Findmypast, swept

Cosulich is not a name that turns up by accident. It is one of the great shipowning families of the Austrian Littoral — Lussinpiccolo and Trieste, and in time the Cosulich Line. And Cardiff in 1876 is the coal port of the world, where the Adriatic sailing fleet went to load. Two Austrian-Adriatic maritime families marrying in a Catholic church in a Welsh coal port is the sea, not migration.

Nothing yet joins Emerico to this archive's own people. But it is the first record of the name in Wales, and it sits exactly where the Lloyd's List work already pointed.

And it is orderable. Marietta Cosulich appears exactly once in the whole of Findmypast — this marriage — and the second entry for it is the civil register, not the parish one: England & Wales Marriages, Cardiff district, Q3 1876, volume 11A, page 428, where the GRO clerk read his name as «Emmerico Defrancrschi». The certificate behind that reference gives both ages, both residences, both occupations and the witnesses. If Emerico is a master or a mate, his occupation joins this marriage to the Lloyd's List work outright. Written up as an errand.

And every one of them is a woman. Filomena Franceschi Dávila de Padilla. Carmen Callejo y Ferrer de Franceschi. Catalina Juliani de Franceschi. Ramona Mato de Franceschi. Read them in Spanish and the reason is plain: «de» here is the marital particle, not the Italian nobiliary one. A woman born Callejo y Ferrer who marries a Franceschi is indexed de Franceschi; a woman born Franceschi who marries a Padilla keeps Franceschi as her first surname. A search for «de Franceschi» catches every married woman of the family and not one of its men, who are filed under plain Franceschi.

So the cluster is real and this archive has been looking at it through a keyhole. It is a Franceschi family, not a De Franceschi one, and the surname this site is built on is not the surname in it. Nineteenth-century Corsican emigration to Puerto Rico is well documented, and Corsica is already here as a parallel rather than a connection — which is still the right word for this.

And then the census itself answered it. Two of the San Lorenzo women were read in full: Cármen Colón de Franceschi, twenty-three, and Aurora Cruz de Franceschi, twenty-five. Both are born in Puerto Rico; both have a father and a mother born in Puerto Rico; both are entered as esposa, the wife; and the enumerator records both as Black.

So the thread closes. These are Afro-Puerto Rican women married to men called Franceschi, in a family that was already two generations on the island in 1920. The surname very probably did reach Puerto Rico with the Corsican settlement of the nineteenth century — that much is well documented and it is why Corsica is on this site at all — but by 1920 it is a Puerto Rican surname, and the people carrying it here are not immigrants and are not related to this family.

This page said «a Puerto Rican cluster of the name» when it was first published on 16 September. It was the name minus its particle, and then it was not the name at all.

Two brothers baptised at San Marco di Palazzo, Napoli in 1842 and 1844, and a sister born at Napoli in 1855, all three children of Carmine de Franceschi and Angiola Conti. A Valentino Mario born at Vicenza in 1900 to Florindo and Angela Torresan. A Lucia Caterina born the same year in the frazione Settecà, who married at Torri di Quartesolo and died at Vicenza in 1967. A Domenico, born 1829 and buried at Vicenza in 1900, son of Carlo and Teresa Facco.

Napoli and Vicenza. Not Istria, not Carnia, not the Kvarner. Written down so that nobody opens these three sets again expecting the family in them.

Memphis, Tennessee — nine children and a German wife. Antonio De Franceski, born 1875 in Italy, arrived 1902, in the 19th Ward of Memphis by 1910 with Bertha, born in Germany. Both his parents born in Italy. The same household is there in 1930 as Anthony De Franceschi, and again in 1940: Pietro, Aurora, Alba, Albert, Flora, Estelle, Serena, Juliet, Romeo and a second Anthony, born between 1904 and 1917. Twenty-one records across three censuses.

The 1910 sheet spells them «de Franceski» — the fused form this family uses and almost nobody else does. And born in Italy in 1875, left in 1902 is the Carnian emigration window exactly. Istria in 1875 was Austria and an American enumerator would have written Austria.

Chicago — a household with a document at every stage. Giovanni / John De Franceschi, born 1895 in Italy, head of a household at Chicago in the 1930 census with Freedia (1904) and the children Thersa (1925) and Ateo (1926). Naturalised at Chicago in 1937 — NARA M1285, roll 41. Buried 12 April 1951 at St Joseph's Cemetery, River Grove, Cook County. Frieda outlived him to 1988; Attilio F Defranceschi, 1925–2010, is almost certainly the son the census wrote as Ateo.

Neither census says more than «Italy». The petition behind the Chicago naturalisation does — a naturalisation petition names the comune — and it is orderable from NARA with the roll number above. Written up as an errand.

The index does not say whom she married. Findmypast's own marriage finder offers three names from the same page: Helen Whittall, Frederick P Wilkinson, Reginald E Turrell — and Whittall is the Levantine British merchant house of Smyrna, the same kind of world as Cardiff and the Cosulich: an Adriatic-and-Levant trading network with a British consulate in the middle of it.

It is not resolved and this page will not pretend it is. A consular marriage certificate would name her father, which is the only thing that could join her to anybody here.