Silvio and Marco Dalpiaz

The great thing about retirement is that I can (and do) spend ALL DAY LONG doing family history research.  The difficult part about retirement is that this research sends me off on tangents that get so tangled up that I have to shake my head to remember where I started.  Sometimes these tangents get so tangled that I forget to blog.  Well, I don't forget because my research is often intended to share on the newest blog post but when it gets so tangled that I forget where I started can lead to writer's block.  An example follows! :)

There is a website that contains digitzed newspaper articles largely from small town newspapers in New York State:  www.fultonhistory.com  I'm telling you, that website is a bigger time-sucker than Facebook.  Anyhow, once in a while I randomly search "Dalpiaz" to see what happens.  One of the items that comes up repeatedly are mentions to the property your father owned in the Watertown NY area when you were children.  Another name shows up in those same articles:  Marco Dalpiaz.  I thought it too much of a coincidence that Marco and your father were not related in some way.  So, I decided to track it down.  And so began the tangled road of research.

Marco Dalpiaz was politically active in his hometown of Tupper Lake, so his name appears frequently.  But this article caught my attention:

I remembered running across Silvio Dalpiaz in Lafferty Ohio in census records and newspaper articles about his death.  Marco's dad is a Dalpiaz miner from Lafferty Ohio????  He must be related.  I went  through my notes and see that Aunt Josie told me once that this Silvio was a "distant cousin" to Costante.  The story of the coal mine strike and Silvio's death is an important part of American history.

Although I cannot yet confirm for certain that this Silvio and his son Marco are relatives, I trust Aunt Josie when she says they are.  In your handy dandy handwritten Dalpiaz family tree headed up by Federico (1730), I think it likely that this Silvio is the 3rd child of Fortunato Dalpiaz and his second wife Maria Odorizzi (Fortunato son of Pietro (1815) son of Federico (1765). 

It's amazing to me that the sons of the immigrants Costante and Silvio found themselves near one another in far upstate New York.  It cannot be a coincidence that your father bought property in that part of New York State.  Furthermore, I am humbled by the facts I find about our families that place them in critical points in American history.  I'd feel better finding proof positive of this relationship but I'll settle for the good feelings the story itself generates.