Family-histories and genealogies : containing a series of ...

vanti, had settled contemporaneously with the Meis. Lucca had been for some time
the last refuge of the gospel in Italy ; and
it was from this city that the Jesuits
drove away the families that maintained the most independence, and which were also,
in part, of the noblest stocks of Italy. Vincenzo Mei became a member of the Grand
Council of Geneva in 1568. Horatio was one of his six children, who, on the ist of
January 1596, was called to Berne to make an attempt to establish the silkworm in
the Canton de Vaud. This same Horatio is reckoned among the celebrities of Lyons
as a merchant or manufacturer of silk stuffs ; I think he was also made a citizen of
Berne. After some time the Meis became extinct in Geneva ;
in Lucca, of the male line, Onofrio, bishop of Bisignano, died in 1664.
the last of the name
" This is about all the information which I can give respecting the Mei family of
Lucca and Geneva. As to our family, May or Maggi, it passed the Alps as early as
about the year 1300, being driven from Brescia after the defeat of the Hohenstaufen,
and the victory of the Guelphs and the Church of Rome, whose declared enemy it
has always been.
" A. de May."
The Vincenzo Mei named in this letter is doubtless the father of
Marie Mei who was married to Carolo Diodati ; and
the information here
given shows that the proper form of her name is Mei, not Mai.
In this connection we print a letter from Count Diodati, relative to
the female ancestry of Carolo :
" Dear Sir,
"Geneva, Nov. 12, 1881."
" I hope you will excuse my long delay in answering your letter of the 25""
of May, if I tell you that I have been travelling for the last eight or nine months, and
have only returned home about the middle of October. Since my return I have, as
you desired, made researches in our family-archives to see if I could find out anything
about the female ancestors of Carolo Diodati, whose mother was Anna Bonvisi ; but
I find nothing except a coat of arms of the Bonvisi family, of which I enclose a copy
[displayed on our Pedigree of Diodati]. There is moreover, in the " Procedure pour
I'Admission de Jean Diodati comme Chevalier de I'ordre de Malthe," a notice of the
Bonvisi, stating that they were nobles of old descent (the mother of Giovanni being
Giulia Bonvisi, and his grandmother a Burlamachi, also an old patrician family of
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