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I am looking for help with the baptismal latin abbreviations in the record of Antonino Matteo Salvatore Oliveri (Church of Sant'Ippolito al Capo, Palermo 1820).
So far my own transcription looks something like this:
219
Anno D(omi)ni 1820
Die decimasexta Maii
Rev(erendus) Sac(erdos) D(on) Natalii (Natale?) Barracco
… Cond: bapt[izatus] Inf[ans] hodie na-
tum ex Josepho Oliveri et Au-
gustina Cassetta jug(alium?) … …
c: n: Antoninus, Mattheus, et (?)
Salvator(is) PP [patrini] Mattheus …
et Anna Ta..mmina
Here is the original record:
and here is another page with better visual clarity of the priest's name:
The godmother's surname looks clearly like "Tarummina". That could be a variant of the name Taormina, if the 'o' and 'r' were transposed, the 'm' doubled, and the 'o' swapped for a Sicilian 'u'.
Where I concentrate my research in Agrigento province, the name was spelled Taormina and Tavormina, with the latter form eventually winning out. In Palermo, Taormina currently predominates. However, if you do a search for similar names among the records indexed on FS, you'll find "Trummina," "Taurumina, "etc. I don't think all these variants were the result of transcription errors by the indexers.
I've actually been there. Took the train from Messina to the town below Taormina and then a bus up to the town. The bus route is a single winding lane in each direction. It has blind curve after blind curve and the driver has to honk his horn before every curve, as he needs to swing into the lane of the vehicles coming down in order to proceed up to the town of Taormina
I've been to Taormina, too, as I'm sure a number of other people here have, since it's a popular tourist attraction. It's well worth the trip. I have a little painting my GGF did of Taormina in the 1950s; his hometown was 30 km north.
The dialects of modern Italian all have their roots in the spoken form of Latin (Vulgar Latin), in use throughout the Roman Empire. Vulgar Latin had, no doubt, its own local peculiarities before the fall of the Empire. The political instability that followed Roman rule kept Italy from re-uniting as ...
