Stories from my family tree

Story and photos by Anne Gabbianelli

Napoleon Bonaparte bankrupted my family in 1814 by convincing them that paper money had no value, so they switched to silver coins. I also have an ancestor who built the Catholic Church that rests on a hill in Winn, Maine. Oh, and my great grandmother was kidnapped by the gypsies when she was a little girl, and her father – a major in the British Army – took his entire regiment to the gypsy camp to save his little girl.

The stories you can learn as you work on your family genealogy are amazing, and I believe I have a lot more to learn on my endless journey to piece my ancestry together. What I’ve found goes way beyond submitting a DNA sample to determine what part of the world my ancestors came from.

My quest to find out more about my roots began in 1976 when I was doing family genealogy for a degree program. Little did I know that this assignment would go on all these years later, and yet be amazed with every faded and tattered document I review and every email exchange I have with my family.

I immersed myself in the college assignment with the help of my parents: my mother Jane Crozier of Irish / Scottish / French-Canadian descent and my father Peter Gabbianelli of Italian descent. My mother was a guardian of ancestral documents and wills and was fairly up to date, including entries in the family Bible. I now have many of these original documents in my possession.

The Gabbianelli site was well-documented by a relative in Italy who clearly mapped a tree that my grandfather’s family from 18.Mum was good at keeping up as she learned more about the history of both theirs and theirs fatherly side of the family.

To keep the Gabbianelli site up to date, my aunts wrote to relatives in Italy looking for information. I have read her translated letters which include my grandfather’s family of eight and the great story of Napoleon. From the side of my grandmother – Pierina Malchiodi – I have many documents in which her first name is spelled differently. A letter from a cousin states that Pierina’s parents married in 1880, but there was no record of her grandparents.

I referred to a few translation websites to help me with the documents written in Italian, and I checked an Ellis Island website thinking my paternal grandparents came to America via Ellis Island only to find that I was myself I was wrong. Boston was the entry point.

Efforts to learn more about my mother’s family side were not that easy to follow because she had multiple families. My mother was called an orphan by some, but I never thought of it because she had families everywhere. Mom was born in 1918, and her mother’s death certificate says that Jane Knox Muir Crozier died of Spanish flu one month after my mother was born. How ironic to discover during the current pandemic that the 1918 pandemic affected my family.

My mother had an older brother who was raised in Vermont by her father, but my mother was divided among her aunts. First on her father’s side and later on her mother’s side, who took care of her higher education (mother was a nurse like her mother). All of the correspondence I’ve seen and stories I’ve heard show how much she was loved.

She spent her academic years in New Hampshire with the Gormley family (one Crozier aunt married a Gormley) and her summers in Millinocket, Maine with the Corrigan family (another Crozier aunt married a Corrigan). So my research relates to the Muirs and Croziers of St. Agathe, who date back to the mid-19th century. It also includes the Gormley family (originally from Ireland) and the Corrigan family (originally from Canada) and all of their branches.