I exchange messages with Jeanne at the beginning of July, exactly two years since we first spoke. A few days earlier, in Alcamo, Sicily, they celebrated the feast of the Madonna dei Miracoli, the patron saint; Jeanne tells me that her cousins from Alcamo sent her photos of the festival and the procession.
Between me in Italy and Jeanne in the United States, there is an ocean crossed by dozens of threads. The first was traced by her grandmother, Maria, in 1919. She was 19 years old when she left her – and my – hometown, a town in western Sicily called Alcamo, to board a ship for New York, eventually arriving in Detroit. She was traveling alone. According to the Ellis Island landing documents, she was heading to an uncle. But that wasn’t true. In reality, she was going to America to marry a fellow townsman, a man she probably didn’t know, or at least didn’t know well, following the path of a choice someone else had made for her. Maria would build her family in America, having nine children and many grandchildren—a hybrid family like many at the time, a little Italian and a little American. She returned to Alcamo for a visit in the 1970s, alongside one of her daughters, to reconnect with her family of origin, which by then had grown to include new brothers- and sisters-in-law and grandchildren.
The descendants of Maria’s American family and the descendants of the family she left behind in Alcamo kept in touch for years, until contact thinned out, memories frayed, and at a certain point, it became difficult for Jeanne—who was planning a trip to Sicily—to track down the part of the family living in Alcamo.
To help Jeanne find her Sicilian cousins, I followed two paths simultaneously. On one hand, we reconstructed the family history of grandmother Maria, her departure, her siblings, and her in-laws. Meanwhile, I used the clues Jeanne gave me to find someone among my contacts who recognized themselves in her family’s story—it helped immensely, in this case, that I am from Alcamo myself.
Jeanne was thus able to fulfill a small dream: meeting a part of the Sicilian family she always knew she had, and visiting Alcamo together with her newfound cousins. They, in turn, experienced the emotion of seeing their loved ones in home movies filmed in Alcamo by grandmother Maria during her visit in the 1970s, which Jeanne had brought with her.
In this way, we added a new thread—certainly not the last—to the dense weave connecting Sicily to the other side of the ocean.
Leave a Reply