There are a lot of people who enjoy tracing their family history. They used to spend years tracing their ancestry the old fashioned way–through public records. That was effective, but very time consuming. My family’s records were in far away places in another language, so my efforts were easily thwarted.
My wife, Lori, was a Douglas before she married me and became a Venturini by marriage. The Douglas Clan was from Scotland. The Scots kept very good records, and members of Lori’s family spent many years and many vacations with one thing on their agenda–to trace the family tree as far back as possible. They were quite successful as they went all the way back to the 1100’s. They found a direct relationship to some famous people and events in history. Her genealogy track traced them to the loser of the famous Lincoln-Douglas debates. A relative was hung during the Salem witch trials. Her family came to America on the Mayflower. Someone also fought alongside Robert the Bruce in a Holy Crusade.
It is pretty cool to look at the history of your family and how it may or may not have affected your life today, or how they may or may not have played an important role in history. uncovering famous or colorful characters make the task of tracing a family tree a lot more fun.
I was always disappointed that my ancestors could not be traced back any further than my grandfather. My surname is Venturini. I am of Italian origin. There are some relatively famous Venturini’s in America today. Tisha Venturini played on the U.S. Women’s World and Olympic champion soccer teams. Another Mike Venturini is a top animator at Pixar–the company that makes those excellent cartoon movies. But we could never find a link to these or any other people with the same last name because we could not get past my grandfather.
Aside from my brothers and their families, we could find no branch that connected us to any of them in any way. It was if my grandfather had no link to anyone in history–not even his parents! It just seemed odd, especially with the ease of use of many ancestry websites and the knowledge contained in the world wide web.
I had always been told that in Italian, Venturini meant “adventurer”. I assumed that there must have been a great traveler or explorer hiding somewhere in the family tree. We kept digging, but still got stuck at grampa Frank, because he was an “only” child and my dad was his “only” male offspring.
Then one day, my wife, discovered that people with the name Venturini had one thing in
common. The name did not translate as “adventurers”, but “wanderers”. They all shared the same last name because it was the name that was given to everybody in Italian orphanages!
Mike Venturini – Innkeeper
“Life is good in Jonesville”