Agatha Giacobbi

Very impressed with the team effort. Well done all.
Very sad that she died so young though. Julie

[Mary from Italy]

Originally Posted by Merry

I wonder what else there is to know?? *runs out quickly*

Well, there is still a bit more to find.

As Libby says, we still need Agatha's burial. Unfortunately, 19th century burials at St Eugene's RC cemetery in Algiers aren't listed online, but I'll see if I can find out anything else.

And I forgot to say yesterday that the entry for François' birth that I linked to is only the birth index; there will also be a register entry showing his parents' names (as l luck would have it, civil registration began in France in 1792, and I believe the clergy also continued to keep their own records after that date).

So far, the French archives have only put the Tables Décennales (10-year indexes) for Cervione online for 1813; the online registers for Cervione only start in 1863, so I hope the earlier registers will be put online later.

I've checked the FamilySearch catalogue, but it doesn't look as though they've filmed the registers.

[Mary from Italy]

Fromthe Familyearch Wiki about Corsica.

Corse. Genoa (now part of Italy) sold the island of Corse to France in 1768. Some family surnames were not fixed until end of the eighteenth century. The records were kept in Latin or Italian, and starting in 1820 they are kept in French. The Family History Library has not yet obtained any microfilm of civil registration from Corse.

https://familysearch.org/learn/wiki/..._Vital_Records

So François' birth record will presumably be in Latin.

I noticed in the index that all the forenames were in French, although the island had been Italian until fairly recently. I would guess that was imposed by the French authorities.

[Mary from Italy]

I'm beginning to find quite a bit of information about François' family (parents and siblings).

Do you want me to post it on this thread, Libby, or would you like to start a new Giacobbi thread, and we'll keep this one for anything we find about Agatha's burial and any other information that might come to light about her?

[HarrysMum]

Oooh thanks Mary. I don't mind......maybe a new one would be better.

Don't go out of your way though......not saying I am not interested. I think I like Mr Giacobbi more than I like Mr Clark.

[Mary from Italy]

There's a rather sad epilogue to the story, because I'm afraid I can make a good guess at what Agatha died of.

I've been researching François' relatives, who I'll put on a separate thread for you, and I discovered that he had a brother Dominique, who married in Algiers in 1843. His wife, Laure, was the same age as Agatha, and died just a month after her.

The death registers never include the cause of death, but as the two deaths were so close together, I wondered if there might have been an epidemic going round, and I found this:

Asiatic Cholera Pandemic of 1846-63

The spring of 1849 began with another round of cholera explosions. France and Italy were infected, as were Algeria and Tunisia in North Africa.

http://www.ph.ucla.edu/epi/snow/pandemic1846-63.html

It reminded me a bit of Camus' novel La Peste (the Plague), and sure enough, Wikipedia says that the novel (a fictional story of plague affecting the town of Oran, Algeria in 1947) is believed to be based on the cholera epidemic that killed a large percentage of Oran's population in 1849.

So poor Agatha and her sister-in-law were probably just in the wrong place at the wrong time.

[HarrysMum]

Mary....I was reading about the cholera epidemic in Algeria last night.

I think it's fairly safe to assume that is what caused Agatha death. I think had it been anything "out of the ordinary" there would have been a note on that death record.

What an interesting thread, and so many finds by dedicated "genies". Still reading up about it.

[Mary from Italy]

If you remember, I couldn't work out the informant Cailly's address, but I've got it now, because I've found something very similar in the Cervione parish records; I'm pretty certain that the scrawl that looks a bit like Arabic writing is actually a very stylised "N°", so he lived at no. 7 Rue Boutin.

As Agatha and François, plus his brother Dominique and wife Laure, all lived at that address, I would guess it was a building divided into apartments or a compound, possibly reserved for civil servants and such like.

[Mary from Italy]

Sorry, just deleted a message because I realised the information I posted had already been found ages ago on a different thread. I'll repost a query there.