back to Family Stories, Fall 2021
by Meredith Foley
Over the past semester, I have engaged in deep research about my family history, exploring the past of my ancestors through documentation and conversations with living relatives. I sent in my DNA to Ancestry in the summer, so when the semester began, my DNA was ready for me to utilize when building my family tree. My ethnicity estimate computed surprising results for me, but it was very useful information when it came to adding members to my family tree. Also, through Ancestry’s DNA Match function, I was able to connect with relatives I didn’t even know I had and we were able to share information we had about our ancestors. After all of my research, I found the past of my great-great grandfather, Giovanni B Tiberi Sr (1887-1985), was particularly intriguing to me.
My great-great grandfather Giovanni came to the United States from Italy when he was 16 years old and settled in Chicago. He later went back to Italy to bring my great-great grandmother Beatrice Luisa (Beatrice Louise) Caruso (1894-1951) to the United States to live with him. I found a lot of really interesting documents that tell parts of my grandfather’s life story. After talking with my living relatives about my findings, I was able to put the puzzle pieces together and better understand Giovanni’s past.
I found a newspaper article talking about how Giovanni, known as John in America, had some sort of tie to Al Capone and the Mafia. In this article, it talked about how he wrote letters to the parole board on behalf of some of Capone’s known gangsters. I brought up this article in a conversation with my grandfather, John B Tiberi III (1937-living), and he said that he would advocate for these gangsters and ensure that when they were let out of jail he would give them work and make sure they were good citizens. This article questions if Giovanni received any benefits from the union for doing this. I am not sure if he did receive benefits, but I
learned from my grandfather that he was great friends with Peter Fosco (named in the article as “Democratic boss of the 1st ward and head of a sewer and tunnel workers’ union) as well as Al Capone.
Something interesting that I found out when constructing my family tree was that Giovanni had a son named Alphonso in 1910, but he died at birth. A few years later in 1913, Giovanni and Beatrice gave birth to a girl and named her Alphonsine. I asked my grandfather if he knew anything about the similarities between their names, and he said that Giovanni wanted to name one of his children after Al Capone because he respected him so much and wanted to pay homage to him.
