Searching for my grandfather

I’ve been searching for my grandfather for a long time.
I’ve walked the cemetery where he is supposed to be buried. I’ve flipped through boxes of family belongings when my grandmother died.
I’ve never found an obituary, birth record or marriage license. I’ve tried searching the Internet for clues. Nothing much was ever found. No obvious grave site. Not even a Web search of burial sites offered much help.
It was as if his existence were a fact only because of a single photograph taken with my grandmother at about the time of their marriage.
All I’ve ever known about him were pieces of information gathered from my grandmother, who never really wanted to talk about it. The memory, I suppose, was just too painful.
The best I could tell is my grandmother was married and widowed at the age of 16, when my father was 6 months old. The story is my grandfather was hit by a bus or a train in 1930 or 1931 while crossing a street in our small town, Vineland, in southern New Jersey, where the family farmed for decades.
He had two brothers, probably some sisters. The story was at some point a second “A” was dropped from our name, and Gaboardi became Gabordi. We thought that was true only because that’s how grandma, switch in hand, pronounced the name when she was angry.
When and why that happened was all a part of the mystery. That was the entire sum of my knowledge of family history.
Then a friend tipped me to a group on Facebook for people with the name Gaboardi. For the first time, I found dozens of people who had the same name as me – maybe. I joined and began asking questions. Information trickled in, but anything felt like a flood.
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