Planning a trip like this one means making a lot of choices. Right now we're trying to decide where to go during our time in Italy. It's exciting, but it's daunting too. We are not the most decisive of couples. We read and research, discuss, debate, and read and discuss some more. We are just so interested in every place, and we want to make the best decisions possible since this is a lot of money and vacation time we're dealing with. So, we're always looking for ways to narrow things down. And we just had an exciting discovery that has helped us!
As we have begun planning our trip I've been thinking back to the few, precious details my Grandpa was able to give me about the Italian branch of our family tree. Grandpa Petty gave a careful account (until his final years the man had a razor sharp memory and he always had his facts straight) and my eager little brain sucked in every word. I hadn’t forgotten any of it, and I believed everything he said, but he hadn't been able to tell me what part of Italy they came from and I have been wondering about it ever since I was a girl.
So yesterday on a whim I searched “genealogy Chiappa” and the number two (!) link that popped up on Google read as follows: Re: PETTY, CHIAPPA, ROBINSON, GIBBONS. Unbelievable! Someone out there inquired at ancestry.com about research on the Chiappa name and another person responded with a bunch of information collected from the Hallet Surname Board in Bermuda! Where my Grandpa Petty's family lived for several generations!
The details were fascinating (and totally congruent with what my Grandpa had told me twenty years ago). Pietro Chiappa was born in Lucca, Italy around 1830. He was an experienced stonemason and came to Bermuda as a young man where he did work on Trinity Church. In 1894 his oldest daughter, Mary Elizabeth Chiappa, married Robert Horris Petty. Their son was my Grandpa’s father, Elmo Petty.
Finally, an answer to where our Italian family came from! I didn’t think I could be more excited, but then I searched Lucca, Italy to see if we might want to make it part of our trip. Here are some photos.
In our guidebook Lucca is in the section titled "Small Gems". It's a walled city in the hills of northern Tuscany. Certain descriptors keep popping up in everything I read about the place, like: charismatic, elegant, eccentric, having sumptuous architecture, and a close relationship with the bountiful countryside. So, we're sold. We were already planning to spend time in Tuscany, and Lucca sounds like our kind of town. A pin has been placed on our Google map, and I'm already dreaming of experiencing the town where the Chiappas started out.
That was me who posted the information about the Chiappas and Pettys. Looks like we're related. :-)
ReplyDeletePietro Chiappa was my great-grandfather. Elmo Petty was my grandfather. He had seven siblings: John Henry, Horace, Edgar,Dorothy, Philip, Pauline, and Peter. Elmo was a plumber on Bermuda and went to Lowell, MA one summer to help with one of his brother's painting business. While there he met and eventually married my grandmother Alice Obrien. They lived in Bermuda and had two children: Francis and Rtia. The family moved back to Lowell when the children were in their late teens. Rita, my mother, married Daniel Cooney, my father.
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