Quote:
Originally Posted by senior citizen
I know where Perugia is. I forgot to mention that besides my grandmother and my Godmother (her youngest daughter), her son Leonard also had the blue eyes.......which are rare. My dad always said her family came "from the north" but when I checked........in the 1800's they were in Laurenzana; earlier than that they were in the town of Potenza north of Laurenzana.
But in 1599 they were in Graz Austria........so that is indeed the NORTH.
When I checked our same surnames in the Trent Fondo area which is in northern Italy near the Austrian border......they didn't have the lineage going back as far as we all had found..........but they did have blue eyes and red hair.
My grandmother's husband's family had been in Laurenzana forever as were the families they married into........going back to the 12th century with the Greeks. Anyway, the little southern village......from whence all of mine came, all intermarried with their cousins.........they were all related in one way or another..........easy to check as Napoleon was a stickler for keeping good records.
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As long as we're on this subject, my maternal grandmother, who was born in Sicily, had blond hair and blue eyes. My mother was born with chestnut-brown hair and it gradually turned black. I was born with blondish hair that gradually turned black (but my under-arm hair is brown, ha!). The blond hair and blue eyes skipped a generation so I had some Italian cousins with blond hair and blue eyes.