A surprise at the National Archives

Note: Please make sure you read the previous post, Before Bone, Algeria, prior to reading this post.



So once again I went to the National Archives of Santu Spirtu, this time looking at naval records BEFORE the birth of Antonio Barbara in Bone, Algeria. I was looking for the journey of the couple Giuseppe Barbara and Rosa nee` Vella to Bone, Algeria. I searched through tomes and grimoires, even enlisting the help of my father - but it was all in vain.



I left the idea for a while...



Then I discovered that the National Archives held another source of information: the Passport Register. While the naval records would have contained information about lots of irrelevant stuff and people (I remember finding a record of a Mexican man landing in Malta), and possibly multiple times for the same person, especially crew, the Passport Register would have only one entry for Maltese persons requesting a passport - and to travel by ship, one would need a passport. This information was also better available: in PDF format, so I could search the records without damaging and old invaluable book. I had 80 pages to search in, and I found something 20 pages on.



I found a record of a certain Rosa Barbara requesting a passport, together with.... wait for it... her daughter Antonina Barbara! Apart from the absence of her husband, which would have gone there before his family, the existence of an elder sister for Antonio was a welcome news!



On my way back home I wondered what could have happened to Antonia. Would she have helped her mother raise her two younger brothers? Would she have returned with them back to Malta, or would she have found love, married and brought up family in Bone, Algeria - would there be descendents, relatives of ours, still living there? Would I be able to make contact?...



All this fizzled away when I rechecked the CAOM records and found out that she had died in 1836, before Tony's birth in 1837 and Antonio's birth in 1838 - they hadn't even met!

Antonia died at the tender age of 4 years. This made the stay of the Barbara family even more dramatic:

• in 1836 the daughter Antonina dies
• in 1837 the son Tony is born
• in 1838 the son Antonio is born
• in 1839 the father Giuseppe dies
  

Imagine Rosa's tragic life: going abroad with a daughter and husband, and returning back with only two sons...

Before Bone, Algeria

Earlier this year, specifically in my post entitled Tragedy and Happiness in Bona, Algeria I explained how the Barbara line had emigrated to Bone, and come back fatherless but with two more sons.

Now the quest was on to find out which town Giuseppe Barbara and Rosa nee` Vella came from. Since their son Antonio, on his return to Malta, married in Zurrieq, it was of course the first place to search - but alas with no result.

Actually there was a surprising result which felt like a slap in the face accompanied with dark laughter: I found there a copy of Antonio's baptism record from Bone, Algeria. And I had gone all that way to look for it when it was always there waiting for me!

Some careful thoughts ensued: where would a widow return to, with her two young sons? Would she return to her husband's home town, or to her own family? The latter being the most probable answer would mean that the wife Rosa was from Zurrieq but her husband no. As I was unable to find a marriage record of such a couple, I made an educated guess that Rosa was from Zurrieq, and the husband was from some other, hopefully neighbouring, town - and that they had married there. I could try to find a baptism record for Rosa Vella, but without knowing her parents (usually acquired from the marriage record) it would have been a wildly assuming and presumptious guess.

Where should I look for information as to where they are from?

In the meantime I was intrigued by the fact of being born in one country and getting married in another. I wanted to search for documentation of the journey and one interesting source of information came to mind: the naval records at the National Archives hosted at Santu Spirtu in Rabat, Malta. I had 23 years to search: Antonio was born in 1838 in Bone, Algeria and married in 1861 in Zurrieq, Malta. When I reached the Archives and told the clerk there of my intention, she remarked that I'd spend the whole summer there. I soon learnt why. She came back with three tomes (some 4 feet by 2 when closed) on a trolley - and they only covered the large part of a year. Each page contains details about the ship, its incoming crew, passengers, and cargo, as well as the outgoing crew, passengers and cargo. After looking through these three tomes I gave up... but it was not for nothing.

I realised that, on some occasions, next to the outgoing passengers was written the name of their hometown. What if I could find the record of Giuseppe and Rosa's OUTGOING journey to Bone, Algeria - and there find the name of their hometown?

A mystery solved - another emerges

In http://barbaravassallo.blogspot.com/2008/03/quandary-explanation.html earlier this year I had explained the problem I was in and how I was to go about it.


Today, finally, I found the time to go to Attard parish church again, and started the family profile. My plan was to find out all the offspring having parents Laurentius Fenech and Gratia, and try to find out whether there were two couples or just one - possibly by finding some overlapping pregnancies.


I started by finding Rosa Maria Fenech's birth record again: 16 May 1694.

Then I found the marriage of Laurentius Fenech and Gratia Buhagiar: 13 Oct 1696


I started looking for siblings to Rosa Maria from 1694 onwards, and found:

8 Aug 1697 - Catarina Barbara Fenech
12 Oct 1699 - Maria Coranda Fenech
15 Sept 1702 - Porcha Fenech
13 Sept 1706 - Anna Hieronyma Fenech
19 June 1709 - Joanna Caterina Fenech
16 July 1711 - Jacobus Vincentius Fenech


Then I searched till 1721 but there were no more births.

It wasn't gonna be easy: there were no overlapping pregnancies.


So I searched for siblings BEFORE 1694. If, as I was assuming, they had a child born out of wedlock, it would be the one and only mistake... but I had to rethink my assumptions: I found FIVE more children born to the couple. They were, working backwards:

10 July 1690 - Angelica Fenech
11 Oct 1682 - Domenico Biagio Fenech
9 Nov 1681 - Joseph Fenech
18 Jan 1678 - Domenica Fenech
8 Dec 1674 - Maria Fenech

All born to a Laurentio Fenech et Gratia, coniug. (his wife). I searched as far back as 1660 but could not find any more births to the above couple.

In view of this fresh evidence, spanning a range of 37 years (1674 - 1711), it seems that there really were two couples with the same names, bath in succession, rather than in parallel - and Rosa Maria Fenech was one of the latter children of the elder couple.

With this in mind I set forth to search once more for the elusive marriage of Laurentio Fenech et Gratia, the real parents of Rosa Maria Fenech, my 7GGrandma. I had failed before, but maybe I had given up too early, starting, unknowingly, from the youngest of their children, rather than from their eldest - which is now known : Maria Fenech. So I started again, looking from 1674 backwards till 1662 but the search bore no fruit. I searched later than 1674 just in case fate wanted to have a laugh and have the couple really born children before getting married. But again I found no such record. It is true that in those years the parish registry is a bit tattered, with loose pages. There may have been some missing pages - but then the months are all there, so probably not. The couple were not married in Attard.

So, after all, the mystery of whether Rosa's parents married after her birth has been resolved, with a negative answer. There were two couples in Attard, with the same father's and mother's names. I still have a missing link as I have no details of Rosa's real parents' marriage - but at least I have cleared their name.

Tragedy and Happiness in Bona, Algeria

In an earlier post (Bona, Algeria), I discovered the birth record of my ggggrandfather Antonio Barbara in 1838 in the North African state, then under French possession, where I discovered his father's name: Giuseppe Barbara.





Back to the CAOM I had terrible news. There was the death of a Giuseppe Barbara in 1839 - just a year after Antonio's birth. Looking at the CAOM list there was no Barbara activity until some 8 years later, and the death of the father was an enough strong motivation for the mother to return with her son back to her native land,Malta. To try to prove the link, I asked my french connection to retreive the document of death for Giuseppe from Aix-en-Provence. She complied.




She also stated that she had discovered that Antonio had an elder brother Tony, who was born a year before him, in 1837.

Slowly I was getting a picture of the dramatic stay of the Barbara family in Bone, Algeria:

• in 1837 the son Tony was born
• in 1838 the son Antonio was born
• in 1839 the father Giuseppe died

Knowing that at 19 years of age, Antonio had married and borne a son in Malta, I can only imagine the wife's (Rosa) journey back to Malta with her son(s) (I have no record of Tony Barbara in Malta, yet).

The tree returns to its roots...

In my second post on this blog, The Spark, I had mentioned how

my dad drew a sketch (see right, darker annotations were made at a later date by myself) to explain how there was an inheritance of 7 /11 of a field in the South of Malta...

Yesterday I received a phone call from my dad who needed some information regarding some ancestors' places and dates of birth and deaths to give to the lawyer who was taking care of the said inheritance. I was able to furnish the results of my research as requested.
After 8 years, the research for my family tree helped provide some answers spurred by the same inheritance that sparked off the whole research!

Bona, Algeria!

Earlier in my blog, specifically here: http://barbaravassallo.blogspot.com/2007/04/from-bona.html I had shared with you my desperation in not being able to trace my paternal line. All I knew about my paternal great great great grandpa was that he was born in Bona.

On 23rd May 2006 I came across a post by Mr Jean Bernard Mifsud indicating his Algerian-Maltese ancestry and asking for help. See here: http://genforum.genealogy.com/malta/messages/1963.html

On seeing a possibly Algerian person with an interest in genealogy I immediately threw in a reply, asking for any leads into seeking my own ancestor's records there.

To my post, another forum member Mr Frederic Messud from Australia(!) gave me a link to CAOM - Centre d'Archives d'Outre-Mere - where the French government was giving an online catalogue of birth, marriage, and death records in its colonies, including Bone, Algeria. He even gave me two possible records for my ancestor's births: one in 1838 in Bone and another in 1894 in Mascara.

I was overjoyed! The one in Bone fit perfectly as he would have been 19 when his son would be born in Malta. The catalogue is very dry in information, giving only what happened, to whom , which year and which commune. The website has strict rules not to communicate via email, and to my request for the birth record, or at least for information as how to get it, I was asked to supply a postal address which I did.

In the meantime I found myself subscribing to the pieds-noir mailing list. These 'black foots' are sons of the European immigrants to Algeria who were forced to leave the country after the Algerian-French conflict. Through this mailing list I received an email from a certain Ms Collonna who told me that she'd been to Aix-en-Provence (the place where these records are located) and seeing my request had brought it for me! I gave her my postal address so she could send it to me.

As luck would have it, Aix-en-Provence sent me a letter describing how they do not do research and that you have to go personally or send someone in your stead, BUT FOR THIS ONCE, THEY SENT ME THE RECORD! A civil record detailing the birth of Antonio Barbara to Barbara Giuseppe and his wife Rosa nee Vella (my gggggrandparents!) who were from Malta.

Against all odds, here was the birth record that I had given up of ever coming across!

-0-

A couple of months later I was looking in the parish archives of Zurrieq (where Antonio Barbara whose birth record I received above got married) for records relating to Antonio's wife's ancestors... and I was leafing through the records and noticed a page alien to the book, in that it was pasted onto the book. I had a look at the page and saw an Algeria mark. I remarked how strange it was for it to be in the book and did not give it any second thought.

Until I was packing up to leave and a second thought finally made it to my mind. I checked again the page. It was the parochial record of the baptism of Antonio Barbara in Bone Algeria! My GGGGrandpa! Here in Malta!

Whilst I had given up, came across a link by chance, and got through all the trouble of getting the record from France, it was all the time available in Malta! What a surprise!

Quandary Explanation

It's been almost a year now and I have not had the chance to carry out the family profile that I promised in http://barbaravassallo.blogspot.com/2007/07/fenech-buttigieg-1696.html.

May I now explain the problem that I have met and how I plan to find evidence to prove a possible alternate situation that may have led to the records met.

Refer to Figure 1 below, which depicts an event timeline of a normal family:

A couple are born, marry, and have kids. For them to be legally recognised, they ought to be born AFTER the marriage. Each sibling is expected to be born at least 9 months after the previous sibling (9 months being the gestation period of humans) unless the siblings are twins (or triplets or quadruplets, etc) and are born on the same occasion (as for siblings 2 and 3 above). Another case is when the child is born prematurely - but they did not have incubators back then so they would have died on being born.

Now the evidence found so far shows that my ancestor Rosa was born BEFORE her parents' marriage. Figure two below demonstrates this:

This is after having searched for the marriage of Lawrence and Gratia prior to 1694 with no success and only finding a record of such a marriage in 1696, 2 years later.

This could mean that Rosa was born out of wedlock, even though there is no such record of this in the parish archive but rather the mother is specified as being the wife, and the bride is specified to be a virgin.

Now all this could only be true if the parents of Rosa were NOT married in the SAME parish but were married somewhere else, which would explain the missing marriage record prior to Rosa's birth.

But why is there a marriage AFTER the birth? This could be if there was ANOTHER couple named Lawrence Fenech and Gratia who married in the same parish where Rosa was born. The Figure below should help explain this:

The fact that Gratia's surname is not listed in Rosa's birth record makes this fact still possible.

But how can it be proved?

The only tool available is the fact that siblings need to be 9 months apart. What I plan to do is to take a family profile: that is finding all the children born to Lawrence Fenech and his wife Gratia to try to find overlapping births - which would indicate two parallel couples in the same parish.

In which case I would need to identify which parish were Rosa's parents from, maybe by looking at the godparents of the children who might be specified to be from some other parish.

Wish me luck!