back to Family Stories, Fall 2021
by Gigi Schimpf
My name is Gigi Schimpf, and I am a Sophomore at Villanova. This semester I took a very interesting course, MSE 2212 Genealogy: All in Your Family. Throughout the semester, I used traditional and genetic genealogy through Ancestry to piece together my family tree. I was excited and a little nervous to see if I might be one of those people who discovers some groundbreaking family secret through my DNA test. While most of the information was not surprising to me, there were a few interesting stories that I learned along the way.
The most interesting story that I came across was my half grandaunt on my paternal grandmother’s side, Emma Teresa Ferrante. Going into this semester, I knew that most of my prior knowledge of my family history was on my mother’s side due to a long and well documented family history on that side of the family. I was also aware that I did not have a lot of information covering my father’s side to start with and I knew it would be something I would need to do a lot of work on. I also knew that while it would be easy to fill in any gaps on my mother’s side, it would be significantly more difficult on my father’s side since both my father and his mother, my grandmother, both passed away a few years ago. I was not too worried about this though, because I thought that I knew a good amount about the last three generations on my father’s side. That’s why, when reading a U.S. census to use as documentation for my grandmother’s family, I was surprised to see Emma listed as a sister of my grandmother in addition to the sisters that I already knew about.
After finding her name, I did some research about her and was able to find that she shared a father, Harry Ferrante, with my grandmother and had a woman named Emma Guyon listed as her mother, who was not my great grandmother. I was able to conclude from this that she was my half grandaunt, which was later confirmed by my only grandaunt who is still alive today. My grandaunt said that Emma was born out of wedlock when her mother was only 18, so her father took care of her and raised her with his future wife and mother of the rest of his children, my great grandmother Irma. My grandaunt said that due to the age difference between Emma and the rest of the siblings, they were never close growing up, which is probably why I had never heard of her.
This was the most interesting discovery and the most meaningful one for me as well. This discovery, although not a discovery for the whole family, was one that made me feel more connected to my father’s side of the family. I was able to feel more connected not only to him and my grandmother through this discovery, but also my grandaunt who helped me through the discovery as well. Although this was not some groundbreaking story that shook our family to the core, it was enough for me to just be able to feel more connected to my extended family, both those living and those who have already passed away.
