Family Apocrypha

I've been working on some family genealogy, tracing back my maternal grandfather's line. There's quite a mystery there!1

Ronald Fabri's Baptism record.

Ronald Fabri's Baptism record from Alexandria, Egypt.

The best part of family research is talking to family about all the old family stories. They're unlikely, maybe even impossible tales, but surely some parts must be true!

Here are two of my favourites.

Budelli

A Fabri of old went gambling one night in Alexandria, and he won big! He on his way back home when he was mugged by some Arabs. They stabbed him many times, took his money, and left him for dead on the street.

But this Fabri was strong. He got up, and discovered that he'd been stabbed him so many times that his budelli (guts) were falling out! He held his budelli in his hands and walked to the hospital. They attempted to operate on him, but it wasn't looking good. The hospital staff found him dead the next day, with his cot's cast iron rails twisted around himself. The pain was so bad he had bent the rails.

La Pipa

This story comes from Edwin. The Bonnicis (my Nonno's mother's family) were ship-makers in Malta. At some point, they decided to leave Malta. They built their own ship and sailed to Alexandria. Their captain was Giuseppe Bonnici, who apparently had a tail.

One night, Giuseppe docked the boat, and went out all night to a party. It was raucous and loud, and in the chaos he left his pipe on the mantlepiece. The next day he went to retrieve it, and the whole place was boarded up. Cobwebs! He broke in, and found the pipe precisely where he had left it.

  1. We're Italians. We speak Italian, we eat Italian, my grandfather and his brother both married Italian wives. My Nonno's DNA is 71% Italian! The Fabris came to Australia from Venice, via Alexandria. Or so always thought. As it turns out, baptism records, marriage certificates, and burial records, always list our nationality as Maltese, and while we were in Egypt, we married Maltese wives. What! And how!? Further to that, we were in Alexandria for at least seven generations! And in every generation, our family is listed as "Fabri (Maltese)". Now we're trying to figure out how far back it goes (we're currently stuck at 1823), and whether there truly is, at some point in history, a migration from Venice to Alexandria. ↩︎