Acolhida no céu, conforme a sua fé. Descanse em paz, vó. Obrigada por cada dia, por cada ensinamento, pela sua presença, carinho e amor.
A antiga postagem agora vira uma eulogia.
Até um dia
Category: Brasil Linha Paterna
Week 16: Should have been a movie
A sad movie, as are many stories of people who die for their ideals. Here is the story of my Xavier de Carvalho branch, and the tragic end of my 1st cousin 5 times removed, José Peregrino Xavier de Carvalho, who was executed in the Pernambucan Revolt of 1817. His father, Augusto Xavier de Carvalho, and his uncle José Maria Xavier de Carvalho – my 4th great-grandfather, were also arrested for their involvement in it.
José Peregrino joined the military at an early age. His father requested a special dispensation, so he could join a military school, ”assentando praça com pão e soldo”, in 1804. He would be a mere six years old. According to Abilio Bandeira (see below), he was born on 18 Aug 1798 to the Portugal native Augusto Xavier de Carvalho, and his wife Jacintha de Mello Muniz.
The Pernambucan Revolt was a Brazilian nativist movement against the Portuguese crown’s absolutism, based on French Revolution ideals. The Portuguese court had moved to Brazil evading the Napoleonic troops in 1808, and the prosperous Brazilian Northeast, still producing plenty of sugar, was largely responsible for supporting its costly maintenance. The revolt had ample support among the military, whose wages were delayed due to the court’s high expenses, and the clergy. This movement was a precursor and gave momentum to what would come to pass in 1822 when Brazil broke its colonial ties with the metropolis. During the Pernambucan Revolt, the first proclamations of Brazilian independence from Portugal happened. In my family’s hometown of Mamanguape, this was carried out by my fourth great-grandfather.
The movement had the support of the United States and from officers from the disbanded troops who served under Napoleon Bonaparte, that even had a plan to set him free from the island of Saint Helena, to take him to Pernambuco, and ultimately to New Orleans. The stuff of movies! Much of the history of this movement, including the involvement of the Xavier de Carvalho men, is found in the book O Brazil Heroico em 1817, by Alipio Bandeira.
My 4th great-grandfather proclaimed the independence of his town, along with the local priest. His brother Augusto was also enthusiastic about the independence, as was José Peregrino, who traveled to the neighboring province of Rio Grande do Norte to bring news that Brazil was severing ties with Portugal. During his absence, troops loyal to the crown arrived to Mamanguape, making arrests and looking for the conspirators.
The account of Augusto’s attempt to dissuade José Peregrino are dramatic:
Once it became clear that the locals would not prevail and the arrests started, Augusto and José Maria certainly worried about not only their fate, but José Peregrino, who was a soldier and would face harsher consequences, as Alipio Bandeira writes.
The hand of the crown, by the authority of the Count of Arcos (Marcos de Noronha e Brito), was swift, punishing the young officers who committed crime de lesa-majestade, a direct attempt against the crown. José Peregrino, arrested and sent to Fort Cabedello in Recife, Pernambuco, was executed on 21 Aug 1817, along with other members of the military. His body was quartered, his severed head and hands sent back to this home province of Paraíba, displayed at the steps of the Our Lady of Lourdes Church.
Augusto and José Maria Xavier de Carvalho were sent to Salvador, Bahia, where they awaited their trial. Both brothers had their assets seized. A letter by my fourth great-grandmother, Antônia Maria de Padilha, José Maria’s wife, exists in the National Archives, though I have not yet been able to obtain a copy. It makes a plea for her husband’s return, noting she was left in their sugarcane farm with five young daughters, one of them being my third great-grandmother, Francisca de Paula de Vasconcellos e Carvalho, born around November 1815, still a toddler when her father was arrested. She would not meet him again until she was around seven.
Both José Maria and Augusto went through lengthy trials, and were eventually acquitted after four years in prison. Augusto Xavier de Carvalho went on to serve in public office, including member of the national assembly to draft the first constitution of Brazil as a free country, no longer a Portuguese colony. He cosponsored the freedom of the press bill. It is not known where and when he died.
José Maria returned to his home and due to the poor state of the Mamanguape church books I could not establish when he died, either. He returned not too long before, finally, Brazil became independent. Their lives were already changed, in great part, for they had been important agents on the local level to raise a movement that would cost lives, including his nephew’s, but it would propel the country towards the future. This ancestry line is interesting because it is widely mentioned in history books, and primary documents have survived in the Tombo Tower Archives in Portugal, enough to create a rich portrait of the lives of the Xavier de Carvalho family.
On a side note, I have two other ancestors who were imprisoned during the Pernambucan Revolt, for entirely different reasons, but this is a subject for another post, and their eventful lives, too, would make an interesting movie.
Week 15: Solitude
There is one common thread that weaves through any immigration story, and that is solitude, and it does not matter whether you are the one who departed, or if you are the one that stayed behind, there is always that void space alongside you.
This week’s post is about two of my third great-grandparents, Giovanni Cupolillo and Maria Rosaria Orlando, and their sons who left Italy for Brazil. My Cupolillo branch is well explored on a previous post (in Portuguese), and it is a family who has long roots tied to the city of Paola in Calabria. They had seven sons, one of whom died as a child. All others emigrated and established themselves in Rio de Janeiro; one of them may have returned to Italy, I could not track him back as we still do not have the 1910-1920 civil registry records publicly released yet. Even if Giambattista came back, Giovanni and Maria Rosaria went from having a full home to a much quieter one with five sons overseas, and they probably never met the majority of their grandchildren.
They certainly met my great-grandmother Norina because she was born in Paola, moving as an infant with her mother to Brazil to be reunited with her father. The family returned to Italy after the birth of the second child, my second great-uncle Alfredo, in Rio in 1905; the youngest child, Waldemira – registered as Baldimira – was born in 1907 in Paola. According to Uncle Alfredo’s memories, they lived in Italy for eight years, so the return to Brazil would have been around 1913. I do not know exactly when their grandfather Giovanni died, but I can place the date between 1910 and 1914, so not too long before or after Nicola and the family returned to Brazil, leaving Maria Rosaria alone, or possibly with Giambattista.
Maria Rosaria was not born in the same place as her husband, though her hometown was a quick jump away down the train tracks. She hailed from San Lucido, a village that today has just over 6,000 inhabitants and faces the expanse of the Tyrrhenian Sea. Researching further back on Maria Rosaria’s line I discovered her ancestors were from Paola, and given the lack of post-1910 records I cannot tell how long she lived, where she spent her remaining years, but I relate to her as someone who lives far from a big part of the family. Even harder for her, with no fast or reliable means of communication, I wonder how she kept in touch with the sons in Brazil. Unfortunately, I don’t have any documents, no pictures, no letters exchanged between them.
Life in Calabria at that time was difficult, the circumstances of my family members who emigrated were hard, the urge to find a better life somewhere was imperative. Giovanni and Maria Rosaria saw them pack and leave, one by one, knowing that their return would be unlikely. In 1902, eldest son Fedele died in Brazil, and a few weeks later Nicola went to work with their bothers in Rio as they had a burgeoning newspaper distribution business and were now one man short. I hope eventually the sons were able to send back some good news of their professional success, and financial support to help the parents in their old years. Giovanni had been a contadino his whole life, he worked in the fields, there was no retirement, no income after you stopped.
Not wanting to see your children live a life of hardship and uncertainty is what gives a parent the strength to support a decision to emigrate. I thank Giovanni and Maria Rosaria for that, for letting their boys go. I hope they found friends and relatives who helped them when they needed it, and I hope someday I can find out where they were laid to rest, make the way back as a way to say their great-great-great grandchildren are alright, that their sacrifice was worthwhile.
Week 13: Light a candle
This will be my first 52 Ancestors entry featuring deeper ancestry, one from my maternal side, and one from the paternal. Both of them are from the 17th Century, therefore I cannot flesh out any of their story with anecdotes. All I have is what the documents brought me, and in both cases their deaths were in very unfortunate circumstances, hence my choice to bring those to this week’s theme.
Matheus Coelho was my 9th great-grandfather. He is my brick wall in the Travassos family, one of three Azorean branches I have. Alas, Matheus did not use the name and I can only infer his father or mother had it, so did his children. It was not uncommon for surnames to skip one or two generations My line to him is through my great-grandmother Noêmia Travassos Serrano (1902-1989), Elisa Dulce Peres Campello Travassos (1859-1948), Vitorino de Souza Travassos Jr. (1827-1871), Vitorino de Souza Travassos, born in Rosto do Cão in the São Miguel Island, died in Recife, Brasil (1800-1865), Francisco de Souza Travassos (1765-1826), João de Souza Travassos (1742-1791), Bartolomeu Travassos (1700-1786), Francisco Travassos, born in Santo-Antônio-além-Capelas on 4 April 1666, and died in São Roque do Rosto do Cão sometime before June 1740. Bartolomeu was one of the children of Matheus Coelho and Maria Ledo.
Matheus was a widower when he was found dead on 6 Jan 1705 outside Capelas, in São Miguel. I am not certain exactly when wife Maria Ledo died, but she was already gone when daughter Margarida Travassos married Miguel Martins on 13 Oct 1685. This couple also has descendants in Brazil. According to the burial record written by the priest, Matheus was living as a beggar and was seen lying on a roadside in the days before he was pronounced dead. Passersby did not notice whether he was alive or not, which is heartbreaking. He was buried on the São João da Apresentação church courtyard, with the costs covered by funds sent by son-in-law Miguel Martins that lived on the other side of the island. Miguel also paid for six Masses to be said in Matheus’s memory. It appears that none of the children were still living in Capelas when he passed away.
My second ancestor this week also had an unusually unfortunate end. His name was Father Antônio Barreira Gonçalves. Alas, he was a priest, and my 8th great-grandfather. He had at least two children by different women. My ancestor through this line is Catarina Barreira, a child born around 1670 with Ana Vieira, a single woman from the village of Salgueiros in Vieira do Minho. Catarina married Francisco Ribeiro on 25 Jan 1688. The marriage entry lists her as a child born out of wedlock whose father, already deceased, had been the clergyman.
My line to the priest runs through my Nunes family: José Nunes Faria (1902-1978), Beralda Nunes (1872-1951), José Nunes de Carvalho (1822-1902), Mariana Lathaliza França (abt. 1800-1839), Mariana Josefa Ribeiro de Carvalho (1765-1841), her father, Portuguese cavalryman Simeão Ribeiro de Carvalho, born in Vieira do Minho on 1720, died in Minas Gerais in 1803, Manoel Ribeiro de Carvalho (1692-1766), son of Catarina Barreira and Francisco Ribeiro.
Death or Burial books are typically the hardest to find, and to read. They were the last ones to become mandatory after the Rituale Romanum instituted by Pope Paul V in 1614. Father Antônio Barreira died by stab wounds produced by a knife on 18 Aug 1669 in his parish of São Paio located in Vilar Chão.
Given that these records are so old, it is very unlikely I will ever find out what happened. I would like to locate the de genere et moribus diligence process that preceded Antônio Barreira’s ordination, hopefully add a bit more to his history and find out who were his parents and where they were from. I can’t be certain, but can’t stop speculating either, whether the priest’s murder had anything to do with his affairs with single women in his parish.
Regarding Matheus Coelho, it intrigues me that I cannot place him among the well-documented Travassos family of São Miguel. There are still baptism and marriage books I can search to find more information on him and his wife, Maria Ledo. If I can make the jump and connect him, I may be able to trace the family all the way back to continental Portugal. This is a big goal for me.
Until further discoveries, I leave these notes about two ancestors who died tragically, and I light a (virtual) candle in their memory.
Week 12: Membership
João Bastos Bernardo Vieira was my paternal grandfather’s father, from whom I got the two family names I have on my birth certificate: Bastos and Vieira. Bernardo is an interesting surname, as it is most commonly seen in Brazil as a patronymic, Bernardes.
I heard a great deal about Vovô João when growing up. He died ten years before I was born, but his memory and stories about him were always a part of family conversation. He was known foremost for his writing as a published poet and a newspaper critic, but was able to learn more about him as a citizen and a member of his community through his affiliation to different organizations, thanks to digitized newspaper archives. Unfortunately, the largest newspaper in Vitória, A Gazeta, founded in 1928, does not have its archives online, but other news outlets do. Vovô was a literary critic for A Gazeta until his death. This news organization, founded in 1928, still exists, though it no longer has a print edition.
One interesting finding I made while going through his papers that a cousin keeps shows he was an honorary member under number 5 with Rio Branco Atlético Clube, a soccer team founded in 1908. The team built its second stadium in 1934, around the time I believe this identification card was issued, judging by his looks on the picture.
The collection of news clippings I have about him show his involvement in several other organizations. He started as a writer with a local newspaper, as he also worked as a school teacher. He worked for several news outlets, and in 1933 was a founding member of the Associação Espírito-Santense de Imprensa, the state press association. There he is, standing up wearing a dark suit right in the center of the picture.
Vovô João was also involved in politics, and was elected state representative in 1936. He served as Secretary of Education but never quit publishing his poems and literary critic column on A Gazeta, until his death in 1962 following a stroke that happened while on a hunting trip with friends.
Week 11: Lucky
In loving memory of Maria Helena Schneider Bastos Vieira
(21 May 1925 – 1 Jun 2023)
Originally published 15 Mar 2023.
Bingo!
My maternal grandmother Maria Helena ´is typically the one to shout it out first. Now aged 97, she has not been attending any social functions anymore, but she used to be active in many organizations such as my hometown’s Lions Club and several church groups, one of which promotes a great yearly bazaar where expertly crocheted doilies and table runners are sold, all proceeds to help people in need in the local community.
Grandma has been an organizer in several of these initiatives, and I grew up watching her embroider and crochet beautiful pieces. She taught me to make a basic chain stitch, but I sorely lack any skills for needlepoint work. She used to have a closet where she would collect, organize and price tag the handiwork of several of her group’s volunteers, each piece carefully ironed and starched, so they would make a good display at the bazaar. Not many went unsold, and those leftovers she would buy herself. They were highly coveted as Christmas presents for me and others in the family, and they are today treasured items in my home. You can never have enough kitchen towels with crocheted borders!
The house where she lives also has a couple of other nooks where other interesting items are stored: the many prizes she won on raffles and bingo games throughout her life. Silverware, porcelain tea sets, serving trays and dining table accents, she won several sets of housewares, to the point that some of her friends would playfully “withdraw” from the game whenever she went in. No cheating, no hijinks, Grandma is just very lucky. I don’t know if she has ever played the lottery, but since she is no millionaire, I would assume she hasn’t. There’s still time!
Grandma, or Vovó Lena as we call her, was born in Vitória on 21 May 1925, the firstborn child of Godofredo Schneider and Noêmia Travassos Serrano. At that time, her father was a public defender in Benevente, modern-day Anchieta, Esp´írito Santo, but the children were born in the state capital. In 1929, the family would move to Vila Velha, to be near Godofredo’s parents, on the place that is dearest to me, Inhoá, named for the rock upon which my father’s family home was built and where they have lived for over a century, starting with Bernardo Schneider and Maria Luiza Furtado (Aiquinha), my grandmother’s paternal grandparents.
My grandparents Maria Helena and Rinaldo got married on 14 Dec 1946, my father Rinaldo arrived nine months later, followed by my late uncle Orlando, who was my godfather, in 1949. My grandfather worked at a bank and the family moved to Santa Tereza, in my home state, then to Jaboticabal in São Paulo, where my aunt Ligia was born, the third child. They would be back to Vila Velha when grandma was expecting my youngest uncle, João. The house where she still lives was under construction, finished sometime around 1956, and she never moved again.
Vovó was a very active woman, intellectually and physically, and even as an almost-centenarian she still remembers entire poems, songs, historical facts and general trivia. She used to swim in the ocean and go horseback riding, she could write beautifully, speak eloquently in public, she could sew, she learned Orpheonic singing in school and up until not too long ago could hit impressive notes.
As another way to keep her mind sharp, she loved making lists of all kinds. Next to the recliner in front of the TV, where she also did her needlework, there was a small notepad. In my young years, spending a lot of time with her in that now empty den (she can’t use stairs anymore), she would have her aha moments and ask “let’s remember surnames that are also plant names”, or animal names, or songs named after women. Anything would do, she would jot down anything we came up with, the lists would go on for months. This is all from a pre-Google era, and after the world became a big digital beehive we still could not, or should not, pull out the cell phone to cheat. The same goes for anytime she is trying to remember anything, a movie or song title. The only search engine allowed is your brain, and she would likely beat you to it.
My grandparents’ house was my playground as a kid. The house sits on a pristine plot with native woods and a diverse fauna. I used to spend weekends there on sleepovers, hang out with her, go on walks after dinner to help with digestion as she would say, and on Sunday we would attend Mass together. Sometimes, during the rainy season when we have spectacular thunderstorms, the power would go out. Grandma would light a candle, and we would talk as the wind blew and made the wooden shutters moan and creak. I was a scared kid, but she would let me sleep either next to her, or in the bedroom right across the hallway, both of our doors open.
She still spends her nights in that same room. Her brain is a bit foggy these days, wandering in and out of the ten decades that span her life, remembering names, dates and people involved in events at any point in that lengthy timeline like they were just happened. Sometimes she mistakes a TV presenter from her favorite Catholic channel for someone she knows and strikes a conversation. It’s all good, she feels connected and strong in her faith, that’s what matters. Grandma is a religious woman and used to be very active in her parish until mobility became limited, keeping her from attending in-person services. She lives her faith in the ways that truly matter: she has helped countless people, she taught us not to judge others and to be purposeful and kind in our words and actions.
Her parish is Nossa Senhora do Rosário, the third oldest in the country, facing the small bay where the Portuguese settlers arrived to colonize the region in 1535. For a while she attended Mass at the little Navy School chapel next to her house, she was friends with the chaplain and with a good reason. His services were never dull, he was a funny man and celebrated two of my uncles’ weddings. We called him Padre Herbert, he passed away in 1994, shortly after receiving the honorific title of Monsignor Herbert Burns.
Even though she has lived almost her entire life in the same place, my grandmother got to travel many times. In the 1960s, when she and my grandpa were members of Lions Club, they traveled to events on the regional and national level. There is a shelving niche in her house displaying the many miniature plates and other souvenirs they brought from those trips. Every year, their local club would set up a stand selling refreshments as a fundraiser during Festa da Penha, a traditional religious festival honoring the patron saint of my home state, on the foothill of where there is a convent dedicated to Nossa Senhora da Penha, or Our Lady of the Rock on a free translation.
The festival happens, you guessed it, right where Grandma lives, the same area where we all revolve around. The local Lions Club had a food stand, and there she sold her famous hot dogs made with sliced franks cooked in a tomato and ground beef sauce, served on a bun. I know chopping up a hot dog sounds horrific to an American, but come to think of it, the whole thing is not too far from a chili dog. And yes, it was delicious and sold well. I was in charge of picking up the soda in the chest cooler and bringing it to the customers to help wash down the food.
Later in life, she traveled by herself, my grandfather was more of a homebody. Sometimes her brother, my great-uncle José Luiz and his wife Maria Carmen would accompany her. Grandma also came to the US a few times to be with my Aunt Ligia during the years she lived here from 1974 to about 1982. Grandma was present when both my cousins were born in Buffalo, NY and faced the weather with aplomb, for someone who tends to be cold at the slightest drop of temperature when the South winds turn in Vila Velha.
She was also a very important presence and part of the support team when my parents got divorced, also in the early 1980s, and throughout the following decades, until my siblings and I were on our own. Grandma drove a Fusca, as we call the VW Beetle, and that car took us everywhere. There were actually more than one, same model, same color. I do not know how many they actually were. She would come over and whisk me away to go to her place, for an ice cream treat, or for shopping trips at the co-op affiliated with the bank Grandpa worked for. At the time we did not have the newer bridge that goes from Vila Velha to Vitória, we had to go around the longer way, and that was a journey typically planned days in advance. The same trip today takes 20 minutes, and has none of the excitement anymore.
I have a lifetime of memories to share about my grandmother. As it was with the post about my mother, it feels strange to write about a living person. I am not eulogizing her, I just want to have some of my impressions out there, so a family history researcher coming from somewhere further down the space-time continuum can find her, find Inhoá, and by extension find all of us.
There is another way in which she is very lucky, and it must be shared: She had all of her three siblings up until she was 95 years old, when one of her sisters, great-aunt Carmita, born one year to the day after Grandma, passed away in 2021. José Luiz and Laurita are still around and in fairly good health. In keeping with the week’s theme, I should say we are the lucky ones to have them around for so long. How fortunate am I to have enjoyed her in my life for more than a century and counting? It is also monumental just to realize she is almost double my age. Hard to fathom, when I think about the span of my own lifetime, to think how much more she has seen, felt, lived.
Grandma always says we do not lose anything we age, we only accumulate all the experiences. There is no dismay in thinking that I will be 51 in a few weeks. If I can sail through the second half of my century with just a fraction of her wit, her memory and vitality, I can count myself as a very lucky person, though I hardly ever win any material prizes of any sort. I am, as we call it in Brazil, a “pé frio”, literally a cold foot, not very lucky on games or drawings. If you ever see me at the bingo, you do not need to do like Grandma’s friends. Pull up a chair, grab your card, you may have a shot at winning.
Week 10: Translation
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.
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.
Week 8: I can identify
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.
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.
Week 6: Social media
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.
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:
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.
It is not all about cats. Babies are a hit, too. Here’s my grandmother, Maria Helena, probably past her nap time.
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.
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:
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.
See you next week! 😊
Week 5: Oops
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.
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.
