The following is an excerpt from my book, Forty Days in Italy Con La Mia Famiglia.
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As I walked up the stairs to my grandmother’s apartment with my laptop under my arm, I felt like I was about to uncover a treasure that I should have started looking for years ago. That doesn’t matter anymore though I thought; the time is now.
She had warm eggplant parmigiana and a loaf of Italian bread on the table, the perfect way to start the afternoon. The two of us, along with my grandfather, enjoyed the lunch and then Grandpa Serafino (Sal) retired to the television to watch his game shows, and grandma and me delved into our past.
I opened up my laptop and used a note-taking program called Evernote to capture the information. She focused on my great-grandparents, one at a time, going through all four of them, her parents and my Grandpa Sal’s parents.
What was great was that she didn’t just give me the hard, factual information that I would need to dig deeper, but she also told me stories about my ancestors, and stories about growing up in an immigrant neighborhood, which was really powerful to me. I started to understand the odds that my great-grandparents were up against when they traveled on a boat from Italy to a country they knew nothing about.
They had no money. They couldn’t speak the language. They didn’t even know if they would survive the trip overseas. However, they all had a common goal. They wanted a better life for their families. Mission accomplished.
As Grandma Jo (Josephine) spoke, with every story she told, I started becoming more and more thankful for the life I had, realizing that success wasn’t handed to my family. It was the product of hard work, day after day, putting family first above all else. The Italian-American philosophy – Family First – Prima la Famiglia.
This realization was worth more than all of the facts that I gained while sitting at Grandma’s kitchen table that day. Understanding that my Great-Grandpa Giuseppe collected junk and sold it to feed his children, and that my Great-Grandma Rosina did seamstress work whenever she could to bring in money to help her family survive, these are invaluable stories that I can now pass down to my children.
As I will share with you later in the book, this was only the beginning. With this information, I was able to find so much more on my own including visits to my great-grandparents original villages in Italy. I will give you all of the details on how I did this, so you can, too.
This was just the first learning session with my grandmother, but I would go on to have many more over the next few years, and still do to this day. I want to share with you some of my notes from those visits in this section to give you some insight into some of the information that you might search for, and at the end of this chapter I will give you some specific questions you might consider.
Giuseppe Baselice – WW1 Veteran (fought for US)
Born: February 7th
Died: 3/28/1984
Born in Sarno, Italy, province of Salerno (Salerno is near Naples)
Mom: Vittoria Balestrino
Father: Aniello Baselice
He had 2 sisters: Rose Baselice, Michelena Basilice
Notes: Both of his parents were killed in the Battle of Salerno in World War II in 1943. Grandma Jo remembers when the letter about his parents death was delivered, white envelope with black border; he immediately knew there was a death in the family. He was a salvage dealer (junk man). He used to go into apartments and get old newspapers from the superintendents. He had a horse and wagon and used it to transport the papers. He met a prosperous Italian man named Pasquala Giordano, and he said to Giuseppe , “If I buy you a truck, you trade only for me.” And that’s what he did. They were very poor. After World War 1 he couldn’t get a job. Fiorello LaGuardia gave him a job. An english-speaking friend of Giuseppe wrote Mayor LaGuardia a letter, and told him that a friend of his (Giuseppe) was a World War One veteran with 5 kids and no job and his kids were hungry. On Thanksgiving Eve, the Mayor sent his staff to their apartment and gave them baskets of food and a job to Giuseppe. They never forgot that day.
Please share in the comments below things you have done to learn about your ancestors, or specific things that you found out and would like to share.
You can check out my book Forty Days in Italy Con La Mia Famiglia here.
Anthony Fasano
Co-host of The Italian American Podcast
Author of Forty Days in Italy Con La Mia Famiglia
Your Grandma–my Aunt Josie–is a special person, and I remember her great Italian cooking!
So glad she is able to give you stories of her (and our) ancestors that are truly invaluable. You are an extraordinary person to appreciate so much our Italian heritage, with reminders that even our people, at one time, were minorities in a strange world.
Only met you once when you were a baby, but the bond will always be there 🙂
Thanks Linda — we’ll meet again. It gives us another reason to come to Europe 🙂 Thanks for all of your positive feedback on the site. You and Roseanne have been very helpful through the process.
Anthony, that is a terrific post. Not just because of the focus on learning more about the Italian family lines through focused conversation with your grandmother, but also because of the poignant story about how an informal social network of Italian-Americans were able to have a huge positive impact on one another. Clearly, other ethnic groups of Americans have performed similar acts to help each other within their ethnic social networks, but being Italian-American myself made the story you reported more personal for me.
I’ve collected and documented information on my Italian lines from my uncle who is now 97. I need to do more of it. Also, I’ve been tested by the three major DNA testing companies: Family Tree DNA, Ancestry DNA, and 23andMe. In addition to providing estimates of your ethnic breakdown by percentages, they provide you with information on all those who match your DNA (your DNA relatives) such as what the probable relationship is (third cousin, etc.) and a means of contacting them via a messaging system available to those who have tested. Matches are anonymous to each other unless the matches had previously decided to share some identifying information publicly with their matches. The companies provide different sets of powerful tools that show you things like who your most likely recent common ancestors are by using the fact that you are unquestionably related to them by your DNA and that family trees are often available because they are uploaded by those who tested. The tools and trees can help immensely in building out your own family tree for those who are interested in family genealogy. The companies all offer a basic test of your DNA to show who your DNA relatives are (of those who have tested; called an autosomal test), but Family Tree DNA also offers a Y-DNA test which allows those who want to trace their paternal line (father / grandfather / great grandfather / and so on). Like the basic test (autosomal test) each company offers, the Y-DNA test also helps in building family trees (doing the genealogy). As more people have DNA testing done, it will become much easier to discover missing pieces of their family trees enabling them to grow their family trees back in time and sideways (uncles, aunts, cousins, …). If the tests are available in Italy, and we can get some of our relatives there to test, it should significantly help grow and document (via family trees) our Italian-American ancestry now and for generations of our descendants to come.
Again, thanks for a terrific post.
Gerald Powell (maternal surnames: Trivisonno and Masiello). I live in NJ.
Gerald thank you for your kind words. I am so glad you mentioned the DNA testing, it is the one avenue I haven’t really explored yet but have been considering doing so. Have you made significant discoveries through the testing with your own family tree? Has it facilitated contact with anyone? Thanks.
Anthony, thanks for your reply. Yes, I have made some significant discoveries through DNA testing. For example, I found a third cousin (once removed), and two first cousins (both twice removed). The third cousin and one of the first cousins (twice removed) are alive and I have established relationships with them. Amazing. I guess some families just lose contact with some of their relatives over time. So, in these cases, the DNA testing turned out to be a way of bringing pieces of families together who have lost contact with each other over years (perhaps generations) and geographic distances. And then you can learn about the children and grandchildren of those newly discovered DNA relatives. Also, there can be some unexpected positive, second-order effects. My third cousin (once removed) then made me a member of a closed Italian-American group on Facebook that she runs (you need to be given permission by her to join it) that focuses on a particular line of our shared Italian-American ancestry. Then you are a part of that portion of your Italian-American social network of your DNA relatives (many of whom have not yet DNA tested, but I saw recently that some have decided they will have their DNA tested having recently seen examples of genealogical (family) information that is often shared by those who are connected by their DNA. And with those “new” DNA relatives discovered, they bring a wealth of information about the families with them; official documentation, and informal information as well. The effects can ripple out powerfully both from a historical perspective of the families and on a personal basis.
-Jerry (Gerald Powell; maternal grandparent surnames of Trivisonno and Masiello)
Thanks for sharing Jerry.