Lottie McCabe:
And Domenico Rizzo:
(Click on both images to make them bigger.) I wanted each of these certificates to confirm the parent names. That's the best use for me of death certificates: they list the parents of the deceased, including maiden name of the mother.
Lottie McCabe was my great-grandmother. This certificate confirmed the names I had of her parents, William H. McCabe and Mary Sheridan. I was pretty certain of those names, but not 100%. Through Ancestry.com, I had found a 1900 census record that had been my initial clue as to the parent names, but that was the only record I had that listed both parents and Lottie, and of course it did not have Mary's last name. I'm not certain, but I think I have found references to William McCabe in publications from the time period that indicate he was somewhat prominent in Staten Island. Here's a link to one. The significance of Mary Sheridan's name is that it is a potential connection to both Philip Henry Sheridan and the pixilated Sheridan sisters! (I did find them referenced in another book, "Staten Island and Its People" under an entry about their father George Sheridan. It didn't mention the pixilated part, which comes from historical family snarkiness, but did mention twin sisters born in 1900 and living on Forest Ave in Staten Island.) Not sure yet how or if Mary Sheridan is related to either the sisters or the general.
Domenico Rizzo was Lottie's father-in-law. I wanted to get his death certificate to confirm his parents, too. In this case, it turned out that the names I had were incorrect. So certainly that is helpful to update the tree! His parents were Santo Rizzo and Joanna Spadaro. So now I have new names on the Italian side to start working on.
