Our family ties with Ilio, Lara and Mauro Spadoni et al resolved

Ilio Spadoni

After some initial frustration, I found the link that connects the family of Ilio Spadoni of Ponte Buggianese to ours. The problem was that Ilio didn’t have quite the steel-trap memory that I thought he did. He had given me the wrong birth date for his grandfather Francesco and the wrong wife for his great grandfather Virgilio.

Lara Spadoni

When I stopped by Ilio’s house to ask for additional information, I talked to his sister Lara, because Ilio was out working in his fields. She looked at the info that Ilio had given me and said that the wife of great grandfather Virgilio had been Emilia Benedetti, not Annuziata Foderi. The latter had instead been married to one of Virgilio’s brothers, she said. Once I had this information, and the correct birth date for Francesco (which I found in the baptismal records of Ponte Buggianese), the clerk at Buggiano found the documents I needed to connect Ilio and Lara’s family to our tree.

Mauro Spadoni

Once again, though, the tie is distant, as it has been with many of the Spadoni families I have found here. Our nearest common ancestor is Francesco Spadoni, born around 1455. I had hoped to find that they had descended from one of the brothers of my great great grandfather Pellegrino Spadoni.

Yesterday I went back and met with Lara, Ilio, their brother Mauro, and Ilio’s wife Rosanna. I gave them a detailed line of descent dating back to 1430, showing all the names and dates I have for their ancestors. Ilio and Lara argued briefly over whether their great grandmother had been Emilia Benedetti or Annuziata Foderi. In the end, Ilio realized that he had remembered poorly and that Lara and the documents I had found were correct.

I also explained how the first Spadoni family of Stignano had probably been land owners and somewhat wealthy, because one of the three tombs beneath the floor of the church of Stignano is for the early Spadoni family. Ilio said that likely some of the first Spadoni families to move to Ponte Buggianese had been land owners, but in the passage of time, they had met with economic problems and also had to divide the land among their many sons. His nearest ancestors had been tenant farmers, as had most of the Spadoni families I’ve found in the region.

Lucia Spadoni x 2

When Lucy and I went to the weekly market in Ponte Buggianese today, we stopped at the hairdressing salon of Lucia, one of Ilio and Rosanna’s daughters. Lucy said that if she hadn’t already made an appointment with her regular hair dresser in Gig Harbor, she probably would have had Lucia cut her hair—one Lucia Spadoni cutting the hair of another.