M-A=PQ where M=Marriage and...Or,: Working Backwards from that Italian Marriage Document

I promise the math involved here in minimal.

Remember the marriage certificate from the last post? It gave us some key information, namely that Innocenzo Federici's mother, Maria Marchisella, was dead at the time of his marriage, and he was 20 when he got married. Here's that document again for reference:

Last Time on Christina Creates Reference Guides in MS Paint

M-A=TPQ

Or:

Year of Marriage - Age at time of Marriage = Terminus Postquem (date after which) Maria Marchisella died.

So we know from this that to find her death record we should be looking between the years 1877 and 1897, roughly. The records also show that Maria Marchisella was a resident "in life" of Garaguso. Chances are this means she died there too.

Fast forward a little: You've gone paging through all those documents, scanning the last images (which usually are lists of all those who died in a given year), or, if you're lucky, your town has an Indici Decennali for the years in question. (Indici Decennali are indexes spanning about ten years with lists of all those who died in a given year collated in one big 'ol volume.)

However you found it, you found it. Huzzah! Now what?

If you've stuck with this unpanned series thus far, you can probably guess that the first set of info at the top tells us the date of the record, followed by some formal language around who reported the death:

This may or may not be a relative. It might be a neighbor. It might not be. But it's always worth a scan - juuuussstttt in case it connects to something. (There's a story about how that played into my own family's history! Mayhaps in a future post...)

Now the meat. The next section tells us the date, time, place of death. Remember, the reporting of the death may not have occured on the same day as the death.

Here's what this section roughly translates to:

"....who told me that at the hour [ante or post]-meridian* [hour] and [minutes] of [day; here it says "yesterday"] in the house located in [place] at number [number if applicable here], died [name of deceased], of [number] years, [profession], resident of [town], born in [town],..."

*aka A.M. or P.M.

But wait! There's more!

In the longest sentence ever, we get the information about the parents too:

"...of [name of father; here we also have a 'fu' indicate "the late"], [profession of father], housed in [name of town], and of [name of mother], [profession], housed in [town]."

You'll notice there's a little extra after the town name in this example. It reads " - moglia di Federico Giuseppe." This means "wife of Giuseppe Federico." (For whatever reason, my family could not settle on whether it was "Federico" or "Federici" even in official documents). This is in reference to Maria Marchisella, not Maria Luigia Carbone her mother, after whose litany of personal details this note appears.

Then, below, as always, you've got you're witnesses, some signatures, yadda yadda yadda.

Disappointingly, the cause of death doesn't seem to be recorded usually - in fact I have yet to encounter a cause of death noted. That part will have to remain a mystery, though in some cases there are clues: does the date of death for a woman come relatively soon after the birth of her youngest child? Then it's probably a death due to childbirth. Do several family members die close together? Could be an illness spreading through the family, or even the town. This is the part where some guess-work comes into play, and requires exploring multiple records, including glancing at those that may not be directly related to your family search. But that's the fun of this, right?

....right, guys?