Written by Karen Zach
Ever felt really stupid during some aspect of genealogy? Could be many things. Perhaps you thought a double ‘s’ was an ‘f’? Maybe you had a sister as a wife? What if you had the wrong person of a common name or a father vs. a son that wasn’t yours?
My stupidity came in believing a story I was told. This wasn’t hearsay. It was a story told to me about my father by a man I had done a great deal of genealogy for. In fact, it was told to me right in my own living room when Stanley and his wife, Alice were here, bringing me some information to add to a genealogical project I was working on for them.
He asked me if my dad was Fred Bazzani. I said yes, as he was. In fact, Dad hadn’t been gone too long and I assumed Stanley knew him as so many in our area did, either as a mail carrier, an active member of the large Catholic church or as a carpet layer who had laid flooring in about half the houses in the county.
Well, Stanley said yes he knew him fairly well as he had worked with him in the aspect of fertilization. I was thinking fertilizer – dad also helped several of the local farmers doing about anything on the farm as he was an amazing, non-stop worker with lots of talents (drove an ambulance as he had had training in the CCC camp and was a medic during WWII so quite knowledgeable there – had seen about everything and even delivered a baby in the ambulance once; started the local volunteer fire department; coached baseball …).
Wait. Whoa. No way. Stanley meant fertilization as far as a male sperm donor. I insisted that would not have been my dad. He insisted it was. Finally, Alice told him to shut up in no uncertain terms. I had known her in DAR and she was normally such a gentle lady but she was pretty perturbed at him.
As soon as they walked out the door, I asked my brother if he knew anything about it. Shocked as I was, he could hardly believe it. Yet, we knew our dad. Any way to make good money and he was in on it. Maybe they didn’t call him the Italian Stallion for nothing? Oh, surely not!
I tried to prompt Stanley for more information another day I saw them but Alice put a stop to it immediately. Now, how was I ever going to find out if I had other brothers and sisters running around besides my brother and his twin who was already gone? We got to giggling about it several times, pondering if the red-headed kid down the street could be our brother as he had no brothers and sisters and we had a red-headed Italian great-grandpa’. His nose was shaped just like ours, too. Or, maybe it was the girl in the next town over who had an older brother. Her parents had tried for years to have a daughter and all of a sudden we hear the parents’ are having another one. She had blonde hair and brown-eyes, like me. Hmm. In our next conversation, we’d tell each other we were idiots to believe a good Catholic fellow would go for that (especially in that time frame).
It was probably two years later (Stanley had recently passed) that I read an article about a man who had become quite adept at using artificial insemination on dairy cows in our area – it was his specialty. I started laughing so hard – I mean Stanley never once said my dad was doing that with people I just assumed it. Then, low and behold there was a guy, Stanley, who was a farmer and would have worked with dairy cows with Fred Bazzani, only the expert in artificial insemination of cows’ name was Fred Buzzaird, not Fred Bazzani as in my dad. Go figure! So, careful with those assumptions and crazy mistakes!
