Some time ago we were contacted by Susanna Tevenè, a descendant of the Tevenè family of Livorno, for genealogical research. She wanted to understand where this unusual surname came from and to verify (or debunk…) some stories handed down in the family for generations, as happens in almost every family.

A word of introduction: in Livorno the surname is known thanks to the teacher and author Pilade Tevenè (1849-1916), after whom a street in the city is named, and to his sons Garibaldo and Alfredo, also teachers. Prof. Angelo Gaudio recently devoted a study to them (in Italian): “I Tevenè, una famiglia di maestri repubblicani livornesi“. We thank Susanna Tevenè for allowing us to publish the photograph of Pilade and his wife.

The problem: a grandfather who was never born

Going back from Pilade to his father was easy: his name was Cesare Tevenè and he was born in Livorno in 1814. That is where the trouble began. There was no trace of a Cesare Tevenè born in those years: nothing in the Tuscan civil registration indexes for 1808-1814, nothing in the birth registers for 1814-1815, male or female, nothing in the Cathedral baptisms. The same went for his marriage, celebrated in Livorno in 1839: no Tevenè married between 1835 and 1849.

When a record that “must” exist cannot be found, there are usually two possibilities: either it has been lost, or we are looking for it under the wrong name.

The key: Pilade’s brothers and sisters

The solution came from Cesare’s children. Listing their births in order reveals something curious: the first children, born between 1840 and 1845, are registered with the surname Landi; from June 1847 onwards, the new arrivals are Tevenè. Pilade himself, born on 1 October 1849, is already a Tevenè. One daughter, Palmira (1842-1874), appears in the records sometimes as Landi and sometimes as Tevenè.

So all we had to do was look for a Cesare Landi. And there he was: Giovanni Cesare Tito Landi was baptised in Livorno Cathedral on 12 August 1814, the son of Gaetano Landi, a cabinetmaker born in Florence around 1771, and of Maria Francesca Romoli. The same Cesare Landi had married Maria Maddalena Tossini on 20 October 1839. The “grandfather who was never born” had been born perfectly normally, but under another surname.

Why a Landi became a Tevenè

Gaetano Landi died shortly after his son’s birth, between 1814 and 1816. Before 1816 his widow, Maria Francesca Romoli, married Giuseppe Tevenè, a cabinetmaker like her first husband, born in Rome around 1775, the son of Pietro Tevenè, and himself the widower of Assunta Bongi, who had died in 1811. Giuseppe was no stranger to the Landis: in 1811 he had been a witness at the birth of one of Gaetano’s daughters. Two cabinetmakers, colleagues and probably friends: after one died, the other married his widow and brought up his children.

Cesare therefore grew up in the Tevenè household, together with the half-siblings born of his mother’s second marriage: Gioconda (1816), Rosa (1820) and Giuseppe Felice, known as Zeffirino (1825). His stepfather died in 1835, his mother at the end of 1845. Between mid-1846 and early 1847 Cesare began to use his stepfather’s surname, for himself and for the children born from then on. We have found no formal deed of change of name: the switch can only be reconstructed by comparing the records.

The Tevenès who were not Tevenès

Hence the title: the teacher Pilade Tevenè and his sons Garibaldo and Alfredo, the best-known Tevenès of Livorno, were by blood Landis. They had inherited the Tevenè name through affection, not through descent.

The Tevenè “blood” line continues instead with the half-brother Zeffirino (1825-1863), a boatman and carpenter, and his children. Some of them emigrated to Marseille, like many people from Livorno at the time. One of them, Giuseppe, known as Joseph, born in 1848, was a second-hand dealer in rue des Cordelles: in 1885 he ended up in court for shooting a man who had courted and then abandoned his sister, an episode now studied as an example of family ties among the Italians of Marseille. A grandson of Zeffirino, Joseph Pilade, a shoemaker born in Livorno in 1876, obtained French citizenship in 1904.

And where does the surname come from?

The earliest Tevenè documented so far is Giuseppe himself, the cabinetmaker born in Rome around 1775, son of Pietro, who died before 1810. The surname arrived in Livorno with him. Its form suggests a French origin, but for now this is only a hypothesis: to verify it, research will have to continue in the Roman archives.

What this case teaches us

De facto changes of surname, with no official deed, were far more common than one might think: children taking their stepfather’s name, foundlings, surnames translated or mangled. When research hits a dead end, the solution is often not to dig deeper in the same place, but to look more widely: at siblings, witnesses, godparents, trades. In this case, the sequence of the children’s surnames and a witness from many years earlier solved the puzzle.