A woman of Sardinian origin who passed away without children . A legacy destined to fall on deaf ears . An in-depth search of vital records from decades earlier. And finally, the twist : the heirs exist, only that no one knew anything about them because the father of the deceased, presumed dead, had secretly rebuilt a family on the other side of the ocean .
The incredible story was reconstructed by the ED Genealogy team, a Ligurian company specializing in the reconstruction of family trees.
And the initial challenge was not the simplest: to look for possible heirs of Mrs. Iole B., daughter of two Sardinian emigrants, from Ossi and Sant'Antioco , who decided to move to Genoa in the early twentieth century .
Iole, as mentioned, died recently, without descendants, at the age of 99 . And so his sister. So to whom to hand over the assets of the deceased, equal to around 80 thousand euros?
To some distant relative still alive on the island? Or to other more direct heirs?
Here the work of genealogist Eleonora Grasso came into play, who consulted old archives and followed the intricate thread of Iole's family history.
A thread that from Genoa at a certain point unraveled in the United States . After moving to Liguria, in fact, the father of Iole and his sister left his wife and daughters to seek his fortune in the USA.
After the first few times, however, Mr. B. (anonymity required, since it was a recent private affair) stopped sending money and communications home. A silence that his resigned wife finally interpreted as definitive, to the point of presenting a declaration of presumed death of her husband in 1946.
For almost a century, therefore, the "widow", Iole and her sister lived believing their father was missing and, in all probability, no longer among the living.
But following the thread left by the man, Grasso made a surprising discovery: the head of the family was not dead at all. He had simply decided to stay in the States, in New Jersey , where he had managed to settle down, remarrying and starting another family . A family that, like the one abandoned in Italy, has lived up to now ignoring the truth.
“When we discovered the existence of the father's American family – says Eleonora Grasso – we immediately got in touch via the web with one of Iole's stepsisters. And it was a shock for her. She immediately talked about it with her mother, now very old, and the woman confirmed everything: she knew that her husband had left another family in Italy, but she had never revealed anything, perhaps out of shame , not even when her husband was is dead, at the ripe old age of 105”.
Eventually the skein was completely unraveled. And Iole's half-brothers and half-sisters - three of them, all still alive - were able to discover the secret story of their father and obtain the unexpected inheritance left by his Italian daughter.
“ A story and a research that fascinated us too ”, explains Eleonora Grasso. “ The proverbial longevity guaranteed by the Sardinian genes also helped us – concludes the genealogist –: all the protagonists have reached considerable ages, both those still alive, all over eighty and over ninety, and those who died, who have also well exceeded the century of life".
