marriage in messina province

[Italysearcher]

Better reread Sacrificed for Honour. Many legitimate children were abandoned in the North as well as illegitmate ones and from my research I would say it was more harshly dealt with in the industrialized North. The whole point of the wheel was to protect the sinful woman's honour, never any mention of the man who sired the child. Even if in these small villages everyone knew who the parents were, there was no written record if the parents were not married.

[mezzogiorno62]

i totally understand the concept behind the wheel.or"ruota"as it allowed anonymous abandonment of the infant.but as i said,in my personal family research of 15 years,after scanning through birth records in both avellino province(my paternal grandfathers lines)and messina province(my paternal grandmothers lines)i found virtually none in avellino,while consistently running into it in messina.consider.i couldnt get past my grandmothers generation.she was born ignoti.and just trying to research her"adoptive"family(her wetnurse informally adopted her)i ran into it again with her adoptive mother's mother.it was rampant.much of this was no doubt due to 2 situations:social moors(protecting the father-and mother-from gossip and social stigma)and the abject poverty in the south,particularly in sicily.the north may have had its share of unknown births,for possibly different reasons,but the situation in the south is clear to see.society and economics.and speaking of harsh repercussions.whats worse than labeling a child"ignoti genitori"? its stimatized for life and kills our ancestral lines in research.i read that in other countries,even catholic france,if a child was born of unknown parentage,legers were kept to identify the child's parents.whether this is true or not,i don't know.also consider that immigration from the south was many times larger than the industrial relatively wealthy north.northern italians had far less reason to leave than their compatriots below rome.the mezzogiorno.this was a land considered by northern italians as barely part of a united country.southerners were considered superstitious and barbaric by comparison.more like third world citizens than part of a western country.anyway,these are my thoughts,as my personal family research is living proof of the scourge of those times.

[MaurizioPerrone]

Better reread Sacrificed for Honour. Many legitimate children were abandoned in the North as well as illegitmate ones and from my research I would say it was more harshly dealt with in the industrialized North. The whole point of the wheel was to protect the sinful woman's honour, never any mention of the man who sired the child. Even if in these small villages everyone knew who the parents were, there was no written record if the parents were not married.

No need to reread anything, I understand what the book is about and I respect the author's (and yours) analysis of his research and the facts that support it. Certainly there was perhaps a more specific process in the larger cities of the north and with a strong local government perhaps there was plenty of incentive to adhere to the laws, but by the late 1860s the practice of the ruota was already abolishing at some of these places.

My point - again - is that in the area of my family in NW Italy, this was not the general practice and illegitimacy was dealt with less harshly than what may have been experienced in other areas.

It is not entirely true that "even in small villages…there was no written record if the parents were not married," this is another broad generalization. The registers of baptism of the parish in my hometown often include at least the name of the mother; but even as in the case of my grandmother where the parents are written unknown and she was given a fantasy surname, her godmother was the sister of the mother and the godfather was the husband of the sister of the mother. There are also some acts, when the illegitimate baby is married, that the name is written with the surname of the mother, for example Giovanni Perrone "in civile Giovanni Vento" … because Giovanni lived always with his mother Maria Perrone even though he is illegitimate and on the birth act it is written "Giovanni Vento". Yes,there are many example like this in the acts of my area.

But perhaps for 100 illegitimate babies there are 100 variations of this story. And perhaps 100 interpretations of each of those stories,our opinions are no doubt colored from our own research and experience.

[mezzogiorno62]

i obtained the baptismal record for my grandmother,in addition to the civil birth act.the civil act simply stated the child was born"to a woman who does not consent to be named"and that the surname choice(costante,or constant,similiar to trovato or esposito)as well as the care and custody of the child was to be given to the wetnurse,who became the virtual mother of my grandmother.in the baptism,the wetnurse isn't named.godparents are.but ignoti genitori is still there.i've tossed these possibilities around in my head.maybe the wetnurse-or the godparents-were somehow related to my grandmother.as it wasn't common for a wetnurse to virtually "adopt" an infant,possibly the wetnurse,if not the mother,was closely related.i've never found information stating the identity of the natural parents.sometimes this notation would be added years later to the birth or baptismal record.but not in my case.

[PeterTimber]

Honor is important,perhaps more important than family gossip. Further, I don't think Illegitimacy was any less in the North than the South of Italy. Remember the North Italians were living in pretty bad economic straits in the early 1800's and the Argentina, Uruguay Chile agricultural/ industrial revolution (grains, meat, hides and textiles) beckoned North Italians ( judging from all the requests we received during the last 10 years here in the forum for people seeking to obtain Italian citizenship when the economy of Latin America went dipsy...remember the requests we used to get??? At the same time the Kingdom of the two sicilies was flourishing and lured the Nobility,Cavour,Garibaldi and the House of Savoy in Aosta to create ITALY. The rest is history, pillage and plunder by the North and Southern Italians forced to leave by the millions to the USA which was then commencing its Industrial revolution and needed manpower for cities, sewers, subways, ports and streets,dams and processing plants after the American Civil War in 1860's. The north took the gold treasury and the factories north and it was only after WW11 that the debt was repaid with interest and brought the north and the south to a more balanced and educated economy. Peter

[mezzogiorno62]

the south was a poor relation to the north for the most part.and consider that southerners werent elitist agriculturalists and skilled workmen,as more northerners tended to be.those from the north never emigrated enmass the way those from the south did.the southerners were the latino migrants of the day.took any menial and demanding job after being promised of gold in the streets and easy fortunes to be made in america.some from the south did migrate to south america,but by and large they came to the usa-especially boston and new york.few got off the boat with any literary skills or any skills,other than as contadini.backbreaking labor was their gold.and where theres poverty theres superstition and ignorance.this is why i believe social stigma like"ignoti genitori"was much more prevalent in the south.while discouraged and frowned upon in the north as well,it was rampant in the south,particularly in sicily.no matter the former glories it may have possessed before unification(at least for the large landowners for the most part),once italy was united the northern economy took off at breakneck speed,and benefited much more from unification than the south did.think of it this way.1870 italy is united.by 1880 the floodgates were open and continued after world war one.at the same time northern italian immigration slowed down to a trickle.no comparison.

[PeterTimber]

Northerners did immigrate by the millions to Uruguay, Argentina and Chile, Peru since the period between 1800-1850 saw Northern Italy in a severe depression and South America was by then enjoying a textile, meat, agricultural and industrial revolution and they too required manpower like the USA. This is why we here in the forum were inundated with requests for family origins since South America went dipsy and became impoverished to the point where South Americans were reverse immigrating to Italy and Europe. They needed this information to obtain Italian citizenship. Peter

[carubia]

i've found in my research that ignoti genitori was rampant in sicily in particular....but as i scanned the births in this area,i find ignoti genitori extremely common.not so in my paternal grandfather's birthplace in avellino,slightly to the north,in campania,he was born in luogosano,a tiny village,in 1870.no incidents of ignoti genitori in his lines,or in the various other birth records i scanned.my conclusions are that:illegitimacy was much rarer in the more affluent north,and when it did occur,was much less harshly dealt with than the southern regions.more superstitions and social taboos there than in northern italy.also,the wheel or total abandonment were just a small percentage of how illegitimacy was dealt with.just wish there were alternate records available that would have revealed the natural parents of these children,who were probably stigmatized with the facts of their birth-and would have broken the code of silence that prevents us from discovering our ancestors.what a shame that social moors have caused such confusion in the name of honor.

I did a study of births in one Sicilian comune (Ribera) of population about 5000 over a period of a couple of decades in the early 19th c. 4% of the births were to children with either unknown father or both parents unknown (but there were much more of the former than the latter). Is 4% a lot? Would 1-2% of births being proietti be excessive?

It may be a coincidence, but I noticed that the number of foundlings seemed to increase when there was an increase in deaths of adults, such as during the flu pandemic of 1833.

[mezzogiorno62]

ignoti genitori is probably worse than ignoto padre.if both parents are unknown its highly unlikely their identities will ever be learned or possibly notated later,but with padre ignoti,its possible the father may come forward later and acknowledge the child.at least more likely than both parents coming forward.when i found my paternal grandmother's birth record in barcellona pozzo di gotto(1883)i found many other children born of unknown parents in those birth registers.both parents and just not the father.as i said,it appears to be rampant in this area.in the province of avellino researching my paternal grandfathers birth(luogosano 1870)i found none in those birth registers.and avellino is only 200 miles to the north.it appears the further south one goes,the more predominant were unknown births.