findingphilblog

Ziu Antonio

CarminaCapture — Grazia Carmina Giulia Venezia Pullano, Antonio’s daughter and first cousin to Phil, Joe and Mary. This is her wedding picture.

One of the most fun parts of writing the book has been connecting to relatives that I didn’t know I had. The Brescia brothers are an interesting lot to be sure, but I’m thrilled to have found the Venezia siblings, too.

My great-grandfather was one of three apparent children. Antonio was the oldest. Then came Teresa Sebastina. And, in what seems to be somewhat of a “surprise!” pregnancy, Francesco came along.

I owe this great bit of information to the incomparable Dina, who routinely goes to Sorbo’s main record halls to photograph records and managed to find the Venezias.

I also learned that it was very common for the folks from Sorbo San Basile to use their middle names, rather than their given first name. This most likely had to do with the Italian naming convention of male children being named for their grandfathers and female children for their grandmothers. It would get confusing after a while, I’m sure. All you have to do is remember the scene from ‘Goodfellas’ where Ray Liotta’s character is at his wedding and introducing his wife to all the cousins. So Antonio was, in reality, Giuseppe Antonio. And Francesco’s real name is Michele Francesco.

I can’t help but see that Saverina happened to marry a man who had the same first name as her deceased husband. Maybe that was her first mistake — to think the same name would equal the same type of person. Not all Michaels — or Laras or Philips or Jasons for that matter — are created equal.

And I also have come to find out why Antonio disappeared from the U.S. record. Antonio followed his little brother to America. He left behind a wife and five kids (yes — real Venezia relatives!!) to come to America. While here, he lived two doors down from Francesco and Saverina.

Antonio himself, sadly, would not live much longer than his brother. He died in 1918 back in Sorbo and is buried there. Of the five children, I have records for just two — the oldest and the youngest daughters. Each of them went on to have enormous families. Nearly 20 children between them.

I see so much of my grandfather’s story echoed in his father and uncle’s. Phil and Joe never lived more than a few miles apart, with the majority of their lives lived on the same street. As much as they could, Francesco and Antonio did, too. Because he was so much older, I imagine Antonio as perpetually amused by his little brother, but liberally dropping the “big brother” card if he had to. Perhaps this is far, far from the truth. But as I said before, I’ve taken a lot of liberties and fiction lets me. So why not consider Antonio from that angle, and hope that at least for a little while, Phil had more than one adult male he could look to for support?

March 2, 2013 0

Any resemblance to persons living or dead

While I wait for notes on my draft, I started to think about all the things I’ve found over the last few years. About the opinions I’ve formed and the decisions I made to write my book.

The first choice I made, as I decided to truly pursue publication, is to make the book a fictional account, based on Phil’s life, rather than a straight non-fiction book.

The reason is mostly because the journalist in me won’t let me commit to paper what I don’t know for fact. I don’t know, any more than the jury in Allegheny County 80 years ago, who started that fire. Or if it was arson at all. I don’t truly, fully know who the “bad” uncle was and the dangling mystery of Phil and Joe’s possible time in Ohio made it impossible for me to say “this is what happened.” I don’t know if Mike Natale was a man caught in a tragic circumstance or if he was a heartless brute.

So, I turn to fiction. The name of my book, at the moment, is “Francesco Fortunato.”

The name, interestingly enough, is one linked to Phil’s family many, many generations ago. For some of my regular readers, using Phil’s father’s first name for the boy who is based on Phil is confusing. But let me tell you, I could not get over the beauty of that name. Fortunato. It means fortunate or lucky. And Phil (Francesco, aka Frankie) was extremely, extremely lucky. The title could almost be “Francesco, Fortunato.”

As I said before, there were so many times during my writing where I felt as if what I was “making up” wasn’t really made up at all. Whether it was just a few good guesses based on lots of research, facts backing up the details, or something else, I feel I’ve done enough work to write knowledgeably.

But there were things I just didn’t know, and so I had to make choices. And the biggest choice of all involved the fire. I guess if it ever makes print, you’ll know how I decided. But a literary twist and an actual life are two different things.

For all the amazing, life-changing information I’ve found during my research, I have to constantly remind myself that these were real human beings. Even Grandpa. Even though he’s ‘mine,’ his life belonged to him. And my perception of it, especially because it’s been found via documents and historic records, is just that. Mine. They might be the same, but they might not.

It goes double for the people whose lives intersected with my family’s — especially someone like Marion.

I’ve tried to stick with the provable facts. But I’ve also taken some pretty large liberties. That’s fiction. Heck, that’s why finding the transcript of the Coroner’s Inquest is so important to me. If I can read the words of the testimony, I might know the truth more deeply. That truth might once again wildly shift my perception of all the characters in this drama.

The characters in the book, therefore, have their roots in my history, but are their own creations.

February 15, 2013 0

I did it

It may never see the light of day, but I’ve finished the first draft of my book. If you give a journalist a deadline … I may not be a real journalist anymore, but a public promise to write is a pretty strong motivator.

I just sent it over to my brother-in-law, Paul Malmont, for his review. By the way, if you’re interested in pulp fiction, or Jack London, I’d highly recommend Paul’s books: “The Chinatown Death Cloud Peril”, “Jack London in Paradise” and “The Amazing, The Astounding and The Unknown.”

December 31, 2012 0

The 1940 Census is here!!

In business-ese, digging into something and spending a lot of time with it has a jargon-y phrase: taking a deep dive.

Well, I’ve been scuba-diving in the 1940 Census since it was released a few days ago.

It’s not exactly relevant to my writing project. It’s more like a roadmap for what happens next. If writing is about building a story arc, then these bits of information might help me craft scenes that allude to something that may not happen for a decade, but still matter. And besides, if I see where they go, it will help me stitch together the path of how they got there.

Of course I had to look up Grandpa first. What I found is interesting. He’d moved out on his own. He was listed as a lodger at a boarding house on Lockhart Street. It doesn’t exist anymore. The street dead-ends under bridge on the North Shore. It’s interesting that Grandpa’s noted as having zero education. I’d always heard he’d never gotten beyond 8th grade. But it looks like the census man spoke with him directly. Hmm. I was happy to see he worked all year in 1939 as a “produce man” (I suppose that could be an abbreviation for manager or it could just be produce man). But that he’d made only $1000 for all his effort. It sounds abominable, but in reality, it was on the lower end of middle class. I figure he had a lifestyle very similar to the one I had when I was single and working for my first newspaper. You were OK, but you really hoped no big bills or unexpected circumstances hit.

I wonder how he felt, living alone. I know that when I shut the door on the first day of living in my first apartment, I was so excited to be in charge of everything. Seems crazy now, of course. Haha. But I wonder how a guy, who’d spent his entire life making sure his family stayed together, felt to finally have a little bit of space for himself. His little brother was married. His sister was being taken care of at the Fresh Air Home. Maybe he just relaxed a little. I hope he had some fun. I hope he went out at night, had girlfriends and found something interesting to do in his spare time. Maybe that’s when he learned to play the concertina!

As we know, Joe and Ruth got married in 1932, so they were out of the Brenckles house, too. They lived in the rear of Ruth’s mother’s house. They had been living there at least five years, too. Joe is a laborer in Retail Food. I’m not sure if that means he’s slinging produce boxes at Donahoe’s with Phil, if he’s working for the Brenckles’ stand or something else.

I also looked up Marion, to see if she was still hanging on. She was. She was still in her house on Ruby Way, but with one more kid. And her brothers were still living with her, although it seems that this person who’s doing the correcting to their posts has made the boys Stephen’s brothers. Their names are also misspelled, but misspelled in the same way they were a few times in the fire coverage. Grost. In fact, the cursive D looks like a G, so the Ancestry algorithm could just be picking up the variation.

Either way, by the eve of World War II, it looks as if everyone had put the events of the past behind them. They were, after all, a solid 17 years behind. For grandpa, it was actually pretty significant. He was 16 when it happened. He was now moving into a future where he was a full lifetime removed from all the troubles of his childhood.

When I think about Phil’s life, sometimes I think of Andy Dufresne from the ‘Shawshank Redemption’ and the line in the movie, as Andy’s escaping: *Morgan Freeman voice* “Andy Dufresne, who crawled through a river of shit and came out clean on the other side…’

That’s about right.

April 8, 2012 0

I’ve started writing

I think I’ve gone as far as I can with the research, at least for the moment. So, I figure it’s time to take all my notes and do something with all the hours and hours of time I’ve put into this over the last few years.

It’s strange. Sometimes, it feels as if something beyond me is dictating where the story is going. I could say it’s my own creativity, but that almost doesn’t feel right. Sometimes, and maybe I’m crazy, I feel like there’s another hand guiding mine. Some of the ideas I have are too vivid. I might consider a path, but then something back in the back of my mind says “No, it happened this way.”

The greatest thing about all of this is that it truly feels like I am spending time with Grandpa. In a way that transcends looking at pictures or hearing other people tell stories, I feel that, because of all the research I’ve done, I’ve gotten a much more clear picture about who he was, how he grew up, the forces that shaped his world and all the rest than I ever did before.

My goal is to finish by the end of the year so I can send it to my brother-in-law, who is an author. We’ll see how I do.

January 15, 2012 0

Look who’s back, back again

Yeah, I kinda flaked for a year there on my postings.

To be honest, my research shut down as I conducted two more vital ones. The search for a new job (my choice, don’t worry!) and a new house (because it was time).

I’m happy to report that both were successful. I’ve got a new gig in Corporate America where I will continue to write, but in a different format and style. And Jason and I, after three years, finally found a place to call our own. Thanksgiving 2010 was spent binge-researching at the Carnegie Library. Thanksgiving 2011 found me elbow deep in paint and spackle.

But now that things have finally calmed down at work and on the homefront, I’ve gone back to my evenings in front of the TV, where I “Play along at home” as I watch ‘Who Do You Think You Are?’ The first episode of the season was Friday (Martin Sheen) and I dug into the website after the show.

Saturday’s mission was seeing if I could find out what happened to the Drost kids. Marion, Frank, Thomas and Joseph survived the fire just as Phil and Joe did. Surely, they had scars from that ordeal, and likely more deeply because they lost their sister. Phil, miraculously, kept his sibling.

So, I started poking around. I found the family easily enough in the 1910 Census. Their father was also Frank. And he was an iceman in this family snapshot. Interestingly enough, there is the children’s mother, Teresa. The family appears to be of Polish-German origin, which means over the next two censuses, their national identity will change at least twice as the boarders shift due to war.

But a decade later, Teresa is gone. Frank, as the papers had said, was a police officer for the city. Interesting. I look up at the date on the census. It was recording literally the month before his children became wards of the Allegheny County Juvenile Court. A policeman. With four kids in county care. That alone would be front-page news today.

It’s hard to find big Frank, but by 1930, I think I may have found Marion and little Frank, along with Thomas.

If it is the same family, Marion is now Mrs. Marion Baker, with a young son named Paul who is almost 3 (quick math, NO he is not Howard Lager’s). Frank Drost and Thomas Drost (correct ages) are living with them and recorded as being brothers of the head of household, a title Marion and her husband Stephen seem to share. He’s recorded as Head, but there’s an H next to her name.

Again, though, I can’t be 100 percent sure because someone has used the feature Ancestry gives you to allow corrections to historic documents. I could have made one, for instance, when I saw how badly Pasquale’s name was misspelled in the 1920 Census.The corrected name is something else entirely, which holds me back from believing this is the outcome for Marion and her siblings.

I hope it is. Because that would mean that she at least (I hope) found peace and a home of her own. Her husband is a steelworker, and if Stephen’s personal history held to the wider arc, that would mean the family probably found a solid, middle-class life. And, just like Phil, she managed to keep her immediate family together.

January 1, 2012 0

Questions answered

I just got back from the Brenckle Family Reunion. And oh boy, did I once again hit the motherlode.

So, to answer your question, yes, there’s a significant faction within the family that believes Howard Lager did get away with murder. And there were other concerns, as you can imagine, as well. Particularly with the female members of the family. No one had a definitive answer, though. A few people thought they heard that Howard had gotten Marion pregnant and that was what the fight on the night of the fire was about.

There was also a rift, apparently, among the Brenckle siblings over the use of these farmed out children. A certain part of the family thought it was unethical and it got pretty heated.

But no one could say anything for certain, and because of that, I’m still wary of pinning criminal labels on anyone — even though you can’t defame the dead.

I shared all the stories I had, and also the research I’d done on the Brenckle family itself. I had copies of Raymond and Myrtle’s marriage license, census records for branches of the Brenckle family and a few odds and ends.

After dinner, we went down to the basement because they had a surprise for me.

“I thought you should have them,” they said as they handed over two envelopes of pictures.

If I was shocked by seeing my grandpa on the front page of the newspaper, these two envelopes shocked me even more.

The picture at the top of the page is Phil (right) and Joe (left) the summer after they came to the farm. This is the youngest I have ever seen either boy. Unless I stumble on a trove of baby pictures by a forgotten Venezia relative, it maybe as young as I get.

I look at their faces and I can see that they are happy. It makes my heart soar. They look like they are having a terrific time. After all they’ve been through, they’re in the summer sunshine, together, with clothes and shoes. Grandpa looks a little silly. I’ve seen my brother make that same face when he’s being goofy and someone’s trying to take his picture.

This next one is just Phil with another one of the farmhands. It might even be Howard Lager. I think it kind of looks like him.

These pictures make me think again — if you’ve got dozens of kids passing through your farm just to do work, why take their picture? Why treat them like members of the family if you were just going to cast them out when the season was over? That wasn’t going to be my grandfather’s and great-uncle’s fate, it seems.

This next one cracks me up. Joe, even though he was the baby brother, was the first Venezia boy to get married. In 1932, he married Ruth Broglie. Joe, looking almost like a movie star, is on the left. Phil, on the right, was his best man. Awwwww.

I laugh because my dad looks like that in a tux. He stands the same way, with his hand at his side, fingers curled almost the same way. They look so Godfather. I’m not sure who the little girl or the maid-of-honor are. I’m also shocked to see how much both boys look like their parents. Joe is Francesco with Saverina’s eyes and forehead smoothed over the sharp edges. Phil is his mother, with his father’s thin face pulling what could be too round into a squarish-oval. Two more generations, and my face is what my Grammy always admiringly called “the perfect oval.” I never thought so, but I guess that meant something back in the day. 🙂

I’m full of good food and good memories now. I may not have concrete answers, but I have ideas. And as I think about writing the book, those ideas will surely guide my imagination.

August 23, 2011 0

Family matters

I’m totally excited. Arnetta and her family have been really interested in all my research and have begun diving in to their history for their family. They’re holding another reunion this August and want me to bring all my research to help them fill things in.

I’ve looked up a few things on the Brenckles, of course, because it was easy to do in all the other searching. When I found them, I sent them along. But all my questions have got them thinking about their own questions. That’s why they want me to bring all my research. We can compare notes.

That’s one of the best things, I think, about genealogy. It’s incredibly healing. At least, it has been for me. Maybe the things you find aren’t excuses for whatever behavior, hang-ups, habits or passions your family has, but they are explanations. And sometimes even knowing WHY can help you at least understand. You start realizing that you’re not just dealing with the things you carry, but that there are echos of the things your parents, grandparents, heck, even great-grandparents carried, too. Whether you had the perfect family or one that’s, well, not, we’re all the sum total of all the parts that came before us. And understanding how those parts came to be can free you from a lot of negative thoughts. I think that’s probably why people — and the celebrities — are addicted to ‘Who Do You Think You Are?’

So, now I have to focus on the essential questions for the family. What did they know about Howard Lager? Had they ever heard whether people thought he was innocent or got away with murder?

And there’s a trickier question that’s been playing on my mind. What if the Brenckles’ motives to adopt my grandfather and his brother were not so pure? What if they did it to buy their silence?

My initial thought is no, and here’s why. Phil and Joe were in county custody, according to all the news reports, from the morning of the fire until, it seems, sometime after the coroner’s jury returned its verdict in January 1923. They were definitely still in custody during the trial.There would be no way for the Brenckles to make some kind of promise or arrangement in exchange for testimony.

I went back to my original research and realized that the trust documents, and the subsequent payout forms, indicate that Phil and Joe were adopted in October of 1923. That’s only 10 months.

Now, I’m not sure what the county would have done. Phil was 16 and in most cases, the county turned you out on your own. Joe was 15, so his status is ambiguous. I could say that the county wouldn’t put them back with people they were calling murderers a few weeks previous, but one never knows.

Which brings up another very, very incongruous bit of information. One that might indicate where they were between January and October 1923.

Ohio.

I’ve maligned Pasquale as the evil uncle who’s carelessness altered my grandfather’s existence. But what if it wasn’t him? What if it was Ottavio? He’s the only other logical choice since he was actively involved in the trust issue.

The story I’d memorized from childhood included a memory that Grandpa and Joe had gone to Ohio to live with this bad uncle. And, they’d run away. They showed up on the Brenckles’ doorstep and that’s how they ended up being adopted.

Is that really what happened, or did my over-active imagination make it up — either in childhood or now? I won’t know until I ask the Brenckles.

July 13, 2011 0

The Stepfather

Since I discovered his existence, I’ve been curious about Mike Natale. I wondered about the man he was, what motivated him and, most importantly, what compelled him to walk away from three children who’d just lost their mother.

There are plenty of good men out there who step up to the plate and raise other people’s children — whether they’re uncles, stepfathers, grandfathers or good friends. Why was Mike Natale not among them? Heck, even Pasquale, such as he was, took his niece and nephews in.

I’ve found no indication that the siblings remained with Mike after their mother died. And if she was in the hospital for a month, it could be possible they were shipped to Pasquale’s before that.

Natale is a hard name to trace because there are many, many, many Natales. With a first name like Michele (Mike), it’s is even harder. I at least have his birthdate from the marriage record in 1916.

So, I do what so often ends up working for me. I Google and Ancestry until I come up with … something.

What I found tonight could offer an enormous explanation. Once again, it was a variation of the name (which you can set filters for on Ancestry) that brought up the hit.

If it’s true, it adds a whole new dimension to my grandfather’s brief life with his stepfather.

You see, the Mike Nataley I found, who was Italian, the correct age, was a widower and living in Allegheny County was, in 1920, living in an insane asylum.

If this is indeed the same man who for a year was Phil’s stepfather, it would go a long way to explaining why he didn’t, or perhaps couldn’t, take care of the siblings. It also creates a very sobering picture of what life might have been like for my grandfather in his home.

And it becomes even harder to judge “what kind of man” this stepfather was in light of this information. He could have been undone by grief and been dealing with a variant of depression. Mental illness was so incredibly misunderstood in this era people were locked up for things we treat successfully with talk therapy and medication today. He also truly could have had something very serious such as schizophrenia or bipolar disorder, which even today can require hospitalization. He could have been an addict. I don’t know. And what’s more, I don’t know if this Mike Natale(y) is our Mike.

So I’m Shoeboxing it until I find further supporting evidence.

And I’m left to wonder. Not just about Mike, but one of the perpetual questions of my search. What happened to Mike and Saverina’s baby?

February 20, 2011 0