Origin stories tell us how things began, provide context, inspire us, and allow us to see how big things started in humble ways.
Think for a moment…
How many struggles, love stories, tragedies, happy events, and expressions of hope for the future did your ancestors undergo for you to exist in this present moment?
The Bellingham Tiscornia family are related to Anton Tiscornia and Cattarina (Catharine) Cima.
Cattarina was born in/near Pont Canavese (near Turin), which is in the foothills of the Alps in Piedmont, Italy, in 1868. Growing up, she spoke Piedmontese, which is a separate language from Italian and is related to both French Spanish languages. On or before 1888, she married Frank Maccario, and shortly thereafter, with Cattarina pregnant, Frank emigrated to the U.S. to establish a home for their family in San Francisco. Four years later, Cattarina made the trip from Piedmont to San Francisco, along with the couple’s daughter, Domenica, then 4 years old. The Maccario’s had two more children in San Francisco, Madalena in 1895 and Lorenzo (Laurence) in 1897. Frank Maccario died sometime between 1902 and 1905, and young Madalena died in 1905, leaving Cattarina a widow with two children.
Giovanni Anton Tiscornia was born in 1867 in Ne, Italy, a village in the hills above Chiavari, near Genoa. According to family oral history, his father had an olive grove. One of his brothers became a priest, his sister became a nun, and another brother emigrated to Argentina. It’s not clear when Anton came to the United States, but he was in San Francisco by the end of the 19th century. Anton spoke multiple Italian dialects and likely also spoke Piedmontese. He and Cattarina were in San Francisco at the same time, but it is not clear if or for how long they knew each other prior to the 1906 San Francisco earthquake.
By the time of the earthquake, Cattarina’s daughter, Domenica, had married and moved to Nevada with her husband, Joseph SimonettiAnton and Cattarina married. In the earthquake’s aftermath, Anton was deputized to help keep the peace. By this point,. Anton adopted Cattarina’s son Laurence, and the family left the wreckage of San Francisco to move north to Bellingham.
The Bellingham Bornstein family are all related to Charles Bornstein and Ane “Anna” Svendsen.
Anna’s parents, Ane Larsen and Mogens Svendsen, converted to Mormonism and the family emigrated from Denmark while Anna was a small child. Her parents both died during the overland journey west to Utah, and Anna and her sisters were thus orphaned and were raised in a family with the name Naisbitt.
Charles Bornstein was Jewish. HIs father, Julius, was born in Prussia (in an area that is now in Poland), and his mother, Fannie Hausmann, was born in France (Alsace-Lorraine, which is along the border with Germany). Charles was born in 1849 in Boston. Between 1856 and 1858, the family moved to San Francisco. Charles’s father, Julius, eventually became part of a venture to position the town of Corrine, Utah, as a key transportation hub in the years following the completion of the transcontinental railroad, which officially occurred in Utah in 1869. Charles lived in Corrine and then in Ogden from the 1870s through the 1880s.
Charles and Anna most likely met in Ogden Utah in the late 1880s. When Anna became pregnant, they traveled to Idaho and were married on December 25, 1887. They returned to Utah, where their son Henry was born in 1888. Not long after, they moved to Ellensburg, Washington, where they lived for about a year, and where their second child, Julius, was born. Charles went into business as a merchant, selling cigars.
In 1889, a fire devastated Ellensburg, which had hopes of becoming the state capitol of Washington once it attained official statehood. A family story goes like this: After the big fire in Ellensburg, ten businessmen [with whom Charles was associated] decided to leave, they flipped a coin, 5 went to Seattle and 5 came to Whatcom (the town that later became Bellingham). Charles and Anna, along with their children Henry and Julius, moved to Whatcom.
Check out who was at the latest family gathering in April 2023 at the Bellingham Yacht Club in Bellingham, WA.
Ancestral Mathematics
Did you know in order to be born, you needed:
For you to be born today from 12 previous generations, you needed a total of 8,190 ancestors.
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