1844-1882), was born in Madeira and came with her family to St Kitts in the 1850s, as indentured farm laborers. My husband’s great great-grandmother, Eliza de Meneses Cabral (abt. I immediately recognized an overlap there with my husband’s family tree, although the link is by marriage, not by blood. The second surprise in the records was the Kittitian woman’s maiden name – Laplace. The entire Kittitian population is about the size of the average American town, and the number that emigrated to the US is a fraction of that, so the chances of an Italian American man (in New York City, as it happens) marrying a lady from St Kitts is quite small. So what’s the connection? Looking at census, birth and death records for my Italian-American friend, I was shocked to find that a man who shared her mother’s maiden name, Ricca, was married in the early 20th century to a woman born in St Kitts. The other is a good friend and neighbor who was born in the United States, and whose ancestry appears to 100% Italian, judging from the family tree research I’ve done for her. His diverse ancestors were all born outside the United States, in places like the British Isles, Western Europe, the West Indies, and Africa. One of the pair is my husband, who was born in the small Caribbean nation of St Kitts. I recently stumbled on an instance of a family connection between two people in my life that really surprised me. Does this concept hold true in genealogy? Maybe sometimes in today’s interconnected world, but what about a century ago, with people from small, somewhat isolated village communities?
A popular exercise is to find six degrees (or less) of separation between movies featuring Kevin Bacon and any other actor, given his extensive work in the entertainment industry. The idea is that in an ever shrinking world, the connections between any two people might be reduced to no more than six associations. “Six degrees of separation” is an esoteric math concept that began with a short story written in 1929.
GabboT, CC BY-SA 2.0, via Wikimedia Commons
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