Salvatore Mandras (b. 1884)
According to an online ancestry.com family tree, Salvatore was born in 1884 in Ozieri and died in 1964 in La Ciotat, France. He was the son of Giommaria Mandras and Giovanna Lai. His wife was Pasqualina Pinna and their children were Jean Marie Mandras and Marie Mandras.
If we have correctly understood the family connections, Salvatore Mandras would have been a first-cousin of Giovanni Ruffini and Giovanni's sister Antonia Ruffini. In July 2012, Joelle Ballonzoli, a grand-daughter of Salvatore and Pasqualina, relayed the following story about Salvatore's marriage to Pasqualina, and the role his cousin Antonia Ruffini played in it:
"I spoke with my mother... she said that the name Ruffinu could not be spoken in front of my grand-mother...
My grand-father, Salvatore (Sevadore) Mandras, fell in love with my grand-mother, Pasqualina Pinna, who was fourteen years his junior at the end of the First World War. The Mandrases were very poor people and her father, Antoni Pinna, refused Salvatore because he had other plans for his daughter. Antoni Pinna and his brother had a stone business in Ozieri. The family was middle class and he considered the Mandras/Lai family not good enough to be associated with his own...
According to Pasqualina, the Mandras/Lai family got offended and decided that Salvatore would marry Pasqualina whether or not her father would allow it. Antonia... Ruffinu, Salvatore’s cousin, convinced Pasqualina to run away and it is at Petrrucia’s house that Salvatore took her to hide after it took her away from her family. In the mid 1980’s, in my home town of La Ciotat, an old paisano of my grand-parents’, whose name was Pedru Tiana, told us that the “taking of the beloved” had been done according to the book, on horseback!
Pasqualina had four sisters and two brothers, Giovanni and Sebastiano (Juane and Sebastianu). Everybody got very agitated after she left and the two brothers went hunting for Salvatore, who was hiding at a different place than Pasqualina, to kill him. Antoni Pinna was a widower. He had a sister, a nun, who had been staying with the family to help and re-organize. There was also Babai Scanu, a cousin of Antoni, who was an archbishop somewhere in Sicily. The two religious convinced Antoni not to let his sons kill Salvatore. Pasqualina was under age and Antoni signed the authorization for her to marry Salvatore, but from that day she was the outcast.
A couple of years later, Salvatore and Pasqualina and their toddler, Giovanni Maria (Mimia), left Sardinia. Salvatore never went back. Pasqualina went back for the first time to attend her father’s funeral. None of us, children and grand-children, visited Sardinia until the end of the 1960’s. Since the 1970’s we have had contacts with grand uncle Sebastiano’s daughters, grand-children and great-grand who all live in Badesi on the north coast. In 1973, grand uncle Giovanni’s widow, Toiedda Pinna, refused to let me in the Ozieri Pinna family house! As Pasqualina’s grand-daughter I was outcast."
