The mystery of my Italian ancestors haunts me. The cold case, handed down from my father, a genealogical puzzle with missing links, pieces lost when his beloved father died. Yet, over the years, the love for his Papa never faded when memories of his childhood fleeted.
A sinkhole at the family home in Northern Virginia swallowed the paternal core after the father of five children walked out the door, with only a suitcase in his hand and a gold pocket watch, dangling from his double-breasted, suit jacket.
Standing next to four siblings, my father, Ronnie, was the youngest; and he looked like a clone of his father. He developed a great pride for his father's heritage, honoring old world traditions, attending Italian celebrations, and festivals. With a meek allowance, he saved money and eventually bought an Italian horn and a gold necklace. He wore it proudly over a white T-shirt as if the shiny charm were a religious symbol. After school, he rode his bike to the market on the corner, where he played cards with the neighborhood boys on the sidewalk. One day, the man who owned the store and the soda fountain next door patted him on the back and offered the tall, skinny "Paesano boy" a job.
Salvatore "Sal" was off the boat from Sicily, coming to America after the Great Depression. Sal thought my father's dark features were Southern Italian. My father smiled and nodded, refraining from mentioning his roots planted in Torino, a northern Italian province. That admission would have divided them. The unification of Italy in 1871, a heated rivalry between North and South still exists-extreme differences on and off a soccer field. Sal was short, portly in his late-forties with a raspy voice.
He loved my father like a son, proclaiming Ronnie was a Sicilian. And he learned from Sal, the ABCs of the Cosa Nostra, five families on the US map with ties to Sicily and Naples. Not many people spoke of Salvatore's connections, but everyone knew he donned a mafia bow tie. Only a select group in his trusted inner circle (my father included) knew he operated a gambling joint in the back- room. The front counter at the soda fountain and the secret wagers in the back room became an extracurricular learning lab. My father observed a brotherhood society, built tough and wise on big-city streets. Italian rule number 1: never flop like a fish out of water, when the police come knocking. Dad later preached rule number one and nine others, a top ten list of Famigila Commandments. He took the street smarts he learned from Sal to the Air Force and then later to Georgetown University. After graduating, he lobbied for the Tuna canning industry in Congress, settling years later in Miami, establishing himself as a successful, legitimate businessman. There is a story to write here, titled the Sunshine Boys, a story of events of gambling in Miami with his friend Santo Trafficante Jr.
Imagining him on break at the soda parlor, I picture my father
scribbling a note inside a school notebook:
Papa's name was Alberto Lucchini. He was born somewhere in Northern Italy in a small town, Torino, near the Italian Alps. He came to America when he was a teenager on a big boat with his older brother, Francis. He lived in NYC with friends, then came to DC to find work and married my mom. Forced to change his last name to sound French, he had fiery eyes, and dry hands from washing dishes in a restaurant then he became a cook. I don't know where my father is... Uncle Frank lives in Philadelphia with a big family. Maybe one day I will go there.
He held on to this sheet of paper (I found it in one of his boxes) with more notes scribbled in writing journals and clippings from a magazine. with an article on Italian immigration. Inside a folded page, he had circled the faces of two young boys who came to America sans parents, from Italy. He believed the boys in that article were his father and uncle. Perhaps.
My father died after a very long battle with Parkinson's disease. And still, to this day, I sometimes find myself reaching for the phone, wanting to call him for advice. Hey Dad, what life path should I take after college, career, kids? What now? What next? And, he always answered: read books, travel often, find our relatives in Italy, and while you are at it, learn the beautiful language.
Those instructions repeated on his hospice death bed; he begged me to solve the complex genealogical puzzle, one that was difficult to solve. Lost fragments of time, the main enemy. A glimmer of hope twinkled when I reunited with my first cousin in Reston, Virginia-- close to where our American family started. She contributed to the start up of AOL, and earned an expertise in genealogy. Her father, now 100, is the eldest and only sibling of my father, who is alive, with very little to no memory, depending on the level of his clarity on some days. Sometimes I wonder if my uncle Albert (named after his father) doesn't want to remember.
My father, "the baby", was just nine years old when his Papa died in New York City, in 1942. At that time, Alberto worked at a hotel as a French chef, estranged from his wife, Mary Grace, and their five children. The cause of death listed on his death certificate: heart attack. The information sketchy, but it was a start, and where I pinned a red heart tack in the Big Apple.
Coming to America
The first ancestral gem found on the paper trail was a passenger list from Ellis Island's record bank. The ship manifest, now searchable online, showed my grandfather, 17, arriving into the Manhattan harbor with his older brother, Francesco, 27, from Ivrea, Italy (the name of the town, a new clue). It showed the timeline when he left the port in Le Havre, France on January, 23, 1904, his time at sea on the ship, La Champagne, and his final arrival into New York on February 2nd.
The ship registry offered more details, listing their occupation as laborers, and a partial address where my grandfather would stay with a friend, Stefano somewhere on W. 36th Street. Francesco reported he would live in Philadelphia, a place he had visited once before, according to what he provided to the immigration officers. He had returned to Italy to escort his little brother to America. But why not his parents, my great-grandparents?
Just before my father passed away, I showed him the immigration record from Ellis Island. Seated at the edge of his bed, at the veteran nursing home, I watched tears stream down his cheeks when he found his father's name on the ship manifest. His face froze by a cruel, debilitating disease, Parkinson's Disease. Yet his mind remained sharp as the fancy cutting knives in my kitchen.
Later, my cousin, Jan, confirmed our grandfather worked as a laborer, helping to build the first Italian-American church in South Philly, Our Lady of Loretto with his brother Frank. Later his hands washed dishes in NYC, then moved to Washington, DC where he met our grandmother.
They fell in love, married and moved in with her parents, who held prominent English surnames.
The 1920 Census-more than a decade before my father was born- showed my grandfather living with his in-laws on an estate in Virginia. They fabricated the entry reporting he was from Switzerland. The country borders Italy to the north. He could have lived in the neighboring country for a brief time before he emigrated from Italy. But my father attributed the cover-up as a shield from discrimination. Alberto Lucchini changed to Albert De Lucien, which sounded French, instead of Italian. He most likely spoke French; Ivrea was once under Napoleonic rule, for 14 years.
When Alberto arrived in America, immigrants from "The Boot" were frowned upon and reside in the ghettos of New York City with their Mediterranean, olive-skinned neighbors, the Greeks.
My grandfather was a dark knight, next to the fair maiden he courted from the Schilling clan. A British coat of arms hung on the wall in the living room and polished silver in the dining room that traced back to an upper echelon of ancestors in England.
Ten years later, the 1930 Census showed the couple lived with her brother, "the head of household", and then the paper trail ended.
My cousin Jan joined me in the search for ancestor records, sending emails to potential relatives in Philadelphia and Turin, Italy, concentrating on the birthplace of our grandfather. The Olivetti typewriter placed the industrial town on the map, near Torino. Many decades later, a group of techies at a university in Ivrea invented a revolutionary circuit board memory processor (Arduino) found in computers today. I would then find out that "Arduino" was the name of the street where my grandfather was born, in the center of the city. And the first king of Italy-before unification-was King Arduino of Ivrea. Oddly, I couldn't help to notice that he has the "Lucchini nose". My teenage daughter (and me) inherited the regal Italian feature. I hope she never alters the slope of her nose like Jennifer Grey, the actress who lost her celebrity look after plastic surgery.
In South Philadelphia, my great uncle, Francis, Francesco, aka Frank Lucchini, his wife, and 5 children lay to rest in one family tomb, a commonplace ritual in cemeteries in Europe. Families laid to rest together. I'm sure there are third or fourth cousins to unearth, but unfortunately, the time warp from the birth of our Italian roots, in the 19th century, (formerly under French and Sardinian rule) make it difficult to dig new information. Would the Lucchini family in Philly have pictures from the old country? Frank's son owned a florist shop, and then passed it on to his son (deceased). I tracked down his wife; she manages the store. After an awkward introduction trying to tell her I was a relative and not a bill collector, she cut me off, "Albert is dead!" A splash of guilt must have stopped her from hanging up on me. Instead, she put me on hold and returned to the conversation with a phone number, telling me to call Virginia-my second cousin. But, the memory of Frank, my great-uncle had escaped the mind of my last living connection to Lucchini in Philadelphia, buried in a family tree of names, Virginia, then 77 years old, as she listed the deceased. Another dead end, at an enormous family tombstone in Mount Vernon Cemetery in Philadelphia.
And then I met Doris, an elderly woman with a compelling, unique back story of survival from the Holocaust in Poland. Living out her last chapter, confined in a nursing home, she was sent to the hospital with pneumonia-a condition my dad routinely battled in the hospital, at the end of his life.
I will never forget the day I met Doris, my roommate on the respiratory floor at Westside Hospital. She came into my life for a monumental reason, as I battled the seasonal flu, severe asthma, and the midlife blues. She stayed longer there longer than me. Yet, Doris left a lasting human imprint in my life- one that she never fully realized.
“We must water our roots," she said. "They hold our origins, the branches of our family tree.”
Selfishly, I had visited Italy-Rome-twice, but not Ivrea, in the North-Western corner.
Doris again insisted, "You must go back to Italy at once, and walk in your grandfather's footsteps; your family will follow."
In 2013, and again in 2014, I set out on an ancestral voyage, which took me to the charming, medieval town of Ivrea. The small city lives in the past, yet beats with a modern drumstick. From one journalist to another, a reporter named Rita Cola (now a dear friend) from the town newspaper wrote a story on my long journey, coming from Miami to Ivrea. We first connected online, via postings on several media sites, where I had searched for information and mapped the location of the town. And through the help of a good friend in Rome, with ties to the Carabinieri (national police force), I obtained the most important document to date: my grandfather's birth certificate from 1885. The story on my ancestral journey published in La Sentinella del Canavese.
Translated from Italian to English:
A sinkhole at the family home in Northern Virginia swallowed the paternal core after the father of five children walked out the door, with only a suitcase in his hand and a gold pocket watch, dangling from his double-breasted, suit jacket.
Standing next to four siblings, my father, Ronnie, was the youngest; and he looked like a clone of his father. He developed a great pride for his father's heritage, honoring old world traditions, attending Italian celebrations, and festivals. With a meek allowance, he saved money and eventually bought an Italian horn and a gold necklace. He wore it proudly over a white T-shirt as if the shiny charm were a religious symbol. After school, he rode his bike to the market on the corner, where he played cards with the neighborhood boys on the sidewalk. One day, the man who owned the store and the soda fountain next door patted him on the back and offered the tall, skinny "Paesano boy" a job.
Salvatore "Sal" was off the boat from Sicily, coming to America after the Great Depression. Sal thought my father's dark features were Southern Italian. My father smiled and nodded, refraining from mentioning his roots planted in Torino, a northern Italian province. That admission would have divided them. The unification of Italy in 1871, a heated rivalry between North and South still exists-extreme differences on and off a soccer field. Sal was short, portly in his late-forties with a raspy voice.
He loved my father like a son, proclaiming Ronnie was a Sicilian. And he learned from Sal, the ABCs of the Cosa Nostra, five families on the US map with ties to Sicily and Naples. Not many people spoke of Salvatore's connections, but everyone knew he donned a mafia bow tie. Only a select group in his trusted inner circle (my father included) knew he operated a gambling joint in the back- room. The front counter at the soda fountain and the secret wagers in the back room became an extracurricular learning lab. My father observed a brotherhood society, built tough and wise on big-city streets. Italian rule number 1: never flop like a fish out of water, when the police come knocking. Dad later preached rule number one and nine others, a top ten list of Famigila Commandments. He took the street smarts he learned from Sal to the Air Force and then later to Georgetown University. After graduating, he lobbied for the Tuna canning industry in Congress, settling years later in Miami, establishing himself as a successful, legitimate businessman. There is a story to write here, titled the Sunshine Boys, a story of events of gambling in Miami with his friend Santo Trafficante Jr.
Imagining him on break at the soda parlor, I picture my father
scribbling a note inside a school notebook:
Papa's name was Alberto Lucchini. He was born somewhere in Northern Italy in a small town, Torino, near the Italian Alps. He came to America when he was a teenager on a big boat with his older brother, Francis. He lived in NYC with friends, then came to DC to find work and married my mom. Forced to change his last name to sound French, he had fiery eyes, and dry hands from washing dishes in a restaurant then he became a cook. I don't know where my father is... Uncle Frank lives in Philadelphia with a big family. Maybe one day I will go there.
He held on to this sheet of paper (I found it in one of his boxes) with more notes scribbled in writing journals and clippings from a magazine. with an article on Italian immigration. Inside a folded page, he had circled the faces of two young boys who came to America sans parents, from Italy. He believed the boys in that article were his father and uncle. Perhaps.
My father died after a very long battle with Parkinson's disease. And still, to this day, I sometimes find myself reaching for the phone, wanting to call him for advice. Hey Dad, what life path should I take after college, career, kids? What now? What next? And, he always answered: read books, travel often, find our relatives in Italy, and while you are at it, learn the beautiful language.
Those instructions repeated on his hospice death bed; he begged me to solve the complex genealogical puzzle, one that was difficult to solve. Lost fragments of time, the main enemy. A glimmer of hope twinkled when I reunited with my first cousin in Reston, Virginia-- close to where our American family started. She contributed to the start up of AOL, and earned an expertise in genealogy. Her father, now 100, is the eldest and only sibling of my father, who is alive, with very little to no memory, depending on the level of his clarity on some days. Sometimes I wonder if my uncle Albert (named after his father) doesn't want to remember.
My father, "the baby", was just nine years old when his Papa died in New York City, in 1942. At that time, Alberto worked at a hotel as a French chef, estranged from his wife, Mary Grace, and their five children. The cause of death listed on his death certificate: heart attack. The information sketchy, but it was a start, and where I pinned a red heart tack in the Big Apple.
Coming to America
The first ancestral gem found on the paper trail was a passenger list from Ellis Island's record bank. The ship manifest, now searchable online, showed my grandfather, 17, arriving into the Manhattan harbor with his older brother, Francesco, 27, from Ivrea, Italy (the name of the town, a new clue). It showed the timeline when he left the port in Le Havre, France on January, 23, 1904, his time at sea on the ship, La Champagne, and his final arrival into New York on February 2nd.
The ship registry offered more details, listing their occupation as laborers, and a partial address where my grandfather would stay with a friend, Stefano somewhere on W. 36th Street. Francesco reported he would live in Philadelphia, a place he had visited once before, according to what he provided to the immigration officers. He had returned to Italy to escort his little brother to America. But why not his parents, my great-grandparents?
Just before my father passed away, I showed him the immigration record from Ellis Island. Seated at the edge of his bed, at the veteran nursing home, I watched tears stream down his cheeks when he found his father's name on the ship manifest. His face froze by a cruel, debilitating disease, Parkinson's Disease. Yet his mind remained sharp as the fancy cutting knives in my kitchen.
Later, my cousin, Jan, confirmed our grandfather worked as a laborer, helping to build the first Italian-American church in South Philly, Our Lady of Loretto with his brother Frank. Later his hands washed dishes in NYC, then moved to Washington, DC where he met our grandmother.
They fell in love, married and moved in with her parents, who held prominent English surnames.
The 1920 Census-more than a decade before my father was born- showed my grandfather living with his in-laws on an estate in Virginia. They fabricated the entry reporting he was from Switzerland. The country borders Italy to the north. He could have lived in the neighboring country for a brief time before he emigrated from Italy. But my father attributed the cover-up as a shield from discrimination. Alberto Lucchini changed to Albert De Lucien, which sounded French, instead of Italian. He most likely spoke French; Ivrea was once under Napoleonic rule, for 14 years.
When Alberto arrived in America, immigrants from "The Boot" were frowned upon and reside in the ghettos of New York City with their Mediterranean, olive-skinned neighbors, the Greeks.
My grandfather was a dark knight, next to the fair maiden he courted from the Schilling clan. A British coat of arms hung on the wall in the living room and polished silver in the dining room that traced back to an upper echelon of ancestors in England.
Ten years later, the 1930 Census showed the couple lived with her brother, "the head of household", and then the paper trail ended.
My cousin Jan joined me in the search for ancestor records, sending emails to potential relatives in Philadelphia and Turin, Italy, concentrating on the birthplace of our grandfather. The Olivetti typewriter placed the industrial town on the map, near Torino. Many decades later, a group of techies at a university in Ivrea invented a revolutionary circuit board memory processor (Arduino) found in computers today. I would then find out that "Arduino" was the name of the street where my grandfather was born, in the center of the city. And the first king of Italy-before unification-was King Arduino of Ivrea. Oddly, I couldn't help to notice that he has the "Lucchini nose". My teenage daughter (and me) inherited the regal Italian feature. I hope she never alters the slope of her nose like Jennifer Grey, the actress who lost her celebrity look after plastic surgery.
In South Philadelphia, my great uncle, Francis, Francesco, aka Frank Lucchini, his wife, and 5 children lay to rest in one family tomb, a commonplace ritual in cemeteries in Europe. Families laid to rest together. I'm sure there are third or fourth cousins to unearth, but unfortunately, the time warp from the birth of our Italian roots, in the 19th century, (formerly under French and Sardinian rule) make it difficult to dig new information. Would the Lucchini family in Philly have pictures from the old country? Frank's son owned a florist shop, and then passed it on to his son (deceased). I tracked down his wife; she manages the store. After an awkward introduction trying to tell her I was a relative and not a bill collector, she cut me off, "Albert is dead!" A splash of guilt must have stopped her from hanging up on me. Instead, she put me on hold and returned to the conversation with a phone number, telling me to call Virginia-my second cousin. But, the memory of Frank, my great-uncle had escaped the mind of my last living connection to Lucchini in Philadelphia, buried in a family tree of names, Virginia, then 77 years old, as she listed the deceased. Another dead end, at an enormous family tombstone in Mount Vernon Cemetery in Philadelphia.
And then I met Doris, an elderly woman with a compelling, unique back story of survival from the Holocaust in Poland. Living out her last chapter, confined in a nursing home, she was sent to the hospital with pneumonia-a condition my dad routinely battled in the hospital, at the end of his life.
I will never forget the day I met Doris, my roommate on the respiratory floor at Westside Hospital. She came into my life for a monumental reason, as I battled the seasonal flu, severe asthma, and the midlife blues. She stayed longer there longer than me. Yet, Doris left a lasting human imprint in my life- one that she never fully realized.
“We must water our roots," she said. "They hold our origins, the branches of our family tree.”
Selfishly, I had visited Italy-Rome-twice, but not Ivrea, in the North-Western corner.
Doris again insisted, "You must go back to Italy at once, and walk in your grandfather's footsteps; your family will follow."
In 2013, and again in 2014, I set out on an ancestral voyage, which took me to the charming, medieval town of Ivrea. The small city lives in the past, yet beats with a modern drumstick. From one journalist to another, a reporter named Rita Cola (now a dear friend) from the town newspaper wrote a story on my long journey, coming from Miami to Ivrea. We first connected online, via postings on several media sites, where I had searched for information and mapped the location of the town. And through the help of a good friend in Rome, with ties to the Carabinieri (national police force), I obtained the most important document to date: my grandfather's birth certificate from 1885. The story on my ancestral journey published in La Sentinella del Canavese.
Translated from Italian to English:
- Ivrea. An unforgettable journey in rediscovering one's roots, to walk in the same places of (family) origins. Michelle Marie McNiff lives in Florida and has chosen the summer 2013 for a grand tour in Italy, walking in the footsteps of her grandfather.
- A few days before her arrival in the city, she posted a request for help on the bulletin board of the City of Ivrea. Requesting, if anyone had information on the Italian roots of her family. "I love Ivrea! - She said on her return to the U.S. - and I want to walk in the footsteps of my grandfather. "
- Michelle's grandfather's name was Alberto Lucchini and he was born in via Arduino in 1885. A fate awaited him as an emigrant. In 1902 he left for the Ivrea for the United States. He was just a boy. In America he built his new life in Italy and never returned. He died in 1942. For the City of Ivrea, however, the presumed death of Lucchini dates from the year of his emigration. In 1960, in fact, the man was pronounced dead allegedly on the basis of a judgment of the Court of Ivrea.
- Michelle tries to find out more. Of course, it is not easy. She found the house where her grandfather was born at number 7, as stated in the register of civil status, with the handwriting of a time that tells of Pietro Lucchini, aged 48, August 4, 1885 that showed up at city hall to register the child's birth, which occurred on July 31, and chose for him the name of Alberto Michele Erminio. The child's mother's name was Anna Maria.
- Michelle says - "I am looking for information on families Lucchini, Colombo, Maffioli. They are my roots." The information Michelle has is short, maintenso. "I was in via Arduino - she says - I went to the Bakery pastry Torinese and talked with people. I stopped in the street, older people I met, to see if they could help me to find someone in my family. I saw the house where my grandfather was born, the balcony. " Michelle also went to the cemetery, in the cathedral ("I have prayed, I know that my family was there"), was wandering through the old town, Via Palestro, the castle, the narrow streets.
- Now what? "Now I hope to return to Ivrea soon. My heart was very happy to have been in Ivrea. And I still hope to find much information about my family. "
- ***
- Recently, I returned from Ivrea, a second ancestral voyage, and feel very close to finding parente, relatives after spending time with Rita at the Commune of Ivrea. A research team at the municipale is conducting an "anagrafe", my family tree, focusing on the relatives of my grandfather, Nonno Alberto, as I fondly refer to him, now. Before I checked out of my hotel, Castello Pavonne-the for mer abode of the House of Savoy and King Arduino, a castle in Piedmont worth visiting, I obtained a phone number of a possible relative. Rita wrote another story, this time, on my steadfast determination and new details, which made the front page:
- http://ricerca.gelocal.it/lasentinella/topic/persone/m/michelle+mcnif
- A third trip again in the summer of 2015. This time to Ivrea and neighboring Biella (birthplace of my great-grandmother). My intuitive powers and Jewish soul shine a flashlight on a possible link to the Piemontese Jewish population with ties to the Maffioli surname.
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