Searching for the Dead, Finding the Living
My globe-trotting bisnonno, his two families, and me
Cari amici,
As some of you know, I was traveling recently, resuming my hunt for my mother’s ancestors in Campania and southern Lazio, and combining one part of that search with a visit to my cousin and her family in the little town of Gioia Sannitica, about 45 minutes northeast of Caserta. The goal was to find documents that could lead me deeper into the past than I’d gotten so far. For any ancestors who arrived on the scene earlier than 1870, I have only a few names and fewer clues. But this time, instead of remnants of the past, I found something better, something unexpected, something now—a family I didn’t know I had.
That’s not exactly true. I knew this family existed, but I hadn’t thought beyond the few remaining half-siblings of my maternal grandmother, the only people alive who had known my bisnonno (great-grandfather) Michele. I hoped to meet them before it was too late, even though I’d imagined a difficult, stilted conversation with a few anziani who either couldn’t or didn’t want to delve into the past for some half-blood stranger.
Let’s just say my expectations were off, way off.
As so often happens with genealogy research, my knowledge about my family from Gioia Sannitica (where my maternal grandmother was born) has expanded slowly. It began with the discovery of my cousin Elisabetta—our bisnonni were brothers. We first met in 2017, then went to Napoli together in 2019. Then Covid sliced a few years from our lives and our freedom, interrupting my research, and after that a few subsequent efforts to get together fell through. Somewhere along the way Elisabetta presented me with my bisnonno Michele’s divorce decree, obtained in the U.S. in 1917 (!), along with a photo of him and the much younger woman with whom he spent the rest of his (long) life after returning to Italy.
Wait a minute—my bisnonno had two families? Who knew? My grandmother and my mother certainly didn’t. Apparently the divorce, and Michele’s return to Italy, ended any communication with the family he left behind in the States.
Now, before you start judging Michele harshly, let me say that he’s the one who filed for divorce, claiming that his wife had neglected and abandoned the family. Whatever the whole truth was, this much I know: my bisnonna had in fact done her share of running around and had a son by another man to prove it (whom Michele accepted as part of the family). Michele wanted custody of their children (six counting the son who wasn’t his), but for whatever reason he didn’t get it. (Maybe in 1917 mothers got custody, period.) And also for whatever reason/s, he decided to go back home to Italy.
I’m not sure when Michele met his “second wife,” Maria Antonia, but once he did, he stuck around. She wasn’t actually his wife—he couldn’t marry her because the Catholic Church in Italy didn’t recognize his divorce—but they had seven children together (and raised eight, including the son she already had when they met).
Michele not only fathered 12 children but (euphemistically speaking) did his part, on occasion, at age 75-plus. Bravo! (Credit where it’s due: my trisnonno in the Ossola line outdid him numbers-wise, fathering 15, though the youngest was born when he was a mere 67 years old.) Michele was also well traveled, emigrating first to Argentina (where his first daughter was born), then returning to Italy (where my grandmother was born), then emigrating to America (where another three children were born), then returning to Italy to produce those seven by Maria Antonia. I’m tired just thinking about it.
Now that the backstory is out of the way, let’s return to 2023. I’d told Elisabetta that I wanted to meet any or all of Michele’s three remaining children, and it just so happens that one of them, Maria Rosa, lives next door to Elisabetta. (Of the other two, one lives in Switzerland and one in another town close to Gioia Sannitica.) So Elisabetta set up a visit for me with Zia Rosa.
To say I was shocked when I met her would fall far, far short of an understatement. My Zia Rosa (actually my great-aunt, or prozia), a sharp, lively 81-year-old, swept me into her arms and her house and her family. Instead of the tightlipped, disinterested, perhaps even dotty anziana I’d imagined, I found a vibrant, delightful woman, undaunted by the dozens of stairs in her house and by more than a decade of widowhood. The mother of three and nonna of four, she spends her days taking care of family, including visiting Elisabetta’s wheelchair-bound mother.
Over coffee and cake, we talked about Zia Rosa’s memories of Michele; about what it was like to grow up in Caselle, an isolated, mountainside frazione of Gioia Sannitica, situated at the foot of a ruined medieval castle, which back then had 40 or 50 close-knit families (and now has a tenth of that number;) and a mountain road traveled on foot or donkey; about her own family and what she knew about her half-siblings (nothing). When I brought out photos of my grandmother and her two brothers (three of the half-siblings), Elisabetta exclaimed over the resemblance between Zia Rosa and my grandmother, which she says would have been more pronounced when Zia was younger and not quite so thin. (Zia Rosa says she doesn’t see the resemblance, but I can, particularly in the line of her jaw. Or is that wishful thinking?)
We talked for two hours, and when I left, it was with the understanding that the next evening Zia Rosa and two of her sons, Giulio and Fausto (who each have two children), would take me out for pizza. Unfortunately Zia’s other son, Angelo, was out of town.
Giulio showed up first, as warm and welcoming as Zia Rosa had been, and we squeezed in a quick visit before all of us piled into the car to go to dinner. After picking up one of Giulio’s sons, a 12-year-old, in another town, we met Fausto and his wife, Dalila, at the restaurant. Over pizza and beer I answered endless questions (most of them requiring something of a story to be properly explained, meaning I was doing far more drinking of beer than eating of pizza) and managed to lob a few questions of my own at one or another of them. After taking a group photo, we closed the restaurant at midnight.
I was leaving the next day, late morning, so I made plans for another visit with Zia Rosa at 10am. Fausto said he would join us, so I said goodbye to Giulio and his son. Back at Elisabetta’s house, I failed to sleep, reliving, for hours, what had turned out to be an astonishing and emotional evening. Though I’d just met these relatives, they made me feel immediately at ease. We all seemed to feel the same way—as if it was perfectly normal that we should meet and share stories and laughter after what amounted to decades of mutually perceived nonexistence. A family divided and obscured by decades and by thousands of miles, yet still a family.
I saw Dalila again the next morning when I went to buy gifts for Elisabetta and Zia Rosa—she’d told me she worked at a florist, which turned out to be the one across the street from Zia Rosa’s house (duh—it’s the only one in Gioia Sannitica, which is so small it doesn’t even have a pasticceria). After spending an hour with Zia Rosa and Fausto, I left fortified by coffee and equipped with phone numbers, Facebook connections, a bottle of oil from Zia’s olives, and a package of her homemade salame.
The day before, Elisabetta and I had searched the comune’s archives for documents about our mutual trisnonno and other family members, but we found very little. That’s okay. I’ll keep trying to trace those dusty old ancestors via their paper trail, but in the meantime I’ve got living, breathing, decidedly-not-dusty relatives, there all along in a little town in Campania, whose warmth and openness made my heart, like the Grinch’s, grow three sizes in one day.
Alla prossima,
Cheryl
Book of the week:
Ancestor Trouble by Maud Newton
Poems of the week:
P.S. My book! Which you can buy here or on the usual sites, or, better yet, order if from you local bookstore. Another fab option is to ask your library to stock it. If you read it and like it, please tell your friends and/or leave a few lines of praise on any bookish site. You’d be surprised how much a rating or review helps authors. Baci!
What a wonderful story and thank you for sharing it, Cheryl. It's encouraging me to do some of my own research, but I'm not sure where to start.
Gosh, I've been meaning to look up how to say 'great aunt' for ages. Thanks for saving me the trouble, Cheryl! (prozia)