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cousinquest.org
The photos on this site come from the albums of Vincenza "Vinnie" DiStefano, 1910-2005. (She hated the name Vincenza.) She was the fifth of eleven children of Giuseppe and Theresa DiRaffaele. I knew her as "Grandma", but because she was from a large family and had a lot of nieces and nephews, there are many more who knew her as "Aunt Vinnie".
When she died in 2005, she was survived by two sons, six grandchildren, ten great-grandchildren, and a stack of photo albums.
In addition to photos of her husband and children, this collection includes many photos of her brothers and sisters, nieces, nephews, grandchildren, cousins, and in-laws and any number of other unknown and unidentifiable people.
In the above photo, which has become iconic within the family, Theresa and Giuseppe (Joseph) DiRaffaele are pictured with their eleven children. The decision to take this family portrait was very timely, because there was only a brief period in which all thirteen family members would be alive at the same time; Theresa would die shortly afterwards delivering her twelfth child, who also failed to survive.
The four children in white to the left of their mother are Vinnie, far left, with her hands on Freddie's shoulders. Yola is to the right of Freddie, and the little one leaning into his mother is Johnny.
The three older offspring standing in the back and wearing darker clothing are, from left to right, Mary, Charlie, and Joe. (All of the official records I've seen have Charlie listed as "Salvatore".)
The second cluster of four children in white on the far right are Al, in his father's lap, Teddy (Theresa) with the bow in her hair, Fran standing at the far right, and Emily, sitting on the box. Emily would be the last remaining survivor from this photo. She died in 2019 at the age of 101.
The patriarch of the family, Giuseppe DiRaffaele, was born in 1883 in Palermo, in Sicily. He immigrated to the United States in 1902 and married Theresa Cannella, also born in Palermo, in New York City in 1904. Theresa died in 1922, and Giuseppe, who had a second marriage to a widow named Josephine Marino, died in 1944.
About this site
This website is a "pandemic project" taken on by me, Richard DiStefano, the third of Vinnie's six grandchildren, as the COVID-19 coronavirus of 2020 is flourishing in the United States.
I scanned each of the photos in color, even though most of them are black-and-white. I wanted to capture the sepia tones, the discoloration, the yellow crackly Scotch tape. I didn't do any fixing of the photos, other than to adjust brightness and contrast to counter the fading that occurred in some of them. But other than that, all of the imperfections remain. None of the photos have been resized; the reason that some are much larger than others is due to the relative size of the various prints in the photo albums.
You may notice some duplicates in this collection. I caught a number of them while I was scanning the photos, but I'm pretty sure I've missed a few. No need to point them out, however. Any duplicates that were missed will remain on the site.
I have focused almost exclusively on my grandmother's older albums, the ones with pages made of black paper. She also left behind some more recent albums, the kind with the sticky pages that get covered by a plastic sheet. I've only included a small handful of these photos. Most of them seem too recent to share, and look too modern to fit in with the rest of the collection that is presented here. I'll leave the archiving of photos from the 1980s and 1990s to some future generation.
When I took possession of the albums, they were already quite familiar to me. Often, on visits to my grandmother's home when I was a kid, these albums would come out and we'd look through them. I wish I had noted what she had to say about the photos. I do know that these photos were important to her, and that they captured memories that she cherished. I'm very pleased to be able to present these photos to the world.
This is most certainly a niche site. I don't expect a whole lot of visitors. But hopefully those who do find this site will recognize some faces and will post some comments. If people can get identified by name in the comments, then that increases the chance that more visitors will come to this site and find photos of their ancestors. And maybe, every once in a while, someone will find a photo of a loved one that they've never seen before, and it will be the highlight of their day. And if not, at least this project kept me busy for a while during a pandemic.
There are several organizations that are archiving the contents of the Internet. It is impossible to know how far into the future these archives will survive. In a way, this site is a message in a bottle to a far-future generation of humans who are unlikely to turn their attention to it. It's like the Chuck Berry recording on the Voyager, sent into deep space on the slim hope that some alien race will learn to rock out to Johnny B. Goode. So if you're reading this in the 25th Century, greetings! Say hello to the DiRaffaele family of the 20th Century. They ate meals together, drove cars, fed chickens, went to the beach, laughed, loved, lived, and died. Now that they're on the Internet, my grandmother's photos have a small shot at immortality. And so do the people pictured in them. (This includes three pictures of me.)
But whatever century it is in which you're reading this, feel free to stay a while and look around. If you have anything to say about these pictures, or if you can identify any of the people by name, please use the comment feature. I'd love to see what you have to say. And so would the citizens of the 25th Century.
Thank you!
