While exploring the collections of the British Museum for items related to Livorno I stumbled upon a series of drawings by Alexander Cozens from 1746 depicting the port and fortifications of Livorno from the extraordinary viewpoint of the lighthouse. In particular I searched for the South view, hoping to see some detail of the Old English Cemetery, and there it was, even though the official description of the image doesn’t mention this fundamental “detail”:
“Drawing from an album, view of the fortifications to the south of Porto Mediceo in Leghorn (Livorno) seen from the lighthouse; left, fortezza di Porta Murata, the separating Fosso Reale and to the right the lazaretto of San Rocco; plain with scattered houses and mountains beyond. Pen and black ink, with watercolour“
This contribution of mine is a simple transcription of a primary source useful for finding the names of merchants with business and family interests in Livorno. The printed booklet is available online on the platform ECCO (Eighteenth Century Collections Online) and its full title is: “The answer of the merchants-petitioners, and Trustees for the Factory at Legorn, To The Account of Damages, Laid to the charge of The Great Duke of Toscany, by Sir Alexander Rigby, Mr. Will. Shepard, and Mr. Will. Plowman: Together with Their reply, and The Merchants-Petitioners Second answer thereto. As also Divers Original Papers and Proofs; Deliver’d in Writing to Sir John Cooke, Judge Advocate, and John Pollexfen, Esq; The Delegates appointed by Her Majesty’s Special Command, to Hear what the Petitioners had to say; and to make Their Report thereupon. With several other Matters and Papers since come to Hand from Legorn.“, printed in 1704 in London. Unfortunately the ECCO platform is only available to selected Universities and libraries worldwide and not to the general public or freelance researchers like me, so when I had a chance to access it, I fully transcribed the following three parts which reveal the names of the people I am interested in:
Niccolò Van Houbraken Self portrait or François Rivière’s portrait c.1720 Corridoio Vasariano Galleria degli Uffizi Firenze
*** this paper was updated after the initial publication, see at the bottom.
The Van Houbraken family is a line of flemish painters from Antwerp who emigrated to Sicily around the 1620s-1630s and then to Livorno, in Tuscany, in the second half of the 17th century.
Jan (or Johannes) Van Houbraken (1612-1676?), disciple of Peter Paul Rubens and Matthias Stom, emigrated to Messina with his son Ettore (or Hector), another painter whose works are often confused with those of his father. In Messina Ettore had several children with a local woman named Giuseppa Maffei, daughter of architect Nicola Francesco Maffei, some of whom we can identify through the Church registers of Livorno, as the family emigrated there in 1674.
In Italy, notwithstanding a profound religious culture, cemetery studies are a very understudied subject if one compares what other countries are doing. This is one of the main reasons for which, when analyzing Livorno’s cemeteries and their archives, the potential for discoveries is definitely high as very few researchers have studied many of their aspects in depth; this is also one of the reasons which fueled my curiosity and engagement in this research spanning almost two decades.
I was recently filling some missing data from an interesting register at the AEG (Archives d’Etat de Genève) regarding the baptisms and marriages of Citizens and Bourgeois of Geneva occurring abroad. While scrolling for information of interest to include in my database, I found a reference to (more…)
The work took really a long time (almost a year) and a great effort but is now complete in its 15898 single entries that represent a total of 3628 family names. I believe that the registers for which these indexes were made are of the greatest importance for Livorno but also for a much larger audience given the fact that so many non-catholics were living in Livorno, coming from all over the world. Additionally these records include, and are composed mainly of, Jewish people. As everyone is aware of the importance of the Jewish community of Livorno, these records can depict the family networks of all these people for a period just short of 50 years across the 19th century.
If you didn’t follow the other posts about this subject, please take a few moments to read the introduction to these records. On the same page you will find the links to access the indexes. ( EzVN8HdtkCV5rZrTWIbp )
The Livorno’s Non-Catholic Civil Marriages’ Index (1818-1865) has been completed in the past few days; after the initial release of several sections, it is now fully published online. The index is comprised of 3288 single entries, representing 1644 different marriages, and a little over 1000 different family names.
Some more information on this source can be found here (also accessible from the blog homepage), otherwise you can directly access the
Leghorn Merchant Networks 