I’m at a bit of a dead end with the money angle. But, I realized I was missing another huge trove of records. Marriage licenses.

SeverinaSo, early this morning, I trundled into the Marriage License Bureau to start my digging there.

The woman suggested I start with the bride’s name, so down came the big book of Bs and I turned to 1904, the year (I presumed) Francesco and Severina had been married. But the search came up empty. I checked the year before and after, just to be sure. Nothing. Which leads me to believe that they’d probably gotten married in Italy and come over here.

I figured while I was in the Bs, I’d look for Raymond and Myrtle Brenckle, my adoptive great-grandparents. As expected, there they were. Raymond Brenckle and Myrtle Lager. I made a photocopy. Everyone’s coming over to our house for Easter, so I figured this would add to the show-and-tell fun.

As I stood there, trying to figure out where to look next, from the corners of my brain, a tiny memory fluttered up. Severina had either died of the flu in the pandemic, or she’d died in childbirth. There may have been a stepfather.

If there was a stepfather, there had to have been a marriage, right?

The will I’d found indicated Francesco had died in June 1915, so I started with July.

My heart dropped when I reached January 1916.

“Severina Brescia and Michele Natale,” I whispered to myself. “You’ve got to be kidding me. Six months? She waited six months?! Francesco’s body was barely cold!”

From “beloved wife” and widow to new bride in 180 days.

I know it’s wrong to judge people of the past by today’s morality and mores. But a part of me is really angry at her. How could she put her kids through that? My poor grandpa! What’s more, all of a sudden this vague notion of my great-grandmother dying in childbirth has suddenly taken on a whole lot more relevance. Was there really a baby?

I copied the certificate and walked back across the street in a haze.

“She waited six months!” I shouted into the phone when I relayed my news to my parents during my walk back. “Six months and she married some new guy. Looks like the neighbor. Their addresses were only a few digits apart. I can’t believe it.”

“It was 1916, honey,” my mom said. “It was probably that or starve.”

“I know,” I said. “But she had money. Francesco left her enough to buy a house, for pete’s sake!”

“How far do you think it went with three kids?” my mom asked gently.

I sighed. She was right and I felt bad. Bad for judging my great-grandma for making a choice I would never have to consider. She was a poor woman with no education. Hell, women didn’t even have the right to vote yet. I shouldn’t be so hard on her.

Later, I calmed down and really took a good look at the material. They’d applied for the marriage license at Christmastime 1915 and had gotten married at a church called Our Lady Help of Christians, which was the same church that issued Grandpa Phil’s baptismal certificate. A quick search of the archives on the Diocese of Pittsburgh website showed me this had been the center of Italian immigrant faith life in East Liberty. The church was still standing, but the congregation had been absorbed a decade ago.

I’d seen that they’d been neighbors, so I tried to find Enterprise Street on Google. It still existed, but it seemed the house didn’t.

Fading to ghosts.

Where do I go from here?