Origins of Crescenzo and Stella Nardolillo in Gildone, Italy

Anthony Darrouzet-Nardi · 13 July 2024


Standing, left to right: John Nardolillo, Crescenzo Nardolillo, Frank Nardolillo, Mary Nardolillo, Sylvester Nardolillo, Nicholas Nardolillo. Seated, left to right: Domenic Nardolillo (whom I met as a child and later attended his 95th birthday party in Cleveland), Maria Stella Nardolillo, baby Lauretta Nardolillo (a.k.a. my mom's Aunt Dora; whom I also met as a child), and Anthony Richard Nardi (born Antonio Ricardo Nardolillo), my grandfather who died before I was born.

AFTER DNA TESTING, the first big mystery I wanted to investigate was my great grandmother, Maria Stella Ragazzo, wife of Crescenzo Nardolillo. The picture above shows the whole family in 1922. It was one of my second cousins (whom I have not met) that shared this photograph on Ancestry.com, and wow, how neat to find such an incredible and detailed photo of an ancestral family like this.

The family lore for Stella that my mom and aunt had heard was that she was an orphan from Italy. There are some great episodes of Finding Your Roots where they explain the quite insane “foundling wheel,” including one where actor Christopher Meloni learns that his last name probably came about because his orphan ancestor’s head was melon-shaped. Something like this is what I was imagining. This in mind, I set out to see if I could learn more about Stella’s past. I studied a lot of trees from our DNA matches and in doing so I came across a forum post that contained many of the names I had been seeing in our DNA match trees. It turned out to be a similar but distinct lineage from the same Italian village, Gildone, that we knew Crescenzo was from.
Gildone. Photo taken by a Gildonese, which I can tell by the surname on the watermark after looking at so many records.

But crucially, in this post, someone showed how to access the records (all online, but not digitized or searchable). I was amazed I could find all these records online from the comfort of my own laptop. I combed through them, trying to figure out Stella’s origins, sometimes pausing to admire the beautiful cursive entries for Nardolillo.

After learning to read the cursive and Google-translating the Italian and asking Reddit if I got stuck on something to work through these records, I thought back to another item that had also been posted by my fellow descendant of Crescenzo and Stella, and it was a newspaper clipping that included the following (which had been shared by my mom's Aunt Dora who was interviewed for the article):

Nardolillo’s father, Christopher [this is Crescenzo], came to Little Italy in the 1890s to earn money, then went back to Italy’s Abruzzi region to marry. He returned to Cleveland with his bride, Stella, in the early 1900s.

This led me to look for a record I hadn’t previously thought to look for, Crescenzo and Stella’s marriage record from Gildone, which was there, basically cracking the case:

This marriage record led me to Stella’s and Crescenzo’s birth records and many more ancestors before that. At that time, after looking through a bunch of records to build out the rest of the tree, I wrote the following email to my mom:

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Hi Mom, after lots of looking through your DNA results, I think I figured out some stuff about Stella. After seeing a snippet from a Cleveland Plain Dealer article (which one of the other Nardolillo descendants had shared) saying that Crescenzo went back to Italy to get married, I figured that there might be a marriage record from Gildone. I had figured out how to comb through these records in working on your other matches. Sure enough there was a record from 1901.

On the marriage record, it listed Stella’s parents’ names as Silvestro Ragazzo and Paola Francesca Gargiso. I thought perhaps they were adoptive parents, but it’s not what it looks like from the records. Stella has a very normal-looking birth record from 1882 that lists the same parents with no indication of an adoption or anything unusual. I thought perhaps her parents died young, but again it turned out not to be the case! There were death records for both parents, her father the year before she got married and her mother two years after. Perhaps the death of her father just before her marriage was what led to the family lore. It is hard to know. The links to the records are below. They are kind of neat to look at. I can show you what they say, but this page explains them well, including what might be expected from orphaned children.

One other piece is whether building out her family tree can help link her to some other DNA matches. I have one match where I believe this is the case, which lends support to these being her parents. However, it can be tricky because the Gildone residents all married each other for hundreds of years, so it is an “endogamous” population with lots of cross-connections among lineages. This also explains why your relatives did not sort nicely when we first looked at them. Crescenzo and Stella are probably within 5 or 6 cousins from one another if not closer.

Records
Crescenzo Nardolillo’s birth record (b. 6 June 1867)
Maria Stella Ragazzo’s birth record (b. 28 February 1882)
Crescenzo and Stella’s marriage record (21 November 1901)

Stella’s parents were Silvestro Ragazzo and Paola Francesca Gargiso
Silvestro died in 1900, one year before Stella was married (record).
Paola died in 1903 (record).

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Stella’s tree on FamilySearch after I entered all the ancestors I found. Generally, these records went back to around the late 1700s but not before that.

The part about the relatives not sorting was an attempt to apply the “Leeds method,” a neat technique that can sort close DNA matches among the four grandparents. When we did my mom, they separated well on her maternal side (Reed/Clark, British-American colonial heritage), but on her paternal side, they were all related and in one group. This was a clue that Stella was from Gildone. I thought maybe it was possible that she just had no matches, but this quickly began to seem incorrect as I kept finding trees that had high DNA matches but did not seem to connect to Crescenzo’s better-documented relatives, and in the end it did turn out, at least in my estimation, to be endogamy. Certainly I’d love to know if there is more to the “orphan” story. Maybe one day we will find that one of the branches is not what it seems from the records, but until then, I think it’s neat to be able to follow these back into the history of the town of Gildone.

There is a record of Crescenzo and Stella coming over from Italy. They came on a ship called the S.S. Lahn from Naples, arriving on April 15, 1903 at the Port of New York and then were processed at Ellis Island.


Record of Crescenzo and Stella’s voyage.


S.S. Lahn


Plaque at Ellis Island. Fingers are my brother's. I believe some of our relatives donated some money to have this included on the plaque.

Finally, one other fun thing we learned about Gildone is that pop star Ariana Grande was also from there. My daughter was thrilled to find out we might be related. I never did quite connect our trees but there are many similar names and probably a few generations more and we’d find a common ancestor, same as Crescenzo and Stella with each other. There were a couple other interesting details like the fact that Crescenzo had a brother, Domenico, who moved to LA and had a big Italian family there as well. My mom had not heard of him, probably because they left Cleveland before her father was born. Someone in that branch had shared some nice work on Ancestry and FamilySearch, which explained the better documentation on Crescenzo’s side.


Crescenzo Nardolillo (1867-1924)