Finding My Italian Roots

Montefalcione - My Grandmother's Village
Image from:  TrekEarth.com

I've been interested in my family tree and who everyone is for as long as I can remember.  My dad told me an awesome story that I believed up until the time I was about 30 and my dad's sister, Aunt Jay told me the real story.

My dad told me a fascinating story about how we come from a line of Polish Jews who were held prisoner in a Russian camp.

The story went on to describe a bunch of people who were all chained together with holes in their wrists. One day they all escaped, running through the Black Forest and finding refuge in a place called Jarmolo in Turkey (does not exist as far as I know, my dad was a good story teller.)

My dad told me that the people who escaped together, all changed their names from a Jewish last name to the name we all have today.  My dad always told me that our name meant, 'the beginning of a new life,' a belief that I held for most of my life.

I even told my nephew Joe the story of our Polish ancestors when he was in 3rd grade.  I remember sitting down at the table with him, telling the story just like my dad told me.  I believed the story with all of my heart.  Joe, he did too and wrote the story as a homework assignment.  I wonder if he remembers the story?

Little did we know that the real story was that my Polish ancestors didn't want to fight in the Russian Army so they changed their name to protect their Jewish heritage.  By the time my family immigrated to the US back in the early 1900's they were Catholic.

Lately, I've wanted to understand my mom's mother and our Italian side.  I want to know her story so I signed up for the 14 day trial on Ancestory.com and have been spending all my time researching instead of writing blog posts.  I apologize to anyone who may have missed my posting.

What I've learned about my Italian grandmother is that she has the same birthday as my mom's first born, September 9th.  Our grandmother's birthday was September 9, 1899.  In Numerology, that would make her a 9, just like my sister.  She had a challenging life and her numerology chart backs up the sad life she had lived in mental institutions here in the United States.

My grandmother, she came to America for the first time when she was 7 with what appears to be a bunch of her siblings and a relative from America.

My grandmother returned to live in America in 1912, arriving on a ship named the San Gregrio on May 25th... just a little more than a month after the Titanic sunk.  I couldn't imagine putting a young girl on a ship that was docked in Naples, Italy and sending her to a foreign land, one where she didn't know the language.   She came to Ellis Island in New York and eventually settled in Massachusetts where she had relatives in Revere.

I'm still searching for information about her.  My mother loves hearing what I'm learning about her mother.  She never knew anything about her family because she didn't speak Italian and my grandmother never spoke English.  Information was lost.

Fortunately, there are places like Ellis Island that has made public the passenger lists for the ships that arrived in New York from ports around the globe.

I really want to know more about my mom's side of the family.  I would love to meet my family in Italy.  I found out that if you are of Italian descent, you can file for citizenship of Italy!  You can read more about Italian Citizenship here on this website.  

I have learned that my Grandmother lived in Montefalcione, Campania, Italy.

Finding my Italian roots... I look forward to possibly meeting some of my mom's relatives one day so that I can learn more about my grandmother.