Today we spent the entire day at Casale Corte Cerro. The entire day was orchestrated by Heavenly Father to help us find the maximum amount of records possible. Everything went perfectly, and there were way too many "coincidences" for it to have been really coincidence.
To save money we left the house in Feriolo and walked to the halfway point between Feriolo and Casale Corte Cerro. There we took a bus to the bottom of the mountain that Casale CC is on. We hitch hiked up the mountain so that we wouldn't have to walk the two kilometer windy road up the mountain. When we got to CCC, we went straight to the Comune (town hall). We walked into the records office and asked to see the civil records. There was an awesome group of women in there, and they listened to our story with great interest. They went through the records and found us a TON of our family records! We got the death certificates of the father and mother of the Cattaneo family, and of one of their kids. We got the birth records of most of the kids also. While we were there, the Comune got a phone call. It was that old lady that we met on the street our first day here at CCC! Quick back story in case I forgot to tell that story: Our first day here at CCC (last saturday) right after sitting in on Mass in the church, we went into a bar to use the bathroom. We started talking to the owner of the bar, a man called Antonio, who was super nice. We asked him if he knew any Cattaneos in this town that might be descendants of our people. He said "hmm, maybe not. But I bet those ladies do!" He went outside with us and stopped two super ancient ladies walking down the street together. We told them our story, and asked them if they knew any Cattaneos. One of them said, "Why, yes! I went to school with a Cattaneo!" She couldn't quite remember the information, but said she'd think about it. Fast forward to today in the Comune. The phone rings, and it was that old lady! She had been calling the Comune every day since last Saturday, hoping to catch us there, because she had more information! She came down to the Comune and gave us a hand-written list of every Cattaneo she ever knew in the town, and their entire families! What a "coincidence", right? We were extremely happy! After we got all of our information, one of the ladies working in the records office, Laura, wanted to take us out to lunch. We hopped in her car and when to the only restaurant in the village. We laughed when we saw that it was closed for lunch, just like everything else. Since the village is so small that there's not even a real super market, she drove us over to a nearby town that had a pizzeria, and we ate there. While we ate, she told us about how she always wanted to travel, and loved interacting with foreigners, because she felt suffocated living in a teeny village her whole life. After lunch, since we knew the priest was busy for a few more hours, we walked through the village, taking pictures. We walked to the street where, according to the death record, our Cattaneo family lived. It was right across from a teeny church. We took pictures, and walked around, imagining our ancestors walking those very same streets every single day. It was a very special moment.
We knew that the priest couldn't help us until later because he was busy with a funeral, so we decided to go see the funeral. We waited outside the church and listened to the congregation inside sing the hymns and the mass. It was the funeral of an old nun, and half the village were related to her, and the other half of the village showed up anyways, so the little church was packed.
The coffin bearers came out of the church with the coffin, and the entire congregation followed them out. We fell into line with the congregation as they followed the coffin bearers through the little streets towards the cemetery, singing hymns and chanting the prayer to the Virgin Mary. As we walked, out of pure "coincidence" once more, a lady in the procession fell in next to us and began talking to us in Spanish, in a perfect Argentine accent. A week before our trip, we had found a blog entry on Casale Corte Cerro's historian's blog about Palmira Cattaneo, and I had left a comment mentioning that we were coming to look for the records of Palmira's family. This lady and her husband had read my comment and added me on facebook. She recognized me from my facebook picture, and they had been expecting us. She is Italian, but she was one of the many many Italians who fled to Argentina right after WWII, and she had lived most of her young adult life in Argentina. She walked with us all the way to the cemetery, where we witnessed a beautiful ceremony. We were appreciating being one of the few outsiders to ever be able to witness a small village funeral like that one. The priest gave a beautiful speech as the entire village gathered around the grave site, and they prayed and sang as the coffin was lowered into the grave. From the crowd, those two old ladies that had called the Comune looking for us came up to us and greeted us, glad that we could make it to the funeral.
After the funeral, Dina (the Italian-Argentine lady) accompanied us to the priest's house. He let us in like before to look at the records. Last time we were here, he didn't really want us to touch the records, and looked it all up himself. But this time, since Dina was with us, he allowed us to look through the old books ourselves, and even left the room for a while. We found so many useful records, including... the marriage certificate of Giuseppe Cattaneo and Angela Contini! On that record, it had both of their parents, and their grandparents! We extended our tree back a generation! We also found several kids of Pietro Giuseppe Cattaneo's brothers and sisters. We were so excited, we could barely believe it! We also found key little pieces of information that filled in the missing puzzle pieces as to exactly which villages their parents were from, and which last names to look for. Now we can go to Novara and visit those little villages where Giuseppe Cattaneo and Angela Contini were, and know exactly what we're looking for! There's no way we would have been able to have the time to look through all those books without Dina there! If she hadn't been there, the priest wouldn't have let us alone with the books, and he wouldn't have had the patience to go through all the books by himself, so we probably wouldn't have found those records. What a blessing! Just like we did for the women at the Comune, we left the priest with a nice thank you letter and took a picture with him.
Afterwards, we accompanied Dina all the way across the village to her house, where we met her husband Enzo. He's Italian, and never lived in Argentina for an extended period of time, but he also spoke nearly perfect Argentine Spanish, because he loves Argentina a lot and goes to visit it all the time with his wife. They invited us in to drink Mate with them, and we ended up staying for dinner with them. Dina is an extremely faithful Catholic, and we talked for a long time about society, the attack on the family, and the weakening of moral values in today's culture. After dinner, just like I would do on my mission, I shared a bible verse with them, Romans 8:31, 35, 38-39, about how we don't need to fear the bad things in this world as long as we have the Lord on our side. She was so touched by my scripture that she asked me if I'd ever considered being a priest. I told her that I had thought about it, but that I really wanted to get married someday, so it wasn't in my plans :)
At the end of the evening, Enzo took us home. We couldn't believe how every single piece of today had been orchestrated perfectly by the Lord to help us find all the records that we were looking for. Now the Italian lines on our tree aren't just a few people anymore!
Anyways, you can look at the pictures of today here. Tomorrow we're off to Novara to find the next generation's records!
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