Adventures in Sicily

So...I'm back after a brief blogging "hiatus"! February and March are busy months in our household...with three birthdays, an anniversary, and that other "Hallmark" holiday we celebrate on the 14th :). Feel like I'm finally coming up for air! In the past few weeks, my daily break time (when I usually do most of my research) has been otherwise occupied by the adventures or mis-adventures of our crazy family.

You may or may not know....but we currently live in Sicily! Just outside of Catania, Sicily to be exact. For any fellow genealogists whose ancestors or ethnicity can be traced to particular areas of Sicily, I'm more than willing to snap photos of places and spaces if you wish. Just send me a message, and I'll see what I can do.

Given my lack of exciting research news to post (currently in what I'm calling a "dry season" for groundbreaking revelations)...here are a few photos from our family outing today to a beautiful city on the island - Cefalu. Have relatives from this quaint seaside town? If so, maybe these photos will add to your mental imagery of their hometown!

Cefalu lungomare (seaside)...the ocean was wild today!

Piazza Duomo (cathedral square)

Between the rains!

Cefalu is located on the Northern coast of Sicily - along the Tyrrhenean Sea. Set between Palermo (the top left corner of Sicily) and Messina (the top right corner), it is a lovely tourist destination - and a must-see if you ever make a trip to this diverse island. Norman architecture, Roman and Greek archeological artifacts at the Museo Madralisca, plenty of delicious restaurants and cafes, and definitely a beach-going vibe.

Enjoy! I typically post photos from our adventures on our family blog - Just Marvelous - but thought I'd share today's trek to Cefalu. We braved wind, rain, hail, and sunshine! So glad we did.

Have a great weekend...back to genealogy soon!

Comments

Pay It Forward

A bit of joy for my Friday! Our mail delivery within our little military community here in Sicily is so.very.sloooooow. What makes it maddening is that it can be a combination of super-fast and super-slow...so no one seems to balk at the trend of inconsistency. Maybe I complain enough for everyone :). I'm in the middle of a few genealogical mysteries - one of them being the family origins of a Mr. Joseph W. Daly, a paternal great-grandfather of my husband. Like most of the challenging parts of our tree, I hit a wall with Joseph a few months back and promptly put him aside when something a little more lucrative came along. For sake of ease. Now, we meet again. For this one, I even consulted a few curious friends. I felt like maybe I wasn't searching deep enough or with the right "keywords" online or in my genealogy search engines. Some researchers have favored methodologies for searching, and I felt I needed to branch out. One friend immediately suggest

Maritime Monday

Instead of jumping right into the multi-generational tradition of service in the US Navy among my husband's relatives (would have been too obvious? No?)...I'll kick off the first of my "Maritime Monday" posts with a nod at one of my several German immigrant ancestors. Ship travel? Check! On 18 Septemer 1868, my 3rd great-grandfather Anselmus Ostholthoff arrived in New York aboard the German steam ship "Smidt" after a trans-Atlantic journey from Andervenne, Germany. His traveling companions - wife Maria Anna (Toepke) Ostholthoff, their eldest son Johan Gerhard (2 years), and daughter Anna Maria (9 months). The following snippet from their arrival documentation [1] indicates that Anselmus ("Selmus") was a farmer from Andervenne. His stated destination after New York: Virgina. This is curious to me, because I have record of Anselmus living in Cincinnati, Ohio in 1870 [2] . At this point, Mr. Ostholthoff is no longer working as a farmer

Chicken or Duck?

I'm feeling a little scattered these days. Could be the breezy Fall weather - a wonderful sight after three long years in Sicily's arid climate. Instead of olive and blood orange trees, I'm gazing out of my kitchen window appreciating our collection of hardwoods. Leaves are everywhere, and the piles are only going to get bigger. I am treasuring every last one. My research brain is also a bit scattered. A little genetic genealogy over here...a little "other people's genealogy" over there. Most of this is flat-out procrastination from dealing with the pile of photos I need to archive and the folder of newly-located probate records to transcribe. There's also that little thing of needing to manage my household. Oh, and clean. And feed children :). In the meantime, I stumbled upon a snippet from the Reading Times (A Web Footed Chicken (1890, August 4). The Reading Times , p. 1. Retrieved from www.newspapers.com)). Sarah M. LUDEN is a 4th gre

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