Casimir Basso (1834-1919)
Who was casimir Basso ?
Casimir Antoine Stanislas Basso was Gian-Battista Basso’s brother, faithful friend and secretary. He was born in Nice on 15 January 1834. He got married at age 30 in Nice on June 11, 1864 to a Spanish woman born in Cuba, Maxime Rosa Clémentine Jué (so-called d’Escalon), daughter of a merchant settled in Nice. They had three sons and two daughters: Honoré Laurent Eugène (Eugène), Julie, Marie Augustine Irène (Irène), Charles Casimir (Charles) and Léon Joseph Flavien (Léon).
Casimir was a merchant in olive oil in the Port area. He also had a preserved fruit business on route of Villefranche. He and his son Eugene were partners before going bankrupt in 1891.
He lived on Rue Ségurane where he had his business. He remained there long before moving - after selling his business - to 27 Boulevard Gambetta, where he died on February 3, 1919 at the age of 85. He was a widower for 19 years and he lived there with his daughter Irene.
The family Basso
Two of his sons died young and unmarried: Charles Casimir in 1899 at age 26 years old and Eugene in 1902 at age 36 years old. His daughter Irene seems to have remained unmarried as evidenced by her death certificate while she could have lived with Ernest Cornet (she died in 1940 at the age of 70 and Ernest Cornet died in 1941 at the age of 73). His daughter Julie was a teacher. One of his sons Léon Joseph Flavien got married in 1901 in Nice with a girl from Turin, Bice Linda Julie Rusca whom he divorced in 1919. He does not seem to have had any children. Therefore Casimir Basso does not have any descendants.
Casimir was the penultimate child of a family of nine children born over a period of 16 years from 1821 to 1837. He had seven sisters and one brother Gio-Battista, who was 10 years older than him. He also had a half-sister Madeleine, born from a previous marriage of his father with Antoinette Fossat.
Gio Battista Basso, Garibaldi’s faithful friend and secretary is mentioned, just like his brother Casimir, in the register of mortgages from Nice and Grasse for the properties inherited from their parents. For Jean-Baptiste, the page summarizing his transactions indicates "lives in Nice or the island of Caprera." This is the only record I found about him. I have not seen any Gio Battista Bassos in any of the marriage and death certificates available at the departmental archives until 1942 in Nice. Turin’s site of archives http://archiviodistatotorino.beniculturali.it/ undertook to identify Garibaldi’s supporters (ref. Alla ricerca dei garibaldini scomparsi (in search of scattered Garibaldinese) and among the Bassos you can see the photo of Gio Battista.)
The parents of Casimir and Gio Battista were Onorato Basso and Teresa Orengo. The death certificate indicates Onorato was an 'owner', which today means a landlord. Casimir was the 5th generation (Onorato, Giuseppe, Gio Battista, Ludovico) of a family that had never left Nice (Parish Sainte Reparate, then St-Roch) since the creation of parish registers, ie the second half of the sixteenth century.
The family of Onorato Basso (1780-1846) who got married in 1820 and Giuseppe Raveu’s (1783-1867) who got married in 1808 lived at the same time and in the same parish of Nice (St. Roch and Notre-Dame-du-Port), the Bassos children were born from 1821 to 1837 and the Raveus from 1813 to 1830, and it is likely that they all knew each other. They obviously knew also Garibaldi who lived in the port.
Onorato Basso's descendants can be found among Casimir’s seven sisters and especially Françoise who married Charles Fossat on 1st July 1843 and Marie Joséphine Camille who married Gabriel Fossat. The two Basso sisters married the two brothers Fossat the same day. They were both bakers-confectioners in Nice. Françoise had 4 sons and 5 daughters and her sister Josephine had one daughter.
I found the grave of the family Basso in Cimiez (No. 405 D) which is not easy to see (alley Raoul Dufy, 4th or 5th grave right in pointing to Dufy’s grave).
Enigmatically Ernest Cornet is buried in the Basso’s tomb, however I have found no relation between them. Cornet was born in Montluçon in 1868 and stood out during the 1914-1918 war, which seems to have made him earn the Legion of Honor (a branch of metal "Legion of Honor" is placed on the grave). He called himself Cornet de Remagne although his birth certificate only indicates Cornet. In the newspaper’s orbituary he is called Earl Cornet de Remagne.
Another curious thing: Casimir’s wife was born in Cuba of a father born in Marseille named Jué. This family seems to have added a particle to be called Jué d’Escalon. They were born in Perpignan. Escalon was the name of the Casimir’s great paternal grandfather. The name of Escalon was then recovered by some of Casimir’s children and even engraved on the stele.