Italian Roots and Genealogy
Preserving Our Roots: Embracing the Italian Legacy Through Family Narratives
My grandmother's laugh always had a way of transporting me to her tiny Italian village, a place I'd never been but felt I knew intimately through her stories. This week's episode is a heartfelt homage to the power of family narratives, where Peggy, Josephine, Becky, Frank, Mirella, Ed and I share our adventures in preserving these precious legacies. They unveil their personal quests—from essays capturing the essence of our ancestors to children's books that whisk young readers to the cobblestone streets of Italy—each story is a brushstroke on the canvas of our shared history.
As we navigate the poignant tales of our panel members, the conversation naturally weaves through the importance of capturing the wisdom of our elders before it's too late. We touch on the technological advances that help us immortalize these stories and discuss the emotional weight of documenting family lore. The diverse methods of storytelling presented by our guests, like cookbooks sprinkled with poetry and genealogical pursuits on digital platforms, remind us all of the threads that connect us to our past and the urgency of keeping them intact.
Venturing into the individuality of Italian heritage, we feel the pulse of ancient dialects and the resilience of immigrant communities. Mirella's family saga during World War II paints a vivid picture of survival and new beginnings, while our panelists reflect on the importance of cultural memory and the efforts to sustain it amidst changing landscapes. As our episode closes, we extend an open invitation to you, our listeners, to explore your own family tapestry, and share in the deeper conversation of who we are and where we come from.
Travel to Italy for kids
Through a Childs Eyes
German bombs fell on the enchanting village of San Pietro Infine, destroying homes.
Growing Up Italian American-Iannuccilli
Great stories about growing up Italian in America
My North End Family Stories
Peggy writes about her family who settled in Boston’s Italian enclave, the North End.
Life's Journey
Based on the real-life experiences of the author's paternal grandmother.
Farmers and Nobles
Read about my research story and how to begin your family research.
Disclaimer: This post contains affiliate links. If you make a purchase, I may receive a commission at no extra cost to you.
My grandmother's laugh always had a way of transporting me to her tiny Italian village, a place I'd never been but felt I knew intimately through her stories. This week's episode is a heartfelt homage to the power of family narratives, where Peggy, Josephine, Becky, Frank, Mirella, Ed and I share our adventures in preserving these precious legacies. They unveil their personal quests—from essays capturing the essence of our ancestors to children's books that whisk young readers to the cobblestone streets of Italy—each story is a brushstroke on the canvas of our shared history.
As we navigate the poignant tales of our panel members, the conversation naturally weaves through the importance of capturing the wisdom of our elders before it's too late. We touch on the technological advances that help us immortalize these stories and discuss the emotional weight of documenting family lore. The diverse methods of storytelling presented by our guests, like cookbooks sprinkled with poetry and genealogical pursuits on digital platforms, remind us all of the threads that connect us to our past and the urgency of keeping them intact.
Venturing into the individuality of Italian heritage, we feel the pulse of ancient dialects and the resilience of immigrant communities. Mirella's family saga during World War II paints a vivid picture of survival and new beginnings, while our panelists reflect on the importance of cultural memory and the efforts to sustain it amidst changing landscapes. As our episode closes, we extend an open invitation to you, our listeners, to explore your own family tapestry, and share in the deeper conversation of who we are and where we come from.
Travel to Italy for kids
Through a Childs Eyes
German bombs fell on the enchanting village of San Pietro Infine, destroying homes.
Growing Up Italian American-Iannuccilli
Great stories about growing up Italian in America
My North End Family Stories
Peggy writes about her family who settled in Boston’s Italian enclave, the North End.
Life's Journey
Based on the real-life experiences of the author's paternal grandmother.
Farmers and Nobles
Read about my research story and how to begin your family research.
Disclaimer: This post contains affiliate links. If you make a purchase, I may receive a commission at no extra cost to you.
Hi everyone. This is Bob Tarantino from Italian Roots and Genealogy, and hosting with me today is my good friend, franky Piero from Keeping it Real with Franky D, and we have a great panel today to talk about writing your family story. So welcome, guys. Thanks for being here. You know, and I think I'm going to start with you because I know you've you've written a few books and you have your short stories and we see you, you got the camera working, so that's even better. So you know why did? Why did you start writing your family story? And is it, you know, through the life, or is it like a historical fiction type of thing?
Speaker 2:Well, actually it happened a few years ago I was. I was at La Virginia Christmas Eve dinner and telling my children how fortunate they were to be here in this country because of my grand, my grandparents, who came as immigrants, in all the trials and tribulations of being an immigrant in this country, and how hard they worked to get to this point. And my oldest son said I didn't know that. I said well, you need to know that. So I wrote a story, just in a journal. What do I do with this story? And I sent it to an editor of the local newspaper. He published it. He said it was charming. I said it's charming. So he published it. I didn't even wrote anything before. I'm a retired physician. I used to write medical stuff which was boring and subject predicate and so forth.
Speaker 3:But anyway, he thought it was pretty good.
Speaker 2:So five books later that was 10 years ago I just wrote all these stories about growing up Italian, about my grandparents, parents, neighborhood friends, et cetera, et cetera. A series of essays, that's what they are. And then I got a job writing for the Providence Journal, then another job for an online digital newspaper, a weekly column, and there it is. It just blew up like that.
Speaker 1:And so, truth be told, it influenced me a lot to write my story, along with Anthony Michio, who was a great mentor, and I like to thank Peggy. I think I helped you a little bit get started yeah, also Anthony.
Speaker 5:Yeah, anthony, michio.
Speaker 1:And so, peggy, you wrote about your grandmother, mostly right.
Speaker 5:No, actually all my close, my mother, my father, but my grandmother was the one who got me started because I was trying, I was teaching in the junior college where I went, and I was trying to get them to talk about, just talk in class, about where they came from, because they were all over the world and what they wanted to talk about was their family. That was the big thing. So I said, okay, this is going to be a first writing assignment, you know, not in the syllabus like this, but we did it. And so I gave them an exemplar of my grandmother and it took off from there and if it came 100 pages, Yep and Josephine your books.
Speaker 1:I guess I know it's about the family, but you kind of, you know, have some historical stuff in there too.
Speaker 4:Yeah, I did a lot of research, took years. Yeah, I went to the church where my grandparents were married, that's in 1900. And they sent me all kinds of documents, all the baptisms of all my aunts and uncles and my father. So, yeah, I do have a lot of documents.
Speaker 1:Yeah, and Becky, how about you?
Speaker 3:Well, I'm doing something probably very different than most of the folks on the panel, so I'm carrying forward family histories that my mother and my father wrote. So my dad wrote a history of his family, of which originally he started with tape recording his mom and dad and collecting all the stories that they had, and then he then also wrote his own personal story, similar to Ed. My dad was a physician as well, so he wrote about what it meant to be an Italian immigrant and come into a system of which there was quotas on Italians to enter medical school and all those kinds of things that entered into his story. And then my mother wrote a personal story of her family as well, and I just discovered for my brother that he has cassette tapes. I guess she did interview folks.
Speaker 3:I haven't got my hands on them yet. I'll be driving over soon to go get those. So listen to well, if nothing else, to hear people's voices again as well. So I've been attempting in different avenues, which we can talk about a little later, to get the stories in places that I think are appropriate, but I'm not necessarily publishing them for the wider world.
Speaker 1:Yeah, we'll get that.
Speaker 3:Oh, you're going to twist my arm. Okay, I do have a children's story based on my mom's first Christmas. I'd love to get out there Great.
Speaker 1:And, frank, that's a good segue to you, because you've actually written children's books.
Speaker 6:Yes, yes, thank you. Yeah, and you know they're kind of based off of the real life thing. You know, I wrote one about, like you know. It's like the little girl takes her teddy bear and she goes to Italy, but it's based off of places that I went to, places my wife is an immigrant and it's where she's from, in Calabria and her town, and you know. So, yeah, it's stuff like that. I'm finishing up another one now, based off of my father's town in Brutso, and it's all about a Brutso, and it's actually going to be bilingual because I'm a big fan of encouraging the learning of the Italian language for the. And it's easy when they're young, they can learn anything in the world. It's hard when you don't like me.
Speaker 1:So yeah, so did everybody, because I kind of felt it, did everybody feel that there was an outside force driving you to do this?
Speaker 3:I think it's not wanting to have the stories be lost, because, when I think about what my just speaking to my dad's family right now, when we were little, my dad's Sicilian and my mother's Carvelle's, so they spoke different dialects, so we learned no Italian as children. So when we went to my dad's parents' home and his brothers and things were there, there'd be all these talking and laughter and everything, of course, spoken in Sicilian, and later we'd have to say to dad what was, why were you laughing, what was the story? And then he would relay these stories back to us and these are some of the things he captured. Suppose it all be lost if he hadn't written them down. And so I feel like I have a chance to push forward to future generations the stories going back two or three generations that we would never have had, and so I think that's sort of this force of I want to make sure they're somewhere and they don't get. They don't get lost again. Yeah.
Speaker 1:And I think that's certainly why I did it.
Speaker 2:for that reason, you know, bob, for me it's an inside force because it becomes an emotional journey when you start to write these stories and realize what people went through and then what you live Alongside that, those generations. It's an emotional journey, people. When I, when I go to book signings and people ask me to read a story, I may have written the story a hundred times over, but I can't read it because it gets emotional for me, yes.
Speaker 1:I talked about my aunts.
Speaker 2:I'm writing about my aunts and I said I'm sorry I can't read it. You're gonna have to buy the book, but it's an inside more emotional for me than outside force.
Speaker 4:When I was doing my research I wanted to go like further back as far as I could. What when my grandfather came over with his parents in 1888 and finding the, the listings of the names and how some people from one village could be 50 of them on the same ship coming over. Even though they were coming over to a new country, they still had 49 other people.
Speaker 2:Which is great.
Speaker 4:It's like you're on a trip with a family.
Speaker 6:You know, a few years back actually probably now like six years, seven years, before I really knew anything about writing and all this stuff I did a book from Costco and it was.
Speaker 6:It was Mostly pictures, but the nice thing was it was like for my kids about my wife's parents and I'm like they do all these their color braids and they do all these things at home and you know, jarring to make a song, making wine and making soups, not done, making this and making that, making this and breads, and I thought you know, just to put it all together and find all these pictures and little captions and stuff, and my final law says all these problems and I wrote all the poppers. So it's on this one book and I thought I know they're not gonna appreciate it now, but one day they're gonna look at this and like you, would you add, I was you, you said it before. I could say it's not an outer force, it's an inner force.
Speaker 6:Your heart and your soul and your gut that does do this. Doing it, doing it is, it's. It's important for our families, for our people, it's for our culture.
Speaker 2:So, yeah, well, here's when you succeeded, frank, is when your granddaughter reads your book and invites you to her class your project Uh that's lovely, you gotta sit down.
Speaker 6:That's excellent.
Speaker 2:That's great, it's yeah, it's a great thing.
Speaker 1:My wife. The second book I wrote was more about my work, career and everything like that and she read and she said I didn't know all that stuff Happens oh, hello, giuseppe.
Speaker 2:Is this the great Frankie D of Frankie D podcast?
Speaker 1:absolutely.
Speaker 2:If you have, you know. Can I just interject because Carlos Simonini, professor a professoressa Uh is is at the University of Loyola and holds the chair in Italian studies there. She's from Rhode Island and I went to school with her, a father. And if you all have not heard the podcasts Of Frankie D the Peter with Carlos Simonini about Christopher Columbus, then you all must get on and hear that story. It's remarkable, in addition to all the other stuff Frank has done, like his podcast. Uh, it will take you forever to listen to all of them, but those especially Frank.
Speaker 6:I appreciate it. Yeah, I interviewed Carla once. You know just one-on-one about her and about Loyola and the. Italian Studies program. Carlos were lucky to have her in Chicago. Yeah, thank you.
Speaker 1:Yeah, no, I, you know, I love Frank stuff. He has the Italian-American moment. Who tells us about people that we, you know, we should know, but we, we don't know. Um, but here's a, here's a question that somebody has and Um, from John Valero have you ever written a story and found more info later that could have been included? Yes, uh, I've been writing the same story for over 10 years. I'm afraid to say it's finished. It's never going to be finished, john, just do it.
Speaker 3:Yeah, just just give birth to it, so to speak. Just do it, because another pair of eyes on it might allow you. I don't know if you've had other people read it, john, but if if you did that, then, um, people might give suggestions and say it's good here or this, what do you mean by? And ask some questions, but at some point you do have to deliver it. You really do.
Speaker 1:Yeah, true, and you know also, I mean I I changed the format of mine a couple of times. It took things out, put things in and then, yeah, you know, you just have to, you just have to go with it. You could always do a second book, yeah.
Speaker 4:Yeah, of course, your first book always leads you to a second, and then your second is going to lead you to a third. That's the fun of it.
Speaker 6:And, if I may, at our Italian Cultural Center in Chicago, uh, under the great dominant candeloro, uh, always he does. They do genealogy, uh, saturday seminars for free, um, how to write your own story. He's done a couple of those seminars in his family's book, a beautiful book with so much information and they help these people how to do it. Um, which is just so, so nice and very, very useful, very, very helpful and useful.
Speaker 4:Yeah, I think that's because I knew. When I first started to gather information for my first book, I was afraid to write because I thought, oh, I can't. I've never wrote stories before. But once you start, it just goes. Your fear let's go. I think you no longer have fear.
Speaker 1:Yeah, yeah, I, I found that too. You just have to, you just have to go with it.
Speaker 5:Um, it's a good memory.
Speaker 1:Just wanted to bring Giuseppe in for a minute. I met Giuseppe in my uh grandparents hometown, torrito uh last September and, uh, he, he, he, he was just amazing, took us around and, uh, we had such a fun time there. So, welcome Giuseppe. Thanks for being here.
Speaker 8:Hello Is not very good. I'm sorry because I speak every day Italian language with uh, with uh, with other people, but I'm sorry. I met just last year Mr Bob at Torrito and I have a honorated to to stay with you all the days for um Giving the opportunity to Mr Bob to visit his roots of Torrito and uh and I I have the pleasure to be. He is a chicharone, you remember to Chicharone.
Speaker 2:Cherto.
Speaker 8:City.
Speaker 5:Oops.
Speaker 1:I think, I think, if he froze, he sure did.
Speaker 8:And I'm very happy to greet you and I think you must uh to transfer In Italy my opinion, because Italy is very beautiful, right. In particular the cook. I'm sorry for my, for some mistake when I speak in English. I'm sorry wonderfully.
Speaker 1:Your English is better than our Italian. Just don't worry about that.
Speaker 3:I think that's a good sign.
Speaker 1:Thank you, sure.
Speaker 3:Bob, I think this comment by ben on the screen is a Interesting start for people to start a family tree, because I know often as you're working backwards, you do think of different stories and some of the websites allow you to Put a story up or write something or um, both orally as well as written, and it's it's also another interesting way to possibly start, even if it's just a small story or a remembrance about a person that you have personally. So I think that's as people could start at the family tree way of doing little little pockets here in there as they go.
Speaker 1:Well, and I I think that's that's great. And I also think that now I know who you know. We didn't do it, but you know, like anthony did in the 70s, for anybody young who's listening, uh, that you know. Has you know grandparents, or maybe even to the lucky enough to have great grandparents, uh, record them, that's sit down there with a book. You know, if everybody's got a video on their phone now, that's probably the best way to preserve it, whether you want to publish it as a as a book later on or, uh, you just want to put it out there for everybody else to see.
Speaker 1:And and my um, my uncle's grandson did that with him. He talked to him about world war two, and it's fantastic, because you know you're hearing his own words. Uh, so you know that's doesn't have to necessarily, I guess, be written. You know, just preserving the story is what's really really important.
Speaker 2:Before my mother passed away, I gave her a book with a question on each page. Her boyfriend first toy, favorite school and she filled the book.
Speaker 8:Well, here's the mistake I and I have it.
Speaker 2:Uh, I should have videoed her Because she would have forgotten the video was on and the video of her in her home Telling those stories would have been. So what my brother and I did is exactly that. Someone asked us all those questions. His son is a videographer, so he took all the old pictures and put them in the video as we spoke about those people, and now it's indelible and it's digitized so everybody can look at it anytime. It's not a you know, you don't have to pass it on. So that's something to think about for the old timers, especially to uh, to get those things recorded. That's great.
Speaker 4:I your mother born in. Sorry what year was your mother born in?
Speaker 2:1911, 1910. Yeah, so she lived through the depression. She had all those stories and uh, uh, you know, and of her parents, so they were great stories and here in America or in Italy. No, no, she's born here in.
Speaker 4:America. We're here in America.
Speaker 2:So in the book she never punctuated anything. So the book is one sentence.
Speaker 4:Yes.
Speaker 2:In the middle of the running she might put x's and o's to tell me that she loved me but other than.
Speaker 3:That's one. Bob is maybe to build off ads, I don't. If you want to show my slide, I can talk about a couple things. When he said not necessarily publishing, publishing, because that's what.
Speaker 3:I've been trying to do with my stuff, um, so I'll just talk about a few that are up here. So one was we did a family cookbook and asked for recipes that people remembered. But then we also have in it poetry written by family members. We have stories written about different events that are interspersed in the cookbook, and then we distributed it through cousins and and aunts and uncles and did that. Uh, my mom's first Christmas in the country is called one small wish, and we did that. Uh, my, my sister and I and my one of my first cousins, christine, we worked on the story and the illustrations, um of that. And then we made books again for the family. But then I've also latched on to opportunity. So for me this is an opportunity.
Speaker 3:Presenting today or I did a podcast with boba while ago about my paternal grandparents is another way of sharing just a small little taste Of it. And then I'm from Akron, ohio, and they were doing um that just happened to come, I believe me. It was two weeks to closure and for some reason because I'm no longer living in northern Ohio, I'm in central Ohio I didn't even know this project was going on, but something came on my facebook and they were collecting Uh, information. They they put up a statue of a rubber worker in Akron. We're going to lay bricks, so we made, I made sure that my, my grandfather and my great uncle and a great aunt who worked in the rubber industry had bricks. But they were also sharing stories and so I was recorded. I don't know what'll happen with that story, but but again, just another opportunity to do that.
Speaker 3:And the only published piece which is an interesting work is by a, a researcher teacher in uh, turin, uh, pina Mifudo, who has been studying caravilly where my mom is from, and on the cover of this book, which is number four, that's actually my family, that's my great grandfather. So she chose and I'll be emotional because I was really surprised, I we sent pictures anyway to be part of the book and this became the cover. Uh, but she wanted to know about second generation and so we my interview, I interviewed my mom while she was alive, Got things, and then my brothers and sister and I Did that, and so she's has published this and recently it'll be coming out in english. I have a copy in italian and it's not good, very good for me, but but the um, but there's about 12 families that did any information, so to look for small or big opportunities out there as another way of telling aspects of your family's stories.
Speaker 1:Yeah, yeah, thanks for that, Becky, and it came up before and I forgot to mention there are. I interviewed one person that escapes me, but there's another one that I'm doing in another couple of weeks. There are. If you don't wanna write the story yourself or you don't have the time, there are places out there on the internet that you can go to and you give them the information and they'll do a draft for you Some of them. If you wanna publish it, they'll publish it. So for people who are really shy about it or don't think they can write, there are other opportunities out there to be able to do that, Right, Okay? Hey, Frank, I'm gonna let you take the reins here for a while, is that okay? We're gonna have the good podcast and now we have some questions.
Speaker 6:Yeah, okay, Do you want me to go off of? We didn't get to some of these questions that we asked yeah yeah, okay, we talk about how everyone gathered the facts and further stories or not, we discussed them.
Speaker 3:I think a little bit, depending on who was speaking.
Speaker 6:Okay.
Speaker 5:Well, I will tell you how I found them.
Speaker 6:Yes.
Speaker 5:Fortunately my mother kept everything she was born in it. She came here when she was seven years old five years old, I'm sorry, five years old, 1917. And everything she kept. So I have like birth records that were never opened that people think they're fake, but they're not. So they.
Speaker 5:But Ancestry Dog Palm for me wasn't that useful for my family because we were born in Italy, then we were here so. But then of course we have a wonderful site in Italy which is free and I got a lot of information out of that. It's a little tough to navigate, but once you know how to do it it's very informative and it also leads you to other people because it'll have mother and father and all of that. Probably all used Anpanamthi. So that's the one I would recommend for everybody to go on.
Speaker 5:But then I found interesting things where you could just go to our main newspaper in Boston, the Boston Globe. I type in my last name for Chillow, maybe a couple of first names, and all of a sudden all this stuff pops up and I put my street in the North End and I find out that our tenement had a fire in it. I never knew that, and so these things come out of the blue that you nobody told me in my family and we owned the building from 1893, when it was built, till 1959. So but nobody passed it down. But in 1929, there was a fire and I think that's probably why my mother was very concerned about fire escapes, because we lived in a tenement in the North End for four floors.
Speaker 5:So also, I think some people are just naturally curious and might want to just delve into it. I mentioned it on one of the podcasts. I have a cousin who's like knows everything about the family, like I do, and then his brother no, and then, excuse me, his sister no and what? Or his mother. So I think it's sometime passed down because if my mother was very, I learned so much from my mother, and even with the World War II, because she was very active in the community for getting people to become citizens because of what was happening with the alien deportation, so she's probably up there someplace now saying good job, peggy. You know You're probably Peggy.
Speaker 6:Hey, peggy, where was your mom from in Italy?
Speaker 5:Where, where Arola? Where's that In between Casetta and Bermento? Okay, so Campania, provincia, campania. My father was from Abolino Cusano.
Speaker 3:Peggy, a viewer asked what Italian genealogy site you were using.
Speaker 5:Antenati.
Speaker 3:Oh, the Antenati files. Yeah, okay, that's fine. No, because I used them too.
Speaker 5:I used a screenshot thing here some place that I have on my desktop and also how to access it. Yes, Because it can get a little confusing. It can, and some of it is in English or whatever language you speak, but once you get, obviously to record the record the record is an interesting script.
Speaker 5:So yeah, but I really feel that having a person in your family that was interested in the history of the family would be beneficial, cause I wouldn't know half of what I know if it weren't for my mother and she was bilingual. Like somebody was talking about Frank, he would talk about that. I'm a, I can speak a lot of language. I'm like multilingual and I can't add or subtract. I'm totally going to die. So that's really important. And she made, she didn't make, it was just it happened. We spoke Italian in the house and I'm interested maybe Frank at some point talking about Loyola, cause I didn't know that and I went to a Jesuit school and I should know this.
Speaker 5:But I'm interested now in the dialects because we I'm not, it's just the idea that somebody also mentioned the Sicilian verses where we lived. We lived right next to the Sicilian community. Well, you know, people would come on the same boat and go live at a certain place in the North end. So our dialect from Avalino is mixed with Sicilian and my grandmother and it's in my books, you know she would oh, you're from the me a bit of an oh, that's nice, oh, thank you.
Speaker 4:You made me your cousin. It's a great it's a great.
Speaker 5:Well, you do, you do she. Yeah, so it was. I lost my train of thought. I got so excited running. What was I saying? I don't know.
Speaker 6:You were saying that the Sicilians are they all here? Yeah?
Speaker 5:So, so my grandmother would talk to me, and I was with my grandmother all the time because my mother worked in the Commonwealth and she'd say something to me. I'm little, I don't even know what it is, but I incorporated it into what I think Italian is. You go and speak that to somebody else and they're looking at you, like you, what are you speaking? And I still didn't know. And I'll go down to the North end, which I'm there, like well, three times a week, and and I'll hear a word that my grandmother said. And then I immediately, you know, grab the people and say what does that word mean to you? You know, and so I'm. I started working on when I did my book. I put a lot of language. By the way, it's Napoli, thon, that's a real language.
Speaker 5:I have to correct people on that. I want that. I want to be able to go someplace and really have that. It's the Italian heritage, because where I'm from in the North end we're mostly all Southern Italians, mostly from Campania, and also I'm reading, they think, but to Sicilian is very, because I could answer that question there. Sicilian is a mixture because of the different places that control it.
Speaker 1:Okay, so I grew up here in Bades. Giuseppe, tell us something in Bades.
Speaker 8:Giuseppe yeah.
Speaker 2:But you say Giuseppe Italian or Italian.
Speaker 1:In Bades. They dialect Jail fart.
Speaker 8:Dialect, though, if you want, I can talk with you in dialect of Bari.
Speaker 8:Yeah, I like when I talk in a dialect of Toritto of Bari we have some different dialect in Apulian region, in particular in the province of Bari, for example, in the city of Bari we have a different dialect in the city of Bari. We have a different dialect in Apulian region, in particular in the province of Bari, For example, in Altamura. Altamura has a particular accent when the people speak in dialect, namaghi, for example. Let's go Namaghi in Altamura, say, for example, or Shamanin, the accent is very different, but we are able to understand in our province of Bari. But I like that you speak in Italian if you want. I don't know if you are able to talk in Italian in this moment or you understand only the dialect, not Italian language, I think.
Speaker 1:What's funny, giuseppe, is when I grew up, I heard about it, but I thought it was Italian. I didn't know that my grandparents were speaking a dialect. I just thought it was Italian because everybody said they were Italian. And I'd like to introduce Morello. We got kind of confused on the times.
Speaker 7:So sorry.
Speaker 1:She wrote about her family, from her Italian family, who migrated to England. There you go. And she's got a fantastic story, Morello, why don't you give us just a brief what your family story is about and when they migrated to England?
Speaker 7:OK, so the story is based on my parents as they were children during World War II, and it's about the invasion of their village in San Pietro in Fina, which is between Roman Naples. It's a tiny little village. It's about their story as children when the village got invaded and how they managed, how they coped with it. So my father was six years old and my mother was four years old, and it just there's little stories in there of my mum, her, my grandmother died. Her mum died just after the war. She stepped on the landmine. So just stories that captivate you. And I was told these stories as a child. And so it tells of post-war, pre-war and when my parents immigrated to London my dad 1959, my mum two years after. So, yeah, so my mum passed away 11 years ago, but my dad still lives in London. He's 87 this year. Yeah, so it's.
Speaker 2:Morello, during the occupation, did your family stay in the town or did they leave the town? They did.
Speaker 7:Yeah, they did. They left the village. It was occupied by the Germans. They hid in the caves just nearby. And that's how they survived, Wow yeah well, most of them.
Speaker 2:Many families lived in the hills. Many families in southern Italy lived in the hills.
Speaker 7:Yeah, so the village was on a mountain.
Speaker 2:Yeah.
Speaker 7:And then amongst the mountains are caves where they were hiding.
Speaker 2:Yeah.
Speaker 7:So that's yeah it's quite a small little book, but it's got a lot of detail in there.
Speaker 1:Yeah, it's a great book and it's a sad story for sure.
Speaker 7:Yeah, but it's got a happy ending. It does have a happy ending. My parents moved over to England. What region?
Speaker 6:is your family from Midella.
Speaker 7:Italy or.
Speaker 6:In Italy.
Speaker 7:Yeah, so we're in between Rome and Naples, near Montecassino we had a casino, so we're just a few miles away from there.
Speaker 3:Yeah, so when they invaded the village, they invaded Montecassino soon after.
Speaker 4:So do you consider them to be Napolitan or?
Speaker 7:Yeah, napolitano, yeah, okay. So our dialect is very Napolitano, so we're almost like our English version. Where I was brought up is the East End of London, so it's a cockney, our dialect Cockney. So Cockney, yeah, yeah, yeah, but it is. I mean, it took me three years to write. It's only 100 pages, but it took me a while, sure, and I had to find the evidence, so all the dates that I was given, of when my grandfather was prescribed in the war. So that's true.
Speaker 4:That's all true in that book is what you say yeah, yeah, yeah, it's all nonfiction. That's a lot of work.
Speaker 7:What's the name of the book Through a Child's Eyes. So the picture at the front here, this one is my mum oh pretty. And then that's her cousin at the back. They both lost their mums. This was during the Angelina, during the invasion. My mum Antonia just after, yeah.
Speaker 4:Very nice yeah.
Speaker 7:So this image here is from John Houston, the film director. Yeah, he filmed the village after the war. That's where I've got the photographs from, and then you've got one inside. I don't know if you can see that clearly. There's a picture of a little boy. Yeah, so that's my parents, both of the parents that John Houston took the film footage, and above that is my parents in the 60s when they moved to England. I think that's quite clear. Can you see it? Yeah?
Speaker 4:Yeah.
Speaker 7:Beautiful.
Speaker 1:Good for you, yeah.
Speaker 7:And that's a village at the back when it was, yeah, just after the war. Can you see it from?
Speaker 4:there yeah.
Speaker 5:That's a village, yeah.
Speaker 7:And there's a picture of me all dressed up. That's a back picture.
Speaker 4:Oh you were beautiful. Yeah, that's a gorgeous photo, yeah.
Speaker 2:Now you see, marella, had you not written that story, that would be lost forever. Right, yes, and you're into how many generations now from that time?
Speaker 7:Oh, sorry yeah absolutely so.
Speaker 2:Here you know, we're into fourth, fifth, sixth generations, right, and these young people know nothing about this. They don't even know about the Holocaust, some of these kids. So if we don't record this and Frank talks about it all the time on his podcast, bob is talking about it it's lost, not now, but forever. Right, it's lost forever and that's why you have to record it. Even if it's just in a diary for yourself, it has to be written or videoed, or but recorded. I'll say one other thing, because it looks like you did some homework there, not to forget the libraries and the librarians. They are terrific. They want to help you do your research. So be sure to go to the local libraries, because they have access to all the libraries in the country, in the world, as a matter of fact, and I've got a lot of help from them in some of my work.
Speaker 4:You know, the sad thing about it is is that as children, when we went to school and they gave us our history lessons, they didn't have any of this in our history books.
Speaker 2:No no Well there's plenty of history about things we don't like to see about Italians. There's plenty of that.
Speaker 4:I mean, it is what it is.
Speaker 2:Not about our culture.
Speaker 3:Right, no, but it takes a creative teacher, because even today's history books are not going to cover these, these local, important stories to what the people have experienced. And it's a creative teacher who invites their students to bring something in and to talk to people in the family and begin to look at it at that personal level instead of somewhere out there, whatever, whatever the event happens to be I agree with you.
Speaker 7:Yes, so I am, as a child, always used to go to San Pietro with my parents and my sisters, and I was told early on about what happened during the emulsion. I was embedded in my memory and as I got older and I had my own children, I started to write all the stories now so that I wouldn't forget, and my stories have passed on to my daughters, my nieces, my nephews, because I think it's important to see it as my point of view going there and my parents point of view.
Speaker 4:You know, when my family came over, they all came to South Philadelphia the grandparents and the parents from both sides. And in South Philadelphia, which happens to have the oldest Italian open market in America and that area down in that area was Irish. When the southern Italians came and the Irish said to the Italians we're moving out, we're going to give it to you. So there's a lot of Italians down there. But we had to stay within that area. We couldn't go into other areas because we weren't welcome, so it took a lot of years to get through all that.
Speaker 1:That happened in Brooklyn. The Italians weren't allowed to go to the Irish church.
Speaker 2:They had to get their own church.
Speaker 1:We had to get our own church.
Speaker 4:We built our own Italian church, or Lady of Good Council for the southern Italians, and there is a copy of my grandparents' marriage and underneath is another couple on the same day getting married, and they were an Irish couple. And I thought, wow, we let the Irish come in and get married there, which was great in 1900. Do you know what I mean? But that was strictly for Italians there. Oh, yeah. It's nice. I love our history. Thank you.
Speaker 7:Yeah my father was welcomed. He was welcomed in London. He came over in 1959. His first job was in a hospital for mentally ill patients and he said that he was really blessed that his colleagues were really good to him, they looked after him. He lived on the complex and he said that he was one of the fortunate ones. He couldn't speak English His English was terrible back then but he said he got on with it and he got on with everything because his colleagues were really kind to him. And that's how he started in 1959 working in the hospital and he did really well. He did really well for himself.
Speaker 7:And when my mum came over in 1962, she couldn't speak English, but they had a beautiful accent with the Italian language.
Speaker 1:Yeah, I was just happy.
Speaker 7:Yeah, they had to get on with that.
Speaker 1:I think that's an important point, because we all love our culture and I know, that we can do this and why Frank does this and like Anthony did it and Michael Caviery does the things that we do, is because they just don't portray us the right way. We have to tell our own story because somehow somewhere along the line we got a stereotype into these people that just like to shout at each other.
Speaker 7:It's a vocal tune, isn't it? I talk with my hands. Some of my hands flip about everywhere. We have got a lovely culture. I don't want to blow my own trumpet, but in the back of the book is traditional recipes, the jarred recipes of tomato sauce, menanzane, and that's keeping up with the culture of cooking, which I think is important.
Speaker 3:I feel, like.
Speaker 4:Italian food.
Speaker 6:That was funny. You said I wouldn't blow my own trumpet. Midella, you're in England. Do you go to Italy often? You're a lot closer than us.
Speaker 7:Yes, yes, italy is about 26 hours driving, or you can be there in two hours. So we're very fortunate that we're not far. We can just jump on a plane and go there for the weekend. We are very, very fortunate. It's great.
Speaker 6:You can say jumping in the car. It just sounds crazy.
Speaker 5:It's awesome, we can do it.
Speaker 6:Italy was either Canada or Mexico, because then we would just go for the weekend and I think that, as Italian Americans, we would have a better bond if it was so geographically close. That's a problem for maybe Italian Americans some of them is you've got to get on a plane and it's a long ride to get there.
Speaker 7:So it scares people. How long would it be for you to get?
Speaker 6:there, from Chicago to Rome. It's about eight hours and that's direct. So if you've got any layover, it could be 10. And then that's Rome. So now, if your family's from Calabria now you got to wait take another flight or take a train.
Speaker 4:So it's a long long day, but, frank, it's worth it oh it is.
Speaker 6:Yeah, yeah, no, I agree, but I'm just being in general. It does. It's located like England and then I could drive a car 24 hours.
Speaker 4:Europeans are lucky because they're so close to Italy's, right next to France, you can hop to all these different countries. We don't have that here except Queebet, or I mean Canada or Mexico, yeah.
Speaker 5:I was lucky when I was younger as a teacher. I had summers off, so to speak. Teachers would be and I would go to see my relatives in Italy for the summer. So that really opened my eyes also to how people how we're so materialistic here and people there at the time in the 70s and 80s was still washing clothes in the center town on a fountain. I'm like, okay, so no washing machine. Everybody had a TV my aunt and this is 70s and 80s they didn't have a telephone. Everybody was happy, they all knew each other and they all took care of each other. That doesn't exist hardly at all in the states.
Speaker 7:Can I just say something? I'm really, really sorry, but my dad is 87, I said he's at my niece's house watching us all. Can I just show you a video of him? So he saw the little picture of him. He's watching us. Oh, my God, my.
Speaker 1:God, my God.
Speaker 7:He's watching us live, oh great, that's fantastic.
Speaker 2:That's my dad.
Speaker 7:Can you see that? So he's watching us, yeah.
Speaker 2:Can I say one thing, bob, about this culture, which is so great. I give a lot of presentations to Italian American historical societies and to libraries that have some cultural exhibitions about Italy and Italian culture, and I see a lot of people there, but what I don't see are young people. So it's got to be some way in the National Italian American Foundation. If you're not members, you ought to look at membership. It's not expensive.
Speaker 2:I'm making a giant push to get young people involved with scholarships, education and some kind of involvement locally and nationally, and that's what we need to do to continue this story. They like to go to Italy. You know they're in school and they take a semester and they go and they come back and forget. What they're forgetting is the giant leap that was made from immigrants to their opportunity today, and so we shouldn't really forget that. But to get them involved, there's one society where I saw them involved and they were enthusiastic. Perhaps they learned about the history, the culture, the food, the geography, all that you're talking about. That's so critical to our culture and I'm sick and tired of them watching all those crazy shows. I mean, the Godfather set us back years. It was a terrible movie, I believe in my humble. It's a great movie, but it's a terrible movie, so we need to enhance that. Frank, I think you're doing that on your podcasts and Bob, you're doing that in some ways.
Speaker 8:Thank you.
Speaker 2:Yeah, it's hard, it's very difficult. There's so many tugs on young people, but that's critical, I think, as we go forward and writing it and leaving those memories, what you're doing, all of you writing them, or cookbooks, anything, videos, anything that our young ones can understand, what gave them the opportunity in this country to succeed because of the courage of our forefathers coming here. I mean, some of them, half of them, didn't speak, didn't read or write Italian, never mind this language, english when they came here. So to me that's a push I try to make. I can't even get my grandchildren to get more interested. Some of them are, some of them are, but we'll see.
Speaker 4:I believe that started the generation before these kids. Like my child, I don't think they instilled that into my grandchildren, I think.
Speaker 2:You know La Storia Segretta. Have you read the book La Storia Segretta?
Speaker 4:No, what is it? Well?
Speaker 2:what happened in World War II. When Mussolini declared war on the United States, the Italians 10,000 were put in a concentration camp and 600,000 Italians were profiled. Their licenses were taken away. They were moved out of their towns. Joe DiMaggio's father couldn't fish because they thought he was in touch with the enemy. So the Italians had 250,000 boys fighting.
Speaker 2:That's it, and the Italians said there it is, la Storia Segretta. The Italians said well, if it's not because of something we did, because we didn't do anything wrong, it must be because of who we are Right. Well, they didn't speak Italian. I never heard Italian in my house, frank. I heard dialect when they didn't want me to know what was going on. Right, but someone was pregnant. Oh God forbid, I knew someone was pregnant.
Speaker 2:Oh, I didn't really hear nice Italian until I went to Italy the first time. Pronto come, va Stato bene. So that's what happened. They moved away my grandparents, my parents talked funny, looked funny, dressed funny, so it was the flight away from the immigrants and we lost a lot of that. And that book you should read about when a story, the secret story, read Gay Tilesi's stuff Unto Thy Sons. That's a great book. It's 30, 40 years old but and that's what happened. So getting that back has been very, very, very difficult, to get the language back and so forth.
Speaker 2:That's what happened in this country. You talk about 1959 going to England. It was easy for your father Try 1859, when the immigrant Italians came here. Oh my God, there was so much prejudice against them.
Speaker 4:Very difficult, so door door and World War II they came to our house. I'm one of 12 children, I'm like number 10. So my mother already had five children by 1942 and they came to our house and they wanted to lock my mother up and send her to the camp. She said yeah, but I'm going to take my kids. They never came back.
Speaker 2:Yeah, yeah, terrible. Well there was nothing like what happened to the Japanese, of course, but it was not a pretty scene for the Italians and the Germans in this country.
Speaker 7:Yeah, so anyway, so can I just go back to the Italian language? So I went to Italian school. I went to Italian school twice a week to learn.
Speaker 2:Yeah.
Speaker 7:I already knew how to speak Italian, but it was all the written form and that's what my parents did to keep up the traditional language, and I did that from the age of eight to 16.
Speaker 2:Great, it was quite a week after school.
Speaker 7:Italian school for two hours. My cousins did that, my sisters did it as well. There was a place, a school locally that offered this service and we did it. We went.
Speaker 2:Yeah.
Speaker 7:But my parents did make sure. So was my uncles, my aunties that came over from Italy to England made sure that our culture was embedded in us. I think it's Japan my sisters and children still do that a tradition wine making and we've kept it up. And I know you're saying that children nowadays don't understand some of the Italian culture. But I'm going to praise my family because we've kept it all up.
Speaker 2:Good for you.
Speaker 1:That's great yeah.
Speaker 7:I think we haven't. It's not dead, it's still alive.
Speaker 2:You know, the name of my second book is Whatever Happened to Sunday Dinner.
Speaker 7:Yeah, the name of my second book, and what has happened to Sunday dinner.
Speaker 2:Well, that's, you've got to buy the book. No, oh, I'll buy it, but it's kind of disappeared. Some families continue to. It's disappeared, with the grandparents and the parents and people moving. Away kids all over the country. Who's going to have Sunday dinner every year?
Speaker 5:And that's just not. I don't want to say it's not just Italians, because it's the people that were living in. It's different. Whoops, oh, what's this?
Speaker 1:Oh there's Bob's grandfather, that's my grandfather. That's an enemy alien, yeah.
Speaker 2:Yeah.
Speaker 1:So who's? Grandfather is this that's my grandfather.
Speaker 4:I don't see Frank.
Speaker 2:So he's registered. Oh Bob, it's an enemy alien. They registered him as an enemy, yeah.
Speaker 3:Yeah.
Speaker 2:Him and my grandmother.
Speaker 4:And so when did he come over?
Speaker 1:They came in 1915. 1915, okay, yeah, but they had to. They had to register as enemy aliens Right.
Speaker 5:Everybody had to if they were not in the process.
Speaker 1:If they weren't? If they weren't, yeah, Naturalized.
Speaker 5:They weren't in the process of naturalization.
Speaker 4:Yeah, well, that was during World War I, right? No, world War II, no, it was World War II 1942.
Speaker 2:February 17, 1942.
Speaker 1:No that's all of them.
Speaker 4:I'm so sorry Okay.
Speaker 2:That's the document, yep.
Speaker 5:And it was only rescinded, by the way, was only rescinded by Roosevelt's, who put it in because it was a great backlash of people that would not vote for Roosevelt because of this.
Speaker 2:Well, he said the Italians stabbed him in the back. I mean he has cartoons saying the Italians stabbed him in the back. Roosevelt said that.
Speaker 1:Yeah, and that's the stuff that they don't tell the kids right, this is the stuff that people don't know about.
Speaker 5:They don't even get to World War II. No, they don't. They don't get to World War II. We've changed our curriculum to, instead of one year of US history, which was probably everybody here I had to take one year of US history. Now we have two years of US history and we still don't get to World War II.
Speaker 5:I forgot just where I heard it. Oh, it was John. People will give five, three days to the Civil War. I mean, that's how, the rapid pace that people want to take. But I do want to say something because I'm from the North end. We do have an Italian school, we have a Catholic parochial school, k to A, which also teaches Italian, and we have two churches that have Italian masses, and one church, which was the Irish church, is in English. But I think the North end is doing a really good job of keeping up the traditions. But the biggest problem, as Ed said, is people leave. People leave. It's a diaspora to wherever they go on, and it's hard to get people back once they've. Also, as my mother said, oh my God, you're not marrying an Irish person, nobody's not Irish, but a lot of people just became American. I don't hold with that, but I believe I'm Italian, have first generation Italian, but I think it's a bad thing. But the North end if you've got people that are living in that kind of a conclave, then it can be maintained.
Speaker 4:You know, when you think of the big cities and you think of the areas where there were the Italians, they were the last ones to leave the area as all the big cities started to turn. Do you know what I mean? Like there's still a lot of the Italians, dan and South Billy, but nothing like when I was a little girl.
Speaker 5:But you're still trying to hold on to that section. Yes, yes, yes. So it's from 90% to 42% of the North end Italian.
Speaker 1:So, before we wrap up, I'd like to go around the table and just ask everybody if you had one piece of advice for somebody who wants to start writing and is not sure about writing, you know what would it be? I'm just going to go around the screen.
Speaker 3:I thought Frank wanted to begin. I'm just going to go around the screen. I really think it can be very simple, If your grandparents are alive, to say hi, I'm 16, what were you like when you were 16? What was life like? Even something simple to either take record or video. Record the responses and that will begin gathering stories. In little bits it will grow Through just kind of a little bit of a little bit of conversation.
Speaker 1:Josephine, how about you?
Speaker 4:For me. My second book is Life's Journey. It's about my grandmother, how she came on an arranged marriage to South Philadelphia to marry Raphael. Just digging and finding that all the history is how I just flowed right into writing a book about her entire life. When she was born, I went to her town at Talia and found her birth certificate in the community center. They had it in the big leather book from 1881. The more you think about it and search, the more you have to write about your family history and it keeps leading you to more and more stories. I'm not going to say that. I'm going to say that I'm going to write about my mother as a child and hearing stories from my mother.
Speaker 6:But writing is just a lot of fun. It's finding out who you are. Yeah, I was going to say listen to everybody. I'm no expert with this at all, but all I was going to add to this was just, if you have an inkling for this to learn some things about stuff in Italy internet, to learn where the family is from the region, anything just do it Right?
Speaker 2:Yeah, I would write about your family. Just write. Just get a journal like this. I write in this every day, every single day, and if you need a prompt, get a picture, an old picture of your grandparents or your parents, and that will get you going, peggy.
Speaker 5:Yeah, well, here's one of the pictures that got me going.
Speaker 2:Who is that Peggy? Who is that?
Speaker 4:That's my mother, oh really, yeah, there's a story right there.
Speaker 5:Is that her holy communion? That was holy communion when she came from Italy, but communion was here and I was like I'm going to write a story about my family and I would just say write what you know, write from your heart and it will come out and, marilla, I'm very impulsive, so I get an idea into my head and I think right, I'm going to do it.
Speaker 7:If anyone wants to write a story about their family and have doubts that it's not going to work, just try it. Give it a go. And you know, just write from the heart and describe everything, show the emotions they felt, and do it. You've got nothing to lose. Just give it a go, yeah.
Speaker 1:I would agree and I would say, you know if there are people out there that will help you If you have a question. We all got help in some way, shape or form. Don't be shy Facebook group or email.
Speaker 2:Or find somebody. There's plenty of people out there that want to help.
Speaker 4:Lots of books, lots of books to read about. And you know who gave me a lot of information about my family and I met them on the computer and they gave and sent me tons of information all the time. Even about my family that came from Italy to America.
Speaker 2:They knew more than I did.
Speaker 4:There are people out there that will help you.
Speaker 1:Great, Great yeah.
Speaker 7:So this is a good question. Don't worry about who's interested in it. I'll just give you one.
Speaker 4:Thank you for having me on your show.
Speaker 1:I really appreciate it. I had a lot of fun. This has been great.
Speaker 4:And hopefully we get people to write their own stories.
Speaker 8:Nice meeting all of you.
Speaker 2:Nice meeting you. Good morning Morellas for meatballs.
Speaker 7:We'll see what Morellas for meatballs. If you are local, you can come around for.
Speaker 2:Sunday lunch.
Speaker 1:We'll be there. See you all, bye, bye.
Teddy Bianco goes to Italy
Travel to Italy for kids
Through a Childs Eyes
German bombs fell on the enchanting village of San Pietro Infine, destroying homes.
Growing Up Italian American-Iannuccilli
Great stories about growing up Italian in America
My North End Family Stories
Peggy writes about her family who settled in Boston’s Italian enclave, the North End.
Life's Journey
Based on the real-life experiences of the author's paternal grandmother.
Farmers and Nobles
Read about my research story and how to begin your family research.