My Nonno, Giuseppe Sulfaro, cutting sugar cane in the fields of Innisfail, Queensland, Australia

Today I took a little break from my ICAP Gen research project and did some research on my Nonno Giuseppe Sulfaro just for fun. I have a lot of resources on him, and thought I’d had everything that had been published with his name on it. Apparently I was wrong. And that is a big lesson in genealogical research. If you think you’re done, think again, and again and again. Because 99.999% of the time you’re wrong. You’re not done.

Because I’m a descendant of recent immigrants I tend to focus my research on my relatives back in Italy. Giuseppe Sulfaro, my mother’s father, came to Australia in 1951. He arrived in Innisfail, Queensland where he cut sugar cane for a living. His wife, Maria Stagno and their children did not arrive for another few years in 1956. I have done very little research on his time alone in this strange new country. I figured what could I find about his time? He wasn’t born, married or died there so his only records during his time in Queensland would be electoral rolls and basic information that I’d already found.

Well, today I did some light digging through a wonderful resource called Trove, run by the National Library of Australia. I did a search for “Sulfaro” and voila an article in a newspaper mentions a “G Sulfaro” who was injured, cutting sugar cane in December 1952. Little things like this keep me going when I’m in a genealogical rut. Check out the record below!

Identical Accidents. (1952, December 18). Cairns Post (Qld. : 1909 – 1954), p. 5. Retrieved February 20, 2014, from http://nla.gov.au/nla.news-article42765011

“Identical Accidenta. Two cane cutters-J. Bate-man, of Daradgee, and G. Sulfaro, of Moresby-were attendedby the Innisfail ambulance foridentical accidents, viz., incisedwounds to the left shin causedwhen using cane knives, ineach case first-aid was givenand the patients transported cuhospital.-Our Innisfail corre-spondent.”

Records such as this one shape the story of someone’s life. Birth, marriage and death records are factually informative but you don’t really get to know who these people were, how their lives were, what they felt, what they experienced and the things that happened to them.

Josephine