Thank you Mr. Paglia!

Some understanding finally!!!

So if you've been around a while you've seen my confusion over some Los Angeles families. Any time you find a grave with multiple surnames represented, you just have to figure it out, because living with someone can be temporary, but to be buried with someone, well that's a lot of intimacy.

I'm speaking of Calvary Catholic Cemetery , which set me off in an important direction. We have the names Fragassi, Nicassio and Paglia all together. My profound confusion is best outlined in this post, but I'll begin with how the problem began to be solved. First, I had to make darn sure of the people themselves, because there are a lot of name variants with our immigrants. Mary Fragassi was also called Angelina, and the headstone has her name spelled Marietta, which is much fancier. A man I don't know found this post and commented that Frank Fragassi was Mary's second (?) husband, hence the Nicassio name of her children, and married name combined.

I found this, which helped settle identity. Bonus that there's a photo.

I stumbled upon an Ancestry tree with some of these names in it and gave the user a shout. "Hello! I'm not certain if I've tried to contact you before, but I've done some visiting of virtual graves and found a family connection between ours... I was hoping you might have some additional knowledge or know someone?"  I didn't know if it was even an active account, so I was surprised to get a reply within a day!

...My maternal side of the family is Nicassio. Actually went Connetto di Bari and found my grandmother's birth certificate. Besides that, my grandmother remarried in her sixties to a Frank Fragassi. After her death, he moved back to Bari where he died in his late 90's.

And so it began. Mary's maiden name was DiStaso, and that might explain the Distashe misspelled young men living with Frank in 1940, who he claimed as his sons. Perhaps there were cousins all over the place? I'm still figuring it out.