YourItalianRoots

Tag: research

  • Stories – finding family across the ocean

    Stories – finding family across the ocean

    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.

  • Back in the past…until when?

    Back in the past…until when?

    Once upon a time, it was crucial for rulers and powerful figures to claim an important ancestor. Alexander the Great claimed to be descended from Achilles, and Julius Caesar even from the goddess Venus. These were, of course, fictitious genealogies, impossible to prove: however, portraying oneself as a descendant of Achilles (or even a goddess) had a very impressive effect.

    But today, who can boast of having the oldest family tree?

    In Europe, one of the families with the oldest documented genealogy is the Capetian family, a French royal dynasty dating back to 978 AD. This means that, for this family, from the 10th century to the present day, it is possible to trace a proven family tree, generation by generation, through reliable documents. Other royal families, such as the Franco-Italian House of Savoy, boast documented genealogies almost as old.

    But when it comes to our ancestors, poor commoners, how far back can we go in genealogical research? The answer is: it depends. Certainly not to such ancient times, yet it’s not as impossible as it might seem to go back three or four hundred (or even five hundred) years.

    Let’s see how it works in Italy. Here, the fundamental documents for genealogical research are the civil registry and parish registers. The former cover, with variations from region to region, the period from the 19th century to the present day. They were introduced in 1806 by Napoleon, but ceased to exist a few years later, with the fall of the emperor. The regions of southern Italy generally have more complete and continuous civil registry records than the rest of Italy, due to the system introduced in 1816 (1820 in Sicily) by Ferdinand I of Bourbon, King of Naples. In most of central and northern Italy, however, you’ll have to wait until 1866.

    So, if you’re looking for your ancestors in, say, Reggio Calabria, you should be able to easily trace birth, death, and marriage records back to the early decades of the 19th century, while if you’re looking in Turin, it might have a bit more complicated.

    And if we want to go even further back? Here, documents (baptismal, death, marriage, etc.) contained in parish registers can help. These records were compiled in the Catholic world at least from 1563 (but in some churches even earlier), as established by the Council of Trent. These are documents in Latin, which don’t always still exist: many churches have lost all or part of their archives over the centuries, due to fires, floods, or simply because someone decided to “make room.” In my research, however, I have often found documents in parish archives that are useful for reconstructing a family tree back to the mid-16th or early 1700s. For example, if we find, in a church archive, the marriage certificate of a couple of our ancestors who married in 1570, we can deduce that the couple were born around the middle of the century: almost five hundred years ago.