On Her Way Home

Well, I can't exactly say it is going to her home, but Baby Fay is now finding her way back to family. If I have this correct, her photograph will soon be in the hands of her grandson. But first, there will have to be one additional stop: to the home of this grandson's sister-in-law, the researcher whose tree on Ancestry.com led me to contact her this week.

As has happened before on this new quest to reunite abandoned photographs with family members, it has been an encouraging and inspiring connection that evolved with this week's email contact. Of course, it always starts out no different than a sales cold call. Since I wouldn't make such a good sales person, the prospect of cold calling stops me in my tracks; if it weren't for the mission behind the contact with total strangers, I'm not sure I could pull it off.

There is, however, a compelling reason behind making these connections: I always think of how I wish someone would find a photograph of one of my ancestors. I'd be delighted with the news! I realize that, because those of us who delve into genealogy share the same outlook about our heritage, I have a good chance of connecting with someone—stranger or not—who feels exactly the same way as I do.

It's just that, this time, I wasn't sure how close the family connection might have been. As I mentioned yesterday, on this particular family tree, I couldn't tell how closely related the researcher was to Baby Fay or the Randall or Panuzzi families. Maybe this researcher wouldn't be interested. Maybe I'd never get a response. After all, that has happened before, with the series of photos I found for Alta Barnes and her family.

In less than twenty four hours, I had a response from the researcher, who, as it turns out, had put up the tree online for her brother-in-law. The two of them talk frequently and their families get together often. She would be glad to pass along the photograph to him.

Not only that, but this fellow genealogist shared an experience she had which proved inspiring to me. While she hasn't done quite the same as I am doing with orphaned family photographs, she found herself sharing in a similar way.

One day, she had been browsing in an antique store, and was looking over some old books when she noticed a "very nondescript looking book." It had a very plain looking new book jacket, but when she flipped it open, she realized it was something very different than what the cover indicated.

As she explains it,

when I opened it up it was a very old Bible and it had generations of marriages and births and deaths in it.

Some of the dates in this Bible reached back into the 1700s. I could so relate to what she mentioned next:

I was so taken by it that I had to find who it belonged to and I was able to find through the last known entry the family that this Bible belong to and was able to contact them just like you contacted me.

The killer was that the family Bible hadn't just ended up in the antique store because someone didn't want it. On the contrary, according to this researcher, the owner

found out that the Bible has been accidentally left in a box full of donated books when the person who was in charge of it...ended up having to move.

What was irrevocably lost through mishap was inexplicably retrieved through one of those random acts of genealogical kindness—the hallmark of a community of researchers who believe in giving back. Perhaps that's why this researcher remarked that she and I are "kindred spirits." The experience made such an impact on her that she now makes it a practice to "always look at the books with the plain binding."

As this researcher observed in her email to me, "It makes the heart feel good when you’re able to get back something that belonged to somebody."

So far, in rescuing these few photographs I've found over the past year, I've found that to be true, myself. The response has always been so positive. And there certainly is no lack of supply of hundred year old photographs containing enough clues to send them back home.

Searching Through the Next Generation

My hope for most weekends is for a time when I can set aside the usual routine and delve into the research problems that have me stumped. Of course, that was my hope last week, despite writing about missing the primo genealogical event of the year, or how I am doing my small part to give back to the genealogical community.

My focus right now is in finding a way to return an abandoned photograph of baby Fayetta Mae Randall and her young mother to a family member who would appreciate having it.

I am not doing so well with that current goal. Besides stumbling upon the tragic story of Fay's uncle and how he and his wife suddenly lost their lives just before Christmas in 1940, I haven't really figured out just how Fay, a girl from Elko, Nevada, ended up marrying an Italian immigrant's son in the Bay area of northern California.

But why mull over getting stuck in our research? There are other clues to pursue. We may not learn how Fay and Joseph Panuzzi first met, but we do know they got married. And they had three children—two of whom are still out there...somewhere.

It would be wonderful if this little Azo picture postcard of their mother and grandmother could find its way to either of them. That would be the ideal. In the meantime, I'm having a hard time, given the array of fellow researchers who have their family trees posted at Ancestry.com, finding one family historian who also happens to be a close relative to Fay.

Meanwhile, best I can tell, not only did Fay and her sisters remain in the Bay area for the rest of their lives, but so did Fay's husband and children—at least for as long as Fay herself was still here.

It was at the relatively young age of fifty seven that Fayetta Mae Randall Panuzzi passed away in Contra Costa County, California. That was in December of 1974.

Less than two years later, Fay's mother—the woman writing on that photo postcard of her infant daughter back in 1917—by then remarried, passed away near the end of May, 1976.

Almost twenty five years to the day after losing his wife, Joseph Panuzzi died in December of 1999, by then having left the Bay area for the northern reaches of California.

I doubt that little postcard made its way to the Jackson, California, antique store where I found it from the liquidated estate of Joseph and Fayetta Panuzzi. Perhaps it found its way there from the belongings of the woman for whom the postcard was originally intended: someone living in a tiny spot in Nevada called Red House—a woman known as Mrs. Henry Keefe.

 

Back and Forth

While many researchers prefer to delve into their direct line of ancestry, it sometimes becomes helpful to keep an eye on what's been happening on those collateral lines—the families of the previous generation's siblings. That turns out to be the case in tracking the whereabouts of the Elko, Nevada, high school graduate we were once introduced to as baby Fay.

In 1939, Fayetta Mae Randall was attending school in Nevada. By 1940, however, she was a married woman in northern California—married, incidentally, to a man born and raised in California, not Nevada. How did they meet?

Admittedly, we've already seen that baby Fay once lived in San Francisco, but we also saw that that was a short-lived residence during her toddler years—hardly the time of life for a budding romance. The rest of her childhood was spent in Elko. What was the nexus?

The man she married, Joseph Olindo Panuzzi, was the son of Italian immigrants Pasquale and Carolina Panuzzi, who, not surprisingly, operated a grocery store in the unincorporated area of Contra Costa County. Ever since their arrival in America, the family had been in the same northern California county.

It took some exploration through baby Fay's family tree to discover that there were other connections between her Nevada family and the Bay area. Back at the time of the 1920 census—that same year in which Fayetta lived in San Francisco with her parents, Charles and Hallie Kleckner Randall—baby Fay's maternal grandmother had shown up in a census record in California, not in the expected Nevada where the woman's husband and other children resided. By 1920, Hallie's sister, Fay's aunt Birdie, had married, then divorced, then remarried her husband in nearby Alameda County, and apparently needed assistance with the household, including her infant twins.

In that year of family upheaval when Hallie's mom was across the Bay in Oakland with Birdie and her husband, Percy Calcote, Mrs. Kleckner had brought along her son Clifton, then only eleven. I'm sure, upon his mother's return home to Elko, Clifton went with her. However, by the time of the next census, he was back in California, a single working man residing in San Francisco.

If it weren't for one detail in the 1940 census, we wouldn't have known that, in the midst of those years in which Clifton showed up as a resident in San Francisco, he actually spent some time back home in Elko. Fortunately, that one census question—"In what place did this person live on April 1, 1935?"—revealed that he was back in Elko.

He wasn't the only one in his household who was back in Elko in 1935. By 1940, Clifton was married, and his wife had also stated that she had been living in Elko in 1935. Could it have been upon the couple's return to California that Fayetta traveled with them? 

Though Fayetta's young uncle, the newlywed Clifton, was back in San Francisco, that was not for long. By the end of the year, and at the age of only thirty one, Clifton was dead, succumbing on Christmas Eve, only two days after his wife's death, from injuries sustained when their car was struck by a Southern Pacific streamliner.

Clifton's older sister, the twice-married Birdie, had once again divorced her husband, returned to Elko, married another man and subsequently moved to Washington, so she was no longer a connection to California. The rest of the Kleckner siblings had remained in Elko. Not until decades later would Fayetta's mother return to California. But for the mystery nexus between Clifton's niece Fayetta and the son of an Italian immigrant in Contra Costa county, Fayetta would probably have been back in Elko, as well.