoke of her parents and siblings. She lost her father, Miguel, when she was 17, within a decade of this picture being taken. Her mother passed away in 1954 from complications after a stroke.
A couple of years after great-grandpa Miguel died, grandma Julia moved in with her older brother and his family in the state of Minas Gerais. She got married in 1932, never lived in Campos again, but visited often. I have pictures of my uncles and aunts taken in a local photography studio when she would visit her hometown and the siblings who still lived there.
I had a hard time locating one of her sisters, Maria, known as Neném. She is the child to the right of her mother. I did not know exactly what happened to her until a couple of years ago. After exhausting my research in Campos, I turned to Minas, thinking maybe she moved with grandma Julia. Thanks to the goodwill from a cousin who has access to old death records in Minas Gerais, I found out she died prematurely of tuberculosis in 1936, aged only 26. Figuring out her whereabouts took so long because none of my relatives had a recollection of her, she had been gone by the time they were born. That loss must have been particularly hard on grandma, they were only two years apart in age. Maria’s face is very familiar to me, I have cousins who look like her.
One of the siblings that lived in Campos was my great-aunt Rita, known as Lilita. She is the standing on the left, and her two daughters were close in age with my mother. Mom visited the cousins in the Summer and shared many memories with me. Hearing Campos stories from my grandma and from my mom is how my brain gathered missing pieces to form the string of sentimental memories I have of that place.
Several of these stories morphed into a recurring dream I have, which I believe stems from bits and flashes of childhood memories from my own Campos trips in which I was fascinated with the old homes and their high, narrow doors, the windows that creak and whistle and when the wind blows, bathrooms and kitchens with old fixtures. I never looked at them thinking they were rundown and needed to be replaced. Everything looked beautiful, proud in its simplicity, lived in, having witnessed its share of important occasions and a multitude of small, mundane occurrences in my relatives’ lives. I was, and still am, a big fan of old houses. Maybe family historians are born that way?
In my recurring dream, I’m in a house that resembles a lot Aldano’s, but it is not exactly the same. I always wander from room to room and end in the kitchen that has a door leading to a backyard with a lawn and a tree with long leaves, maybe a mango tree. I noticed the trees behind the family in the picture also have long leaves, but I do not know where this photo was taken, and it is certainly not a place I have ever visited. According to the death certificate, my great-grandfather Miguel died on his family’s farm, where his mother still lived. My grandmother was born in that same area, and I believe that’s where they posed for this photograph. The issue of the tree with the long leaves may have stayed recorded in my memory from decades ago. Perhaps there was one tree like that in Aldano’s yard, I can’t be certain, but the tree is there every time I have this dream. The brain picks up and stores so much more than we realize.
After great-grandfather Miguel died in July 1929, the family moved downtown, and that is where I always met the relatives. The Barros family farm was sold sometime after 1936 after the death of his mother Rita Ribeiro da Motta Barros, the daughter of one of the so-called Sugar Barons of Campos’s rich heyday. He actually had a title, and a piece of his emblazoned dinnerware survived the century-and-a-half, many-thousand-mile journey to a shelf in my Florida home. Great-great-grandma Rita’s house, once considered one of the region’s architectural jewels, had fallen in disrepair after her husband died in 1909, leaving more debt than wealth. The sugarcane cycle boon had dried out for most farmers, with only big operations surviving, those with enough output to feed the big sugar refineries that had replaced the old animal- and steam-powered mills.
Seeing my grandmother as a child, next to her mother, also gripped me intensely because of the strong resemblance Grandma Julia would have, as an older woman, to her own mother, whom I have never met. Great-grandma Alda died 18 years before my birth. Whenever I would visit my grandmother, I would sit next to her on the couch, she would gently lean over so our shoulders touched, and she would slip one of her hands between mine, much in the same way she does with her mother. I recognized that gesture immediately when I saw this photo, a memory so strong it is almost physical. We spoke holding hands, for hours, she told me so much about her life and I regret not recalling every detail. But those talks are stored somewhere in my mind, and they spring back in dreams and in a feeling of recognition of people and places that do not inhabit in the same timeline of my own existence.
What happens when you are not considered a citizen of the only place you have ever known, the place you call home? Where everything that is familiar, from the language to the food, the songs, the hills that surround the lakes where you played as a child? What is life like when you are, still, homeless in your own country? When your homeland does not recognize you as a citizen, making you stateless, an outcast?
This was not something I was contemplating when I found the Frey family in the Canton of Fribourg 1818 census.
Entry 51 in this folio lists as residents in the parish of Gurmels in the Canton of Fribourg, taken on 16 January 1818 : Anna Maria Frey, age 55, Zemn, Canton Lucerne, widow; Elisabeth, 16, Kriegstetten, Solothurn, single; Mariana, 13, Biberist, Solothurn, single; Katthry, 8, Bremis, Wallis. The far right column notes they are all Heimatlos, or stateless. I took to Swiss genealogy discussion boards to learn about the possible reasons for their status, and also to figure out where the mother, Anna Maria Frey, was born. “Zemn” is not a place I could find in Lucerne or in any other cantons. Fortunately, a native Swiss-German speaker experienced in dealing with old documents figured it out: she probably told the enumerator she was “zu Emmen“, from Emmen, which is indeed a commune in the Canton of Lucerne. The same researcher was able to locate her baptismal record:
Anna Maria Elisabetha Æmila Frey, born 4 April 1769 in Emmen, parents Josephus Frey and Elisabetha Zubler.
I did not find the parents’ marriage in Emmen. The record does not mention their places of origin, which makes the search harder. The pattern of absent, inconsistent, or incomplete information starts and becomes the norm with this family line. This record shows no indication that Anna Maria’s parents were foreigners, stateless. This was either by omission on this particular record, or she was born a citizen but lost this status due to marriage.
Here is how things went for her: In 1818, the Canton of Fribourg entered an agreement with the Portuguese crown to send 100 families to settle in the mountains outside of Rio de Janeiro, where Portugal’s court had relocated during the Napoleonic Wars. The agreement was mutually beneficial, as King John VI wished to experiment with subsidized colonization, and Europe was experiencing crop failure and population displacement following the wars that raged in the prior decades, and the environmental aftermath of the Mount Tambora eruption, that led to the “Year Without a Summer”.
According to Swiss-Brazilian genealogist Henrique Bon, who has done extensive research and published a book recounting the voyage (made also into a children’s version), several of the immigrants bound for Brazil traveled with their expenses paid for by the local communes, that wished to be rid of poor citizens who burdened the local administration and churches’ treasuries.
Mr. Bon is very generous answering my inquiries, but we could not come with a definite reason for the Frey-Guttemann women to be considered stateless. He pointed out that some of the immigrants in that journey were widows with children. It is not difficult to infer that those were people who could not secure a living without the male head of the household, and would be likely candidates to get a ticket out of town from the local authorities.
Anna Maria’s immigration papers show she was the daughter of Joseph Frey, and the widow of Agostinho Gutermann, as their names were written down by immigration officials. As it was customary in Brazil, she showed on records with her husband’s last name, henceforth appearing as Anna Maria Gutermann (with various spelling variations of the last name). She came in the company of the three daughters aboard the Daphne. Their journey was harrowing, with overcrowded vessels in which nearly a quarter of the passengers perished due to the unsanitary conditions, as I wrote in two previousposts about the other half of my Swiss ancestry.
Shortly after her arrival, Anna Maria married a fellow immigrant, a French-speaking widower by the name of Joseph Ferdinand Steulet. She died in the city of Nova Friburgo on 16 July 1839, by then twice-widowed. The eldest daughter married immigrant Anton Klein, the second daughter went to live in the capital city of Rio de Janeiro, and we lost track of her. The youngest child married an old neighbor from Gurmels, Hans Wagner, starting a numerous family in Campos dos Goytacazes.
I wanted to find out more about their circumstances, or at least make the most educated inference possible in the light of the civil laws of their places of origin. Also, I needed to find out more about the family member who never made it to Brazil: Agostinho, or Joseph Augustin Guttmann.
As of the writing of this post, I have not yet found their marriage record. I found documents showing they had a son named Joseph born in Deitingen, Solothurn, on 29 Oct 1798. He was buried in Kriegstetten, SO, on 24 May 1799. In Joseph’s baptism entry, the parents are Joseph Augustin Guttman and Anna Maria Æmila Frey, Godparents Joseph Stüdi from Grenchen, and Maria Anna Grolimund. The place of origin of the father is Canton Wallis, or Valais. They are noted as vagi, short for vagabondi, vagrants, maybe part of the traveling peoples who have lived in Switzerland for centuries. Their presence in many communities was, and still is, generally not welcomed, and historically they have been seen with prejudice and little tolerance by the communities on their way. They moved together in caravans, typically looking for employment on farms during harvest season, and found other temporary jobs in trades as blacksmiths and carpenters. I cannot determine with certainty if this was their situation.
Joseph Guttman’s baptism record
One year after Joseph’s death, his sister Elisabeth was baptised in Kriegstetten. Born on 30 April 1800, the father’s name appears as Augustinus Guttman, mother Anna Maria Frey. Josephus Stüdeli stands as the godfather as he did for Joseph, and another Grolimund woman is the godmother, which leads me to believe they may be related to the Guttmann-Frey family. Regarding the father’s origin, the notation has Lausanen, different from what we see on the previous record. Also noted the word conversus, indicating Augustin was not born in the Catholic faith.
Elisabeth’s baptism record
The next daughter, Maria Anna, was born in Biberist, another community in Canton Solothurn, on 29 May 1803. This time the parents are noted as vagrants. The godfather is Sebastian Werbold from Schüpfen, godmother is maternal aunt Maria Anna Frey.
Maria Anna’s baptism record
The last birth I could find was that of my ancestor, Katharina. She was born in Bramois, in the Canton of Valais. Unlike her siblings, she was born in a French-speaking region, where church records are not easy to research, and I had to request hers directly to the current abbot from the parish where she received the sacrament. Alas, older books are not housed in the church building, they were transferred to the state archives and can only be viewed in person. Abbot Rotten drove there to send me one more piece of the puzzle, and he has my immense gratitude.
Katharina – Catharina Guttman’s baptism record
This time the father is named Joseph Guttmann, mother Anna Maria Æmila Frey. The parents are noted as inerto vagorum. The officiating priest was the godfather, the godmother was Catherine, her last name not readable.
I hypothesize that Anna Maria Æmila Frey was not born to vagrant parents, but I could not find other children by Joseph Frey and Elisabeth Zubler in Emmen. We know she had at least one sibling, who was Maria Anna Guttmann’s godmother. Frey is a somewhat common surname. Zubler is found in several communes in Solothurn. This is why I believe they could be from that area, and not travelers passing by. Finding the Frey-Zubler marriage record would give us confirmation of that.
Joseph Augustin Guttmann remains a mystery, and I believe Anna Maria became Heimatlos when she married him. Their daugthers, though born in Switzerland, would not be considered citizens, as citizenship is passed down by the father. The Register of Swiss Surnames does not indicate Guttmann, with this spelling, is an “old” Swiss name, although we do find the variant Gutmann more frequently.
I cannot affirm that they were a part of one of the traditional traveling peoples of Switzerland, if going from place to place was their chosen way of life, or if this was a matter of circumstances in which they were continuously forced to dislocate in order to survive because of the war, poverty, or both. Augustin died sometime between Katharina’s birth and the time the enumerator knocked on Anna Maria’s door in Gurmels, in 1818.
As of the time I was wrapping up this post, I found an interesting record which I have not yet completely deciphered.
Above is the baptism record of a child named Maria Anna Guttmann. She was born in Grenchen, Canton of Solothurn, on 16 June 1809. Her father was Franc. Augustinus Guttmann, mother Margaretha Fasnacht. The couple were not married. Margaretha was from the town of Entlebuch in the Canton of Lucerne. Two things stand out: first, the name crossed out right above hers. That is our very own Anna MariaÆmila Frey. Second, the place of origin of Franciscus/Franz Guttmann. It is not clear, but it looks like it says: “Darischar Distr(ikt) Melsch Depart(ment) S(ankt) Hypolit”
Melsch, Meltsch, or Melč, is a hamlet in what today is Czechia. In the 18th Century, it was part of Silesia, in the Austrian Empire. It seems like we may have a lead of where to look next.
This post will deal with the future, the present and the past. In that order.
If you are someone down the road of time from me, a relative or someone who is researching the families I write about, hello! One big reason I blog is to add my small contribution to genealogy, or family history as I prefer to call it. I hope you find some useful information here. The thought that a descendant may be reading is surreal right now as Izzie is 15 and Alex is 10, but if you are one, and wonder why you can’t find so much in the old social media platforms that people of my time use, the answer is simple: I’m not a fan. I used to post a lot of updates, then I got over it. Fake news, trolls, the wastelands of the comments section everywhere, Flat-Earthers and other science-denying types, people posting pictures of their meals, cat memes. Actually, I am OK with the latter. I hope by the time you read this, most of those problems have been resolved, but the kitties are still around.
So, if you are looking for me: besides this little corner, I have an even smaller soapbox on Twitter, that old platform that the rocket guy bought in 2022. I use that mostly as a news aggregator. Speaking of him, when did electric cars finally become affordable? Are those batteries still catching fire? Moving on, here are two little pieces of advice: First, in online interactions, never say anything that you would not say to someone face-to-face. Be kind and polite, always. Second, check your sources. I don’t know what the consequences will be of my contemporaries’ lack of critical thinking skills and basic source vetting, but I want to apologize to you for whatever messes we got the world into because of the spread of fake news and wack job theories. Those two issues are why I am (almost) off of social media.
RIP Tardar Sauce, a.k.a. Grumpy Cat (2012-2019)
Now that we talked present and future, let’s go to the past. My favorite way to research the social media of way back when is accessing the Brazilian National Library online. They have a great collection of digitized periodicals and, lucky for us, our ancestors were keen on writing to their local newspapers, which I hope still exist when you are reading this. I have a few examples of how their writing helps me flesh out our family history and go beyond the classic BMD of genealogy (birth, marriage, death). The same way we look up a new contact on social media, whether they are a new friend, a potential new employer or employee, we can look up our ancestors.
In the times when we did not have digital, before the radio and television, most small towns had a local print news outlet, or more. In Brazil, up until the first half of the 20th century, those would be affiliated with political parties. They offered a mix of local interest like police blotters, voter rolls, birth, wedding and funeral announcements, sympathy notes, public health advisories, party and church group meetings, boat and train schedules, arriving and departing visitors, hotel guest lists, undeliverable mail, local business ads, and of course editorials that allow us to see what issues were at the top in the political environment.
All of these things offer great subsidies to family history. There is a good bit of gossip, normally signed under a pseudonym, and the indispensable arts. We find poetry and fiction, typically published in installments. Students’ grades, and tax collector’s lists were also printed, because public shaming works (not). This is all ancestry jackpot. In my family, we had newspaper writers, and several that were the subjects of stories. When you put it all together, it’s the social media of the olden days. Also, there was typically the other newspaper, owned by the political opponents, which also adds to the research as you read the opposite side of certain stories. So, without more ado, here is a little sampling of what we have:
Diário da Manhã (ES) – 4 June 1924
The social column giving interesting details about my great-grandparents Godofredo Schneider and Noêmia Serrano’s wedding. The bridal party gives us a good idea of whom they were closest to, some of them from out of town, that will provide leads of where to look next. I was able to get a great outline of Godofredo’s life from newspapers spanning decades. His academic performance in a preparatory school, college, passing the exam to become a lawyer, a short-lived first marriage with the premature loss of wife and child, the move back to the home state, his marriage to Noêmia, incursion in politics, becoming the mayor in my hometown during a period of turmoil, and many other facts up until his death in 1971. My father and late uncle appear as pallbearers in a very poignant last picture.
Another common function of social media is the rants. People will go on about all sorts of issues, with politics being typically the hottest topic, a solid engagement generator. So, how did you achieve this before social media and cell phones at hand to record everything? A public space? Perhaps a busy train station? That is exactly what my second-great-grandfather Anésio, Godofredo’s father-in-law, did. He went on a thunderous tirade against Brazil’s then-president Floriano Peixoto, nicknamed “Iron Marshal”, in the middle of a busy railway platform. Some bystanders who were Floriano’s supporters did not like it, and Anésio went viral more than a century before TikTok.
O Parahybano – 23 Feb 1892
It is not all about cats. Babies are a hit, too. Here’s my grandmother, Maria Helena, probably past her nap time.
1925
Influenced by Queen Victoria after Prince Albert’s death, mourning became an elaborate (and strangely fashionable) tradition, newspapers offered several art choices to embellish funeral announcements. I am absolutely fascinated by this trend, and I will come back to it at some point.
Diário de Pernambuco – 9 Aug 1865O Commercio do Esp. Santo – 1 Jun 1896A Provincia do Esp. Santo – 12 Jul 1889
Take note of every person mentioned in those announcements. They’re family history gold.
My great-grandfather João Bastos published poetry, short stories and signed a column as an art critic for A Gazeta, a daily newspaper from Vitória – ES. My aunt Lígia’s name came from the poem Salamandra, which I find beautiful:
Vida Capichaba – 18 Sep 1927
There are many other pieces I would like to add, and I don’t want this to be a tl;dr post. I’m sure during this year of weekly blogging there will be plenty of opportunities to share more old-timey social media, but I would like to ask, did you ever have something really important go on your spam folder? One of my main research lines was saved by a letter that was not delivered to the recipient. After several tries, the postal service would publish a list of pieces of undeliverable mail. This is a story I’m saving for sometime in the future, but a note in tiny print, tucked away several pages deep into a Rio newspaper, solved the mystery of where my 4th great-grandfather was living in 1879, all thanks to his brother-in-law who wasn’t home to receive a letter.
Dirigible GrafZeppelin– Conceição da Barra (ES), Brazil – 1932
Spoiler alert: the dirigible above did not suffer any failures, it was decommissioned along with the remainder of the fleet in 1937 after the disaster involving its sister ship. This week’s “Oops” theme has nothing to do with air flight at all. It is about the house below the aircraft, one of the coolest genealogy pictures I have, so much I use it as the cover on my Twitter account. This house seen above, a much-maligned mistake, the source of much dismay, a veritable snafu, the mother of all oopses.
It belonged to my third great-grandparents, João Bastos de Almeida Pinto and Anna Tomásia Pinto Marques. They did not build it. Rather, it was built for them, without their knowledge or consent. If you are confused, you are not alone. This is how the tale was told by their daughter, my second great-gran Adalgiza Bastos Vieira, affectionately known as Vovó (Grandma) Benga, as recounted by my late cousin Nancy Bastos: the young couple got married sometime around 1870 (we lack records for that time and place), and traveled to the groom’s native Portugal on their honeymoon. João and Anna were cousins, I still search the connection to find out how, but I assume they were visiting mutual relatives. The details are scarce, but apparently one of them got sick and their sojourn in the old country lasted for close to one year. During his absence, João left his business partner in charge of the finances. The man, named Joaquim Duarte, was someone he had met during one of his business trips to the country’s then-capital, Rio de Janeiro. According to Benga, Duarte was a down-on-his-luck chap, but smart and street-savvy, which earned him a job offer.
The story goes that, when João and Anna’s boat approached the estuary (or barra) where the village is located, they thought they were on the wrong place. João’s business, as he left it, was a one-story warehouse with a dock for small boats, a trapiche. There were no two-story buildings, or sobrados, anywhere near the village before they left. The new addition changed the skyline dramatically. Joaquim Duarte waited for the couple with a smile on his face, proud of his business acumen: He had used the company’s money, the entirety of João’s savings, to expand the warehouse and build a home on the second floor, the perfect place for the newlyweds to start a family. He also thought that Anna, the daughter of a wealthy farmer from Porto Seguro, a bigger city in the state of Bahia, deserved a home that stood out.
The trapiche, circa 1908
João had different business and financial goals. Clearly his partner was not aware of them, and Anna, well, she hated the new place and refused to live above the warehouse, loath of going up and down the stairs. It is not clear how long they lived there, but it seems like the re-relocation happened fast. They established themselves on Rua Grande, their home on the same level as everybody else’s.
The couple had six children, some of whom I had not been able to research. Anna died in November 1888. By my estimation, she was not yet 40. João went on to remarry, having two more children before his death on September 30th, 1895. João and Anna’s only male child ran his late father’s business during the two decades following deep changes in the country’s politics and economy with the demise of the monarchy following a military coup d’état that inaugurated the First Republic. In the 1910s, the building was vacant as litigation with debtors went on. It fell into dire disrepair until it was sold on an auction to a family that used it as a store, a restaurant, and an inn.
Today, the building belongs to the city and hosts an art gallery and cultural center. It is arguably the most recognizable edifice in town, strategically located on a curve where the River São Mateus meets the Atlantic. Once regarded as a behemoth of a mistake and an eyesore, the old trapiche was vindicated, being chosen by an unnamed newspaper photographer to compose a beautiful picture on the day the Graf Zeppelin flew above. The sobrado went through many lives since João and Anna returned from their honeymoon. What was their nightmare and disappointment became a landmark and a tourist attraction.
This week, I had an admirable array of possible choices. There are tutors, masters in many disciplines in my family tree. One of my paternal great-grandfathers was a teacher, school principal, journalist, a published poet and up until the last week of his life he wrote for an art column in a local newspaper in my hometown. There are schools named for him, and for his sister, another great teacher. There are numerous music instructors, college professors in various fields ranging from law to medicine, cited to this day in scholarly papers. All of them are formidable, and deserving of their own blog post. But when I think about this theme, there is one name that always comes to the top.
I hope no one finds it strange or inappropriate that I am writing about a living ancestor, someone who is very close to me: my mother. She embodies the dedication, the passion and the true sense of what it is to be an educator. I apologize in advance if this will be too personal. I do not want this to read like a eulogy. Right now, I want to pay tribute to my mother for her achievements and the lives she touched during her years in teaching, or magistério, in Portuguese, from the Latin magisterium, meaning “a principle of nature having transmuting or curative powers”. That is indeed the power an educator wields.
My mother is 75, and was diagnosed with frontotemporal dementia when she was only 61. News of her retirement in 2009 caught us by surprise; up until then, she had been talking about leaving her job in 2012. She had big plans, one was writing a book. She wanted to travel to spend time with me, in the United States, and my brother, who was living in Europe at the time. My mother became a grandmother twice in 2007. She took some time off to be with my family when I gave birth in March that year, and in October when my sister delivered her first child. When mom retired in mid-2009 there was another baby on the way, my sister’s second daughter. Two grandsons arrived when her cognition was already somewhat impaired, in 2012 and 2014, but we have beautiful pictures of her holding each of them with all the love of the world in her eyes.
Before her diagnosis, she wanted to cross off other items from her travel bucket list, specially Budapest. She has traveled extensively, but an opportunity to go to Eastern Europe never came. I am glad that, on her last international trip before her illness made such things impossible, she came to visit while I was living in Georgia. My mother always dreamed of seeing Savannah and Charleston, having grown up reading romance novels set in the Antebellum Era. We took the grand tour! During those weeks, I was able to observe what my sister had been telling me, about Mom’s spotty memory and executive function difficulties. For us, the long process of grieving the slow loss of our mother had started, and is still unfolding. Dementia is indeed the long goodbye, and it has given me the opportunity to reflect on life, death, spirituality, the things that matter and the ones that don’t. It gave me a new perspective on my mother and on my changing relationship with her. It certainly shapes me as a mother to my own children. I traveled from one side of the spectrum to the other, from being the one she cared for, to being a caregiver, although my sister, an extraordinary powerhouse of a woman and an apple who did not fall far from the tree, is the one that fulfills that role primarily.
I have seen my mother from her strongest to her most vulnerable, I came up with boundless more admiration for the absolute rockstar Maria Luiza is, and I want to write that while she is still here. When I see her, sometimes I catch a brief glint of recognition, she sees me and something inside her lights up. I do not know what she remembers, she cannot use her words anymore. Everything that makes a person who they are, the collection of personal traits, knowledge acquired, life experiences and whatever it is that constitutes one’s soul my mother still has them, but these things are locked away inside her brain, forever irretrievable. My children, nieces and nephew are growing up without the privilege I had of having both grandmothers around. I am leaving these words, which are patently my own impressions of her, so they can know a little more about Vovó Biziza.
She was born in Vila Velha, Espírito Santo, on July 21st, 1947, the second-to-last in my grandparents’ brood of ten. Mom lived her whole life within 2 kilometers from where she was born. The city was not big, and the times were different, the prospects were not the most exciting. Most people would not leave town, it was a quiet life. But she was born with the gift of wanderlust, which she indulged in by reading every book she could get her hands on, watching movies, and later in life, traveling. She was a straight-A student and in high school she went for a teacher’s certification track. She was already employed tutoring adults at a public school’s nighttime elementary education program when she started college, pursuing a bachelor’s degree in Neo-Latin Languages. By then, she had been dating my father for a few years. They had known each other since infancy, as it happens in small towns. The rest of the story unfolds in a fairly predictable way: they got their degrees, got married, had a baby (me), bought a house, had my brother, had my sister.
Now, things go off script. Not many people got divorced at that time. You were married, no matter how unhappily, until life did you part. My parents did not stay together, which was of course not easy on any of us, but for their own sake, in retrospect, I am glad they did. They are both good people who simply did not belong together. My father moved away, she stayed and became a solo parent when this was still taboo. Mother kept a brave face as some of their old relations drifted away due to her “unconventional” marital status. She raised us through thick and thin, went back to work outside of home, something she had not done since my brother had arrived. I am old enough to remember her suffering, but she was also a very practical person, and she did everything she had to do to pick herself up, and kept our lives as steady as possible. We did not experience hardship. She cried when she had to cry, the first couple of years took some getting used to, but on the other side she emerged stronger, resilient, and she never lost one ounce of the grace, kindness, generosity and dedication she devoted to her children, and to her students.
Mom juggled working at a school in the morning, and tutoring in the afternoon at our house. We had a classroom on the second floor with a long table sitting up to ten people. I grew up with the constant opening and closing of the front gate, watching the groups arrive hourly. Most of those were high school seniors she was preparing to pass the competitive university admission tests we take in Brazil. She also taught French, her second-favorite language, in which she was beautifully fluent. Portuguese was number one, and that love she had nurtured since childhood, reading the works from the great masters. Brazil and Portugal have produced some of the richest literature in the world, still vastly underrated. You should really. Check. Them. Out. Each of these links.
My mother believed that an education was a right, not a privilege. I remember her teaching grown-ups who had not been able to complete their studies when younger. She was unflappable dealing with the throngs of sleepy-eyed teenagers during school’s first period at 7 in the morning, that oftentimes were not on their best behavior. She would spend long hours editing and proofreading post-graduate and PhD theses, and facing, unflinchingly, piles of tests to grade (it was all paper-based, dear young reader). Mom was tired, a lot, putting in a double, sometimes triple, journey every day. Also, she was an introvert, and being one myself I do not know how she mustered the energy to engage daily with so many people, but she did.
When she was not working, she was in her bedroom at the end of the hallway, the space where she could enjoy the brief gift of quiet and solitude, although she always knew what us kids were up to. She was not an absentee mother, and she was firm in disciplining the wayward child (I think I deserve the Number 1 prize on that). She grew up with strict values of politeness, respect for everyone regardless of their background, strong work ethic and personal responsibility, and she expected nothing less from us. We were also brought up still in the old times when there was the proverbial village that helped raise the children. Both my grandmothers, some of my uncles and aunts were always present, she could count on them and so did we, but during the hardest times, during the long sleepless nights with one or more sick kids, when she had to manage the myriad little crises that come with parenting, when one of us was struggling in the difficult process of growing up, she was there, always by our side, always steady, our biggest encourager, enthusiastic about our prospects and exploits. My brother left to live abroad in 2000, I moved here the following year, and she cheered for our success while missing us dearly.
During school vacation, we would travel to be with our father, and mom would purchase a travel package and go somewhere. She went to Europe and the US several times, she traveled a lot within South America and domestically in Brazil, too. She would always send postcards from whichever new destination she was visiting. Those are now stored in boxes along with many pictures and other mementos from her adventures. That lady climbed several hundred of steps and experienced the rarefied air and the visual marvel of Macchu Picchu, she was in Los Angeles in 1994 during an earthquake, and she had this one story where she was behind a man at an airport in London, then in a few days in Toronto, and finally in Brazil, same guy, wearing the same jacket, a couple of weeks later. For him, it was probably boring work travel, but she did all of that plane hopping while seven months pregnant, which is no small feat.
I am very happy to inform that she found love again, more than once. Some relationships were brief, and the last one lasted a couple of decades. They never got married, didn’t even move in together, which was by common agreement and worked out great. He was a good friend, a companion, and for a period of time a caregiver, until we had to move her to be closer to my sister.
My deep dive into family history, and the fact that it has become so big I am now even keeping a blog, started with her. She liked telling stories, specially of her travels to her mother’s hometown of Campos, when she was younger. There were so many uncles and aunts, cousins galore, I could not keep track of them. Now I have plentiful names and dates, but sometimes cannot match them to the stories, a big source of dismay because I should have written those things down somewhere.
My mother had a prodigious memory, and she would remember people’s names, birthdays, even phone numbers (again something really novel for you, young reader). She called every sibling, niece, nephew, and a long list of dear friends to wish them all the happiness and health on their big day and through the year ahead. Many of those friends were former students. She threw beautiful birthday parties for the three of us, creating treats and decorations by hand in a pre-Pinterest era when you had to come up with the ideas on your own. She made picture albums chronicling our childhood, all labeled and decorated, also before the digital age. Those, I am rushing to scan because time is not kind to photo paper.
For each of our births, she created a Baby Book where you can see her perfect calligraphy on the family tree going up to the great-grandparents, all the immunizations, major milestones, and some of her impressions of her babies in all the important categories of “first smile”, “first tooth”, “first steps” and “first word”. Mine was “ua”, which she translated to the readership as “rua” (street), but it could also mean “lua” (moon). Or, pretty much anything that sounded vaguely like that. My vocabulary grew exponentially and very fast, undoubtedly because I was surrounded by said village, my mom at the center of it, making the time to play with dolls, sing lullabies (in French too!), and read books. We had a lot of them, and they were not just for show. She taught me to read when I was three, which earned me a fast pass in academics: the sisters at the Vicentian school she had attended and where she also taught at times let me enroll in kindergarten ahead of schedule.
Every memory of my mom is profoundly intertwined with her craft, her mission, her passion of being a teacher. Even when the times were not the greatest, again, we are talking dealing with teenagers, she was always ready with a lesson plan, a smile on her face, a clear explanation for each of the incomprehensibly complex verb tenses and the labyrinthine rules of Portuguese grammar, and more than enough time to help a student before or after class. I do not think she had real off hours. Teaching was her every day, not just a job. She believed in education as the key to form a professional, a citizen, a well-rounded person, and she wanted to see each of her students realize their potential.
She also liked being the student. She went back to further her own education, taking courses in theology, a subject she was really interested in even though she was not particularly religious. Furthermore, she went for her post-graduate studies when I was already in college, and she wrote her final monograph on the language and symbolism in the music and lyrics of her favorite composer, Chico Buarque de Hollanda, who was targeted during the military dictatorship my mother grew up under, starting in 1964 when she was still in her teens, and ending when she was the mother of a teenager. One of the dearest memories I have is taking her to see him live when I was living in São Paulo, sometime in ’98 or ’99. She was able to deliver a copy of her study to one of his assistants. I hope he received it. Chico, by the way, is still fighting the good fight. She was also a huge Elvis Presley fan, and after the onset of her illness, on those days when she was more absent, in those increasingly longer gaps of connection with the world and the people around her, one of his movies would always bring her back, and we would sing with Elvis whether he was in Las Vegas, Acapulco or Hawaii.
So, this is a little bit about Maria Luiza, one of three ancestors I still have along with my dad and his mother. Some people who will read this blog also know my mother, and may want to add their own impressions, or would like to highlight a different set of memories of her. The comments section is open. If you are someone doing family history, do not wait until after they are gone. Seek them out, listen to their stories, write them down. And if I may suggest one question to ask them, this is it: ask about their teachers. Behind a great person, there is typically a dedicated group of educators who helped them along the way. I know because every single time I visit my hometown, I run into someone who has something amazing to say about my mom.
Santa Isabel, Espirito Santo, 1860 – Source: Esp. Santo State Public Archives
Coming up with a subject for this week’s post was not an easy choice since I come from a family of immigrants. I am myself one, so being out of place is not an uncommon occurrence for us. However, on most cases, people ended going where they intended to go, so I thought telling the story of an unexpected detour would be interesting. I chose a branch I already wrote about, my Schneider folks (the original post is in Portuguese), that along with the Stein family would depart Germany for Brazil in 1846, believing they were headed for the Southern province of Rio Grande do Sul, a place that had been receiving a steady immigration influx from several Germanic States like Rhineland-Palatinate, Hesse, Thuringia, Lower Saxony, and Saarland since earlier in that century. The villages there were full of people who came from the same land, spoke the same language, there were even a few familiar names.
For years, they had seen their friends and relatives leave. Finally, their day to board the Philomela, departing from Dunkirk, France, had arrived. She was one vessel in a convoy carrying families escaping the harsh economy in their homeland, where people were suffering with land seizures, unemployment and crop failure. Agents recruiting laborers to depart for the Americas did not have a hard time finding takers. Most immigrants would opt for a new beginning in the United States, but others would choose Brazil, specially if they already had relatives or old acquaintances there, like my ancestors. But alas, unbeknownst to them, the Schneiders and Steins would participate in an experimental program elsewhere some 1300 miles away up the Brazilian coast.
The Philomela
When one thinks about coffee, Brazil likely comes to mind, and the story of how my ancestors found themselves in the exuberant countryside in a little known province in the eastern seaboard has to do with the Brazilian coffee boom. The first seedlings had been brought from Guiana into the country in 1793, and soon coffee took over vast expanses of farmland along valleys in the interior of Rio de Janeiro, São Paulo and Minas Gerais, transforming villages and towns that had been struggling and where there was still a significant number of enslaved people to work in the fields. At that time, the Atlantic slave trade had ceased, at least officially, but Abolition in Brazil would not happen until 1888.
Espírito Santo was not experiencing this downturn in the same manner because of its own underdevelopment, there were not many farms in the interior parts of the province and most of the land had not been yet explored. This was by design, to serve a purpose that had now expired. Due to its strategic position and topography, it created a natural barrier that inhibited gold and gemstone contraband from the sprawling Minas Gerais province to the West during the gold rush era. Espírito Santo’s interior is noted as forbidden lands in 17th and 18th century maps, and by royal decree it was stipulated that those portions of lands should remain unoccupied by settlers and no roads could be opened crossing the province to connect the mines to the seashore.
To enforce that with some visual aids, maps had illustrations depicting indigenous men with spears, feathered headpieces, and the botoques, more accurately named tametaras or tembetás that they wore on their lower lips, ears and nose. The natives received the generic denomination of Botocudos, even though they comprised very diverse groups of Gê origin, sharing and often warring for territory against Tupiniquim tribes. These indigenous groups bravely resisted occupation of their ancestral lands for over three centuries since the first Europeans arrived in 1500, having endured violence from the Portuguese colonizers, and the deadly diseases they brought. The native people had been pushed away from the coast to accommodate the urban settlers during the colonial era, but they were left somewhat alone in the interior mountains and valleys for the next couple of centuries, acting as an extra measure of discouragement for anyone trying to smuggle mineral riches through Espírito Santo. However, when mining in Minas Gerais dwindled and Brazil turned to other exports, the mountains would no longer offer them seclusion.
In the 1820s the gold and gemstone mines were all but exhausted, Brazil had just become independent from Portugal, and it started to look for new commercial partners. In the coming years, old fields that were once pasture, cassava or sugarcane crops now showed neat rows and terraces where the green bushes grew with its colorful coffee berries. Espírito Santo’s mountains, part of the Atlantic Forest biodome, offered the perfect weather and soil conditions, and the province’s president decided it was time to develop the countryside by bringing immigrants as part of an incentivized program. They would receive a plot of land and seeds. Their transportation expenses since the origin, as well as food and other necessities, were to be repaid to the Brazilian government within four years. He requested that some of the incoming German immigrants headed to Rio Grande do Sul would instead be redirected to the mouth of the Jucu River, where they would be transferred to the capital city of Vitória until their paperwork and provisions were ready. Hence, my ancestors were moved to two other boats, the Eolo and the Urania, smaller and better for sailing closer to the coast. I do not know how much my ancestors understood of what was happening. Their fellow countrymen would proceed on their journey to Rio Grande do Sul, they stayed behind. This process took a couple of months longer than expected, but finally, in March 1847, still during the hottest season of the year, the group of 167 people divided among 39 families was on their way up the slopes.
The men went first, opening the path through the creeks and the tangle of woods and vines of the still pristine forest. They were accompanied by local guides from the provincial military, dealing with the terrain, mosquitoes and the justified outrage from the increasingly displaced native people. Adapting to the diet was another issue. Europeans were not used to eating cassava flour, the starchy staple from a root vegetable that grows in South America. The women and children joined them once the trails were passable.
The Schneider immigrants in my family were Peter Joseph, my 4th great-grandfather, a twice-widowed laborer born in Neunkirchen, Saarland. He arrived in Brazil aged 65 and lived in his new home for another twenty years. He left one married daughter in Germany, traveling with the single children: Nikolaus (26), Joseph (22), Christine (28) and Barbara (33).
My other branch was the Stein family. Thomas Stein was born in Hundheim, Rhineland-Palatinate, and was married to Margaretha Anton from the same town. They immigrated with their children Nikolaus (15), Marie Anne (12), and Jakob (9). Marie Anne Stein and Nikolaus Schneider were neighbors in the new colony, and married in the Santa Isabel Parish on January 16, 1851. They had a brood of 13 children, among them my second great-grandfather Bernardo Schneider, born in 1859. One of Nikolaus and Marie Anne’s daughters married a man from Rio Grande do Sul, where the majority of the German immigrants had settled, likely the son of a family they knew from their old home.
The Catholics, among them both of my family branches, found support in the nearby village of Viana, where a number of Azorean families had settled a couple of decades before. The Lutheran reverend arrived later to tend to his flock. Looking at Santa Isabel church books, I took note of the numerous marriages among the families including a few interfaith unions, others venturing out and taking Brazilian spouses as the years went by. Census and records illustrate how my two families were faring five years after their arrival.
Entries in the 1851 Santa Isabel Census showing Peter Joseph (Jose) Schneider living with sons Joseph and Nikolaus, married to Marie Anne Stein. They had 3,000 coffee plants and one horse. On the next lot lived Thomas Stein and Margaretha Anton with sons Nikolaus, married to Marie Anne Marx, and Jakob. They owned 2,000 coffee plants and no farm animals.
More than twenty years would pass until another wave of Germanic immigrants arrived in Espírito Santo, however not from the same region. The newcomers came from the Prussian Province of Pomerania, most of it situated in modern-day Poland facing the Baltic Sea. They settled in the Santa Leopoldina Parish area, some 50 miles North. Santa Isabel would, however, receive a large influx of Italian immigrants later in the century.
Province of Espírito Santo in 1861 showing the Santa Isabel colony. Santa Isabel – 1875
The elders in my family were not able to vote, as a matter of fact they passed away before a time when they would be allowed to, by law. I did not find naturalization records for any of them, except for one of Marie Anne Stein’s brothers, who was involved in local politics. My 97-year-old grandmother remembers her grandfather Bernardo Schneider, who spoke with a slight German accent despite being Brazilian-born. He moved away from Santa Isabel and was a successful entrepreneur in Vitória, the owner of a general goods store. He married my 2nd great-grandmother Maria Luiza Furtado de Oliveira in 1889. Her roots in Espírito Santo stretch back to the late 1600s. The house where they lived in my hometown of Vila Velha, across a narrow bay from Vitória, still stands, the street now named for Bernardo. The high school across from the old home is named for their son Godofredo, my paternal grandmother’s father who died a few months shy of my birth, in 1971. My grandmother still lives down the alley that starts at the high school gate. Apart for a few years spent out of town due to my grandfather’s employment, she has lived there her whole life.
That place is my family’s, my own. I am the immigrant now, though I cannot say I feel out of place where I am. Rather, I am forever divided, as I am sure the Schneiders, Steins and many others probably felt. I am glad they took the risk. I hope they thought their journey was worthwhile, and that they were where they were supposed to be.
After my grandmother Julia Wagner de Barros Faria died in 2006, her belongings were gathered by my aunt and godmother Aldinha, the youngest child and a loving caregiver. Little did we know that my aunt would herself depart prematurely in 2018. Her bedroom is still kept the way it was the last night she spent there. It took me a bit to muster the courage to ask my grieving cousins, two of Aldinha’s daughters, to let me see what was inside the boxes. They were happy to oblige. So, during one of my travels to Brazil last year, we got together to look at snapshots of my grandparents’ life.
None of us had many recollections of our maternal grandfather José Nunes Faria (the grandson of my subject in last week’s post). He passed away when I was six; one of my cousins was three and the other was born after his death, although his memory was, and still is, very present. All of us grew up very close to our grandmother, who had a large family, as did grandpa. Our hometown was not theirs, though: my grandfather hailed from the state of Minas Gerais, whereas grandma was from a town in the northern part of Rio de Janeiro. Grandpa José’s work brought the family to where I, and my cousins, were born. Over the years, we got to meet many of each side’s relatives, but we never had a big family reunion with everybody. Not that we were isolated, our local group by itself was a large one, but most of my great-uncles and great-aunts, and their families, lived far. In grandma’s boxes, I found photos of parties where people came from other states, but those had happened decades prior. Many of those in the pictures were already gone by the time I was a small child, including all of my grandmother’s siblings.
On my grandfather’s side, I remember traveling to meet two of his youngest sisters, Djanira, nicknamed Deja, and Isaura. My mother and grandmother always spoke fondly of them. Even if they went years without seeing each other, their names were always mentioned, and we knew what was going on with the Minas relatives. Deja died in 1986. She was the family historian and left a treasure trove of notes, the foundation for my research on that side of the tree. I owe so much to her. Isaura passed away much later, four years before my grandmother, and thus the book was closed on a whole generation of the Barros and Faria families. The mementos I found among my grandmother’s belongings offered me a glimpse of their lives decades before I came around. The picture above caught my eye and my heart immediately.
On the back, I saw my grandmother’s handwriting. There is no date, but it reads “On a stroll, with the Church of Floresta in the background, where the famed choir is comprised of, and directed by the Faria family”. It wasn’t difficult to find the church, Our Lady of Sorrows, located in the Floresta neighborhood in Belo Horizonte. The building was still in construction when the family moved there from the countryside town of Pirapora, in the western portion of the state, and became involved in this fledgling parish doing what they knew best: making music, which is a topic for a future post. The church was officially inaugurated in 1940, the year my great-grandfather Christóvam died.
I love this picture because the people look so carefree. My grandfather, married to a talented seamstress, always very dapper. His face cannot be seen, and he was not one to “say cheese” anyway, but I like to think he had a slight grin under the shade of the brim. My grandmother, linking arms with Isaura, was laughing, something she did often. I still see that smile when I think of her. I noticed Deja was looking up and beaming, her gaze towards someone she knew.
When I researched the church, I saw it is located on Silva Jardim Street. I had seen that name before, it was on my great-grandfather’s death record. It turns out, the family lived down the street from their church, and the house is still there, in need of care and repairs, but still conserves its lines, embellishments and character as the city grew and modernized around it. The street is still paved with the original cobblestones. The local architectural commission has the house listed on its website, where I found current pictures of the exterior, and part of the original blueprint from 1931. I hope the goal is to preserve this historical building.
I wish I could zoom out and see who was at the window, smiling back at Deja from inside the family home. Maybe my great-grandmother? I wish I could overhear their conversation, it looks like they were having a good time, or maybe trying to lighten up after a difficult period if this was taken not too long after Christóvam passed. It could be a well-deserved respite for my great-aunts, who cared for their father alongside great-grandma Beralda during his illness. I will never know, but I wish I could thank the photographer, likely my great-uncle Alysson, known for this love of cameras and all things audiovisual, a passion he turned into a successful career, deserving of a blog post of its own. He captured a precious fleeting moment, the shutter clicked at just the right time to preserve the happiness and camaraderie of my grandparents with the sisters. Whatever the conversation was, I can feel their joy.
Pará de Minas, Brazil – 1897 – José Nunes de Carvalho front, right
To kick off the 52 Ancestors in 52 Weeks challenge, I chose my second great-grandfather, José Nunes de Carvalho. I would love to have met so many of my ancestors, in my years researching my family’s history I have found people who have lived interesting lives, but the picture above shows an ancestor that was sitting in the courthouse after being absolved from sedition charges, brought forth due to his political opposition to the then-ruling party in his small hometown of Pitangui, in rural Minas Gerais. My great-grandfather Christóvam de Faria, married to José’s daughter Beralda, was the leader of the town council, and was deposed by his own father-in-law. He was reinstated shortly after, but his political party lost the following elections and was weakened for a long time after. Politics and its dynamics interest me greatly, specially in times of deep divison such as these we live in. Maybe José would have a thing or two to say about it.
How they got to that situation is something I would like to find out. Local history books tell of the deep-rooted political rivalry that spanned decades before the events that unfolded in 1896 and 1897. My great-grandparents were married sometime in late 1886, certainly not without the blessing of the bride’s father. It could be that despite being on opposite sides, the families had a cordial relationship. Maybe there was some older blood relation that I have not yet discovered; this side of the family tree has been hard to research due to a fire that destroyed the local church and its precious records in 1914. Or, it this could be a case of young love, thankfully not Shakespearean and tragic, but one that successfully overcame family strife. I can only speculate.
Beralda was born out of wedlock, received her mother’s name, and was a couple of decades younger than her older half-siblings. There is evidence that she was not the only child he had outside his marriage. I found out he had a son who was a priest, and he may be a full brother of my great-grandmother’s. I have found strong evidence that there was at least one more brother in the same situation due to the custom of having a grandparent be the godparent of one’s firstborn. One of my great-grandmother’s brothers also had the elder Beralda hold his first child at the baptismal font. I believe he, too, was a full sibling.
Nevertheless, it appears Major Nunes’s children were all brought up close together, raised as siblings along with the ones he had with his wife, which survived him by more than a decade. This was not totally uncommon at that time in such a strongly patriarchal society, though it surely raised eyebrows and had people gossiping, as this was also a very devoutly Catholic people. The family origin of my second great-grandmother and the nature of her relationship with José, that evidently lasted for a long time, is another mystery I am still working to clarify. In May 2021, I traveled to Pitangui for the first time, and I was able to look at documents in the town’s historical archives. I found nothing about her, but plenty about the Nunes family, including José’s parents’ last wills and probate records. He received a significant inheritance when his father, a military officer dead in 1846, seven years after the passing of his mother, the daughter of a French physician. None of it lasted until the time of José’s own death.
The most poignant obituary I found was written by someone who knew him well and admired him. For a while I thought my great-grandfather, his son-in-law, known for his great way with words, was the ghostwriter. Later, I found out this newspaper belonged to one of his cousins, from the same family that was in a political feud with the Nunes clan. It shows reverence, and tells us of an eventful life, deeply intertwined with politics and music. He was known in town by both is military patent, and by his title of Maestro, being the regent of the oldest band in town, founded by his namesake father, that performed in both civic and religious services. Going through one of my great-aunt’s notebooks where she carefully took down names and dates until her passing in 1986, I found an old, damaged portrait of his, that I estimate dates from the 1870s or 1880s. It is now taped to a page, but judging by its edges, I believe it used to be displayed in a frame. It is captioned Master of Music Zé Nunes – Father.
Below is a free translation of the obituary, published by O Pharol, a newspaper from Juiz de Fora, Minas Gerais, on December 10th, 1902:
” The old city of Pitanguy lost, days ago, one of its veterans with the passing of the septuagenarian José Nunes de Carvalho, whose last years were bitterly marked by blindness and other tribulations.
A fierce spirit, cultivated by reading Latin classics, José leaves in the hands of local friends and published in newspapers many satirical verses, powerful opinion pieces, and lyrical poetry that he, a consummate virtuoso in both the viola and the cello, would turn into music, having formed with his nephews, nieces and children an excellent orchestra.
[…] A lawyer, José Nunes gathered a small fortune working in Pitangui and in nearby counties, but his Bohemian and overly generous spirit would not allow for him to have savings. However much he earned, he would spend, always lending a hand to those he cared about.
He was affiliated with the Liberal Party, leaving in 1888 when the first Republican clubs started to gather. One such club, named Aristides Lobo, met in his house.
[…] His last musical works, among many that he composed throughout his life, including religious pieces, were a song for the theatrical drama Dolores, as well as a ditty named The Sexton.
He leaves a widow, sons and daughters, as well as many grand- and great-grandchildren.
To his son-in-law, our friend and fellow journalist Christóvam de Faria, and his virtuous wife, our condolences. The old Major’s funeral was very busy with the presence of most people in town.
Terra tibi sit levis.“
My maternal grandfather was born six weeks before his grandfather died. He was named José Nunes Faria.
