declare in presence of 2 testimonies?

[denman922]

I recieved a state of family doc. My GGGF and GGGM had thier first child after being married only 4 mos. On the doc is written:



because Georg Jakob Metz is married with the childs mother only since
february 23 1886, Metz declares in presence of 2 testimonies to be the
childs father.
( child was born in June of the same year)

what does that mean, what did he have to do to prove he was the father?

[Poipuo4]

I think this was a mistranslation and they meant in front of two witnesses. I don't know this for a fact, so hopefully someone with more knowledge will jump in, but I think that he just needed two people as witnesses to his solemn oath that he was the father of the child in question. There was probably a presumption that if you were married to each other 9 months before the birth, you were the father.

[denman922]

I have recieved a couple of certificate di stato di Familglia originario's and I found several ancestor's at the LDS site. on the certificates and at the LDS site, I notice that between 1850 and 1890, in Northern Italy (maybe everywhere, I dunno) my ancestors had brothers and sister that died at a rate of about 50% before making it to AGE 5! What was the deal?

[Poipuo4]

I was just reading a book called La Storia (it is in English) on the history of Italian Americans. It remarked that there was a lot of disease in Italy in the 1800s and turn of the century due to unclean drinking water in many inland towns. I don't know if that was an issue in your ancestral town, but that could be a cause of so much death. Also keep in mind no modern antibiotics, people living in close quarters, and the spread of infectious diseases.