Italian Roots and Genealogy
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Italian Roots and Genealogy
Uncovering Italian Ancestry: A Journey Through Family Roots and Heritage
Ever wondered how far back your family roots can go? Join us for a remarkable journey into Italian ancestry and family history with our special guest, John Clarkin. After retiring in 2020, John embarked on a mission to honor his grandfather by tracing his lineage back to the early 1800s. Through civil and church records, John discovered distant relatives and unearthed historical connections even dating back to the 1400s. He shares the heartfelt and often surprising revelations of his family's roots in Faleria and the Campobasso region, offering a unique perspective on why many people only start exploring their heritage later in life.
Listen as John recounts his multiple trips to Italy, particularly to the seemingly uneventful village of Faleria, which proved to be a goldmine of genealogical discoveries. From photographing headstones to delving into diocesan records in Civita Castellana and Nepi, John paints a vivid picture of the challenges and rewards inherent in genealogical research. Learn about the interconnected nature of families in small Italian towns and the classic immigrant experience of seeking opportunities in the US while supporting families back home. John's humorous anecdotes and heartfelt reflections will transport you to the heart of Italian family life, both past and present.
Immerse yourself in the cultural richness of Italy as John shares his experience creating a PowerPoint presentation that captivated his audience and earned recognition from the mayor. Discover the historical significance of Giuseppe Agnani's book and the importance of preserving heritage, especially when original records have been lost. From tales of resilience during the fascist era and World War II to nostalgic memories of Italian-American neighborhoods in New York and Pittsburgh, this episode offers a rich tapestry of family heritage. Join us for an unforgettable exploration of Italian traditions, cultural history, and the vibrant community life that continues to thrive on shared experiences and human connections.
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Hi everyone, this is Bob Sorrentino, from Italian Roots and Genealogy. Be sure to check out our blog and our YouTube channel and our newsletter and our great sponsors, your Dolce Vita Italy, rooting Phil Italy and Abbiativo Casa. And today I have a great guest, john Clarkin. So welcome, john. Thanks for being here.
Speaker 2:Thank you, Bob, for having me.
Speaker 1:So I see you have an Italian scene behind you.
Speaker 2:I do, I do. It was taken on a recent trip. This is the Via della Cucagna, which leads to where my grandfather was born.
Speaker 1:That's super. That's so cool. That's so cool. So you know when and why did you get started doing your research?
Speaker 2:doing your research. Well, I retired in 2020, just in time for COVID and so I needed something to keep my brain going. I didn't want it to turn to polenta, and so I had to find something that was going to be interesting and challenging and meaningful, and so when I got through all of that, it was really. The bottom line was that I wanted to make sure my grandfather was never forgotten.
Speaker 1:Yeah, and I think that's why we all do it. You know, some of us get the calling early, some of us get it late. I started before I retired, um, but to your point, I started doing this because I said, well, what am I going to do to keep myself busy? And uh you know I I started the blog, which was one way, and now this thing.
Speaker 2:I think I've done close to 300 interviews now and it's just so much fun to hear everybody's stories oh, it's it, and I just happened to watch the video that you did with Anthony and that just it was such a meaningful thing to have these stories told in the first person, you know, and describing things. His passing was really a sad event.
Speaker 1:Yeah, that's for sure. And you know he was such a great guy and he helped me in lots of different ways and we were going to do so much together with, you know, with the audio tapes because he had so many of them I he had like 100 hours or something like that. But I'm friends with a good friend of his and I'm hoping at some point in time he could revive that. But, and those people, the people came in the you know 1900, yeah, quite, an interesting story really, really is.
Speaker 1:um, so what did when you started doing your research? Well, first let me ask this question how far back were you able to go?
Speaker 2:Well, I got back to about 1800, you know, and that was based on the online research I was able to do through the Portale Antonati, and you'd find death records that would take the births back that far. But really, unification in 1875, kind of, was the beginning of the Antonati records. I was able to find church records that went back beyond that, but I haven't digested the last batch of church records yet. I've been occupied with the civil records. So when I get into the church records that'll take me back further. On this last trip I met my third cousin, carlo Ippoliti, and he had a friend that visited the Vatican Museum and he was able to chase back his direct lines back into the 1400s. So, and as I described one of these documents that I received on my last visit, there was a scholar that had access to these records that segregated things by name, by surname, and he has notes in there from the mid-1400s of my grandfather's surname.
Speaker 1:Ah, that's great to be able to find that. That's super Now. Did you always know where your grandfather came from? The town?
Speaker 2:I knew the town Growing up, and I was fortunate, you know, in that I'm the eldest of 13 grandchildren, and so I got to spend 35 years with him outside of my professional career in my military service. But I spent a great deal of time with him and he never wanted to talk about his past like so many others. So what I knew was he came from a small town called Valeria in the Turbo province just outside of Rome, and I knew that he was in the army and beyond that. We never talked about those sort of things. We talked about the present and the future. So it was up to me to dig it out, and I didn't do hardly any of it until well after he passed.
Speaker 1:Yeah, that's so great to be able to have that relationship for so long. You know I was. My parents were on the tail end of both families, you know they my, my mother was the next to youngest and my father was the youngest. So you know, my grandparents were already older. My mother's mom lived the longest but and I used to play cards with her when I was a kid and I never thought to ask her about Italy because she would have probably been very forthcoming if I had asked she didn't volunteer and you know I could kick myself that I didn't ask more and my father's mother just has this rich, rich history behind her. I was like, oh my God, how come I didn't ask this woman any questions and I never even asked my father, you know.
Speaker 2:My mother didn't know much either. I mean, and it was interesting for me because only my mother's side is Italian my dad's side is Irish. You know, I grew up in this household that even though I was only 50% Italian, it was really 100% Italian because my dad's family was so scarce and so thin. But then in my maternal side, my maternal grandmother's family, was the dominant one. My grandfather had no living relatives other than distant cousins that even came to the US, so all of them were back in Italy and other parts of the world, as I discovered. So yeah, it was dominated by my grandmother's family, and her parents came from the Campo Basso region of Moese, came from the Campo Basso region of Molise. So what I knew about Filario was very, very limited before I started.
Speaker 1:Yeah, you know, and I didn't realize that. Well, Molise, back then it didn't exist.
Speaker 2:Right, it was Brutso right.
Speaker 1:Yeah, yeah, but there's a lot of people from that Campo Basso area that I've probably interviewed, I don't know three, four, something like that, but yeah it's. You know, basically when they carved up Italy, they kind of created a couple of territories and I think some of them may want to go back together again, although I don't know if they'll ever allow them to do that. So where did you grow up?
Speaker 2:I grew up in Pittsburgh. I was born in Connecticut but I grew up in Pittsburgh and Pittsburgh is the only area that I remember, and my grandfather worked in steel mill for over 20 years. So my childhood because we lived so close my childhood was very much grandparents and parents together, but it was always them. My dad was the outlier, was very much a grandparents and parents together, you know, but it was always them. Not my dad was the outlier, the, the only Irish person to enter into this big network of Italians. So he, I admired his bravery.
Speaker 1:That's funny. My, my dad's, my dad's family Well, his older brother, his older brother. He was the oldest of the family. He married a non-Italian, but everybody else married Italians.
Speaker 2:And my mom's family.
Speaker 1:Only her younger brother married outside the Italians and my Aunt Margie was Scottish and she was actually a model back then. She was very, very pretty. But yeah, it must have been really interesting for her to come into this family of nine brothers and sisters all the time.
Speaker 2:Yeah, and my grandmother was one of eight children, so all the uncles and aunts and all of their children and everybody you know that was, that was the family that I grew up with.
Speaker 1:Yeah, so well, I guess your father enjoyed the Italian food. I'll tell you a funny story about my friend, tommy, who lived around the corner from me he married. His wife was Italian first generation. Her parents were born in Italy and when Tommy went over there I guess for the first time he was meeting the parents and they had this big Italian dinner and stuff like that. He didn't want to portray the typical Irish. You know that they drink a lot. So they asked him if he wanted something to drink and he said milk. They were like milk With spaghetti sauce. What are you crazy? And he didn't. I mean he and he didn't, he didn't drink a lot. And you know she said well, maybe, you know, maybe have a glass of wine, or something, yeah, yeah um, it's, it's, it's funny like that.
Speaker 1:So now, obviously, you said you were back to the hometown. Have you been there more than once, and what was it like when you got there? I?
Speaker 2:had, it was hot. We went in July and but you know, that was my fourth trip to Italy and the first two were really tourist kinds of things in the mid-90s, and I drove, you know, we were in Venice and Rome and Florence and Naples, and I said I got to see this place, valeria, you know Well the first three people I asked about where it was, because that was pre-Garmin days. They didn't know, and so it was a challenge finding this little place and we went there and by the time we got there, it was like mid-afternoon. It looked like everything was closed. There were five guys sitting out in front of a bar in the piazza um, which I did not know was not a tavern, it was the coffee bar. But um, you know, I thought no, this is not florence, um. So we went back two years later and I thought maybe I missed something on the first trip, and so we spent about 10 minutes in in Filaria and I said there's, there's like no, it was, I think it was the same guys sitting out front. I said we're, you know I? Now I know why he got out of there, you know, because there's nothing going on here.
Speaker 2:Well, when I started digging into this and made a trip there specifically focused on doing the genealogy. I discovered I couldn't be more wrong. There was a lot going on and it was then, on my trip in 2023, that I got that sense of belonging the initial sense of belonging, and after this most recent trip it's off the charts. So first impressions are not always right, but I went back in 2023 with my sister and because we had done some Antonotti work and some other things ahead of time, we kind of knew or thought we should go to the cemetery and photograph these headstones.
Speaker 2:Well, we did, and close to 2,000 photographs that we built into a database and we really started to broaden our research from the direct family line to be more about malaria, and we wanted to capture as many families as we could and link them together as many families as we could and link them together. So this is where I thought it was our initial approach to looking at our family was missing. It was missing all these connections to the other families, and the more I read, the more I found, the more I knew that I had to expand this. So you know the manifests of alien passengers when you'd see four and five and six names all coming from Filaria to New York and you'd find them back and forth and things. It just expanded my understanding of what these people must have been going through.
Speaker 2:And I found that my grandfather's story, although really important, really unique to me, was a story that was shared by so many in that village. They came to the same regions of the US. They didn't stop in New York. They went to Pittsburgh and West Virginia and Detroit and Akron, chasing the work and sent money back, moved families over. I mean, it's the classic Italian story and I wanted to share that story with as many families as I could find. So that's what we did.
Speaker 2:And on the first trip we didn't realize that the diocesan records are not, the archives are not always in the diocesan headquarters. In this area, the diocese is headquartered in Chivita Castellana, in this area, the diocese is headquartered in Chibita Castellana. But we found out two days before we left that the archives are in Nepi. So on the follow-up visit that we did in July of 2024, we knew a lot more and got to work with the people in Nepi, and it's just been great, and there were four of us photographing. So I got a work with the people in Nepi and it's just been great, and there were four of us photographing.
Speaker 1:So I got a ton of information. Oh, that's great. Yeah, that's great. I'm trying to do that with my mother's hometown in Torito, and I pick it up. I go back and forth. I did put together a database that I forget the exact name of it now I'll put it in the notes if I remember. But they allow you, it's really better than most of the typical databases that you get from Ancestry and those things, because you can kind of control things yourself, which is really pretty neat. The next, next generation, it's called tng and uh and uh. So yeah, I go back and forth with when I have time, I go, you know, I just sit there and try to look up records from torito and put the names in there because, you're right, those, those families were so interconnected in these small towns. You know that's right, that right, that's right.
Speaker 2:And you know the same thing. That went on, like my grandfather, when he came over in 1913, he came over with his older brother who I didn't know him, but he came over with his older brother who had made three previous trips. Now to do that and I just couldn't grant my mind around it. Initially most of those trips took about 10 days to two weeks, one way going from Naples to New York. Then they had to take a train from New York to Pittsburgh, detroit, wherever they were going. But they also had a train from New York to Pittsburgh, detroit, wherever they were going. But they also had had train trip on the Italian side because they're north of Rome. They had to go to Naples, so, and then he went back, then he came back over to the US and then he went back again. So he was back and forth and you could see that he traveled with others and he was almost like an ambassador.
Speaker 2:I guess what he learned in the areas to live and the areas to work, he would come back and tell the others in the village or in the comune that they could get work there, they could make money there, and they were all farmers. None of them were landowners of any consequence or merchants. They were all farmers, yet they worked in the mines and the mills and the factories. So it was an amazing story as it unfolded. But I mean, I was so fortunate because I grew up in the 50s and 60s. I experienced these big Sunday dinners and these homemade ingredients and the gardening and everything. In fact, one of my earliest childhood memories was when I graduated from the kids table at my grandmother's into the adult table.
Speaker 1:Now, we've all had that graduation. That's where I'm like yeah, and it wasn't you know, wasn't anything.
Speaker 2:I think it was only recently that I discovered the only reason why it happened was because my aunts and uncles had more children and there was no more room at the kids table, you know, so they had to so. But in any case, these kinds of things, the younger people today, no idea, no idea then.
Speaker 2:So, um, but I I really want to tell you about this last trip, this, this trip in july, when, when you asked me if I would be interested in doing this in June before I left, I kind of thought that it was going to be a great trip because I'd gone before, I'd established these contacts, I'd made you know, I knew my way around and I knew my way through the records and I was a little more experienced, even though I didn't speak the language. But this trip just far exceeded anything I could have imagined, because not only did we reconnect with the people in Nepi who were so kind, laying out the records for us to work in, kind laying out the records for us to work in, but then the mayor of Flaria and the consigliere, nicola, were just so good. And Nicola, after we were there for a week I had been in contact with him. He said I want you to do a presentation to the people of the Kimone. So right away I thought I know most don't speak English.
Speaker 2:So I created a PowerPoint presentation using Google Translate and put in a bunch of photographs of things and I was just amazed. I have a photograph in the piece here that I hope you'll find as interesting as I did that the crowd of people that came to this presentation just blew me away. And then the mayor presented me with this I don't know if you can see it, probably not. I'll send a photograph of it to you and recognized the value of understanding our heritage and our ancestors. And then Nicola gave me this book that was done by a scholar named Giuseppe Agnani that chronicles the story of the village. I hope to use the story of the village, woven into the stories of the families, and produce something that I can give to the people of the Comune. I'm not doing this to make money. I'm doing it to give it to them all the database information, because all their records were destroyed. The roof of the church collapsed, rained and I found that out from the people in Nepi that malaria just had no viable records.
Speaker 1:Oh, wow.
Speaker 2:The state archives had them and there's some in the church, but a majority of them were destroyed.
Speaker 1:Yeah, and what's so interesting about what you say is they are genuinely thrilled to have us there. I mean, we had a similar experience when we got to Capucota, where mass was ending, and so you know that town's a thousand people and you don't remember how many were in the mass, but there was, you know, maybe 200 or whatever it was. Um, and they the priest, you know said who we were and and all of that, and and nobody left. Nobody left the church. And then they asked me to talk, and of course I had to talk in English and never translated, but nobody left. You know, it's, it's, it's really shocking.
Speaker 2:It is, you know, and and the challenge for me is, you know, I went there with a couple of questions, a couple of research questions. I'm I'm a retired university professor, so I approached this with the diligence of academic rigor but at the same time had to balance that with being, you know, conversive and informative and cordial and all those things. So it wasn't like a military operation where you go in and try to dig up all this data. But the people there, I mean, they were just so forthcoming. But yet, you know, in order to get back further, beyond the record keeping, we've got to use DNA and so few of them have tested.
Speaker 2:My basic, one of my research questions is about the surname. My grandfather's surname was Palamides, not what we would consider to be an Italian surname Sounds more Greek than Italian. In fact, there was a big debate while we were over there whether it's more Spanish or Italian. So the score right now is there are six of us that think it's Greek and four of us that think it's that the spanish. But in any case, I mean, I I need dna evidence to to be able to to prove that or disprove, and so few italians test that. Um, it's going to be hard I know they don't.
Speaker 1:They don't do the testing. Yeah, I, I know I I I think I said this before before. Uh, I had thought about bringing tests with me, you know, and seeing if I could get a couple of my cousins, because I didn't know my mother's family. Pretty much everybody came, my father's family, only my grandmother and her aunt had come, so everybody's there. You know, my father's first cousins are still alive in their 90s. I didn't know any of this, none of it, until just a few years ago. And to find my dad's first cousins, that blew me away. That just blew me.
Speaker 2:Yeah, my first cousin, who was born in 1934, I finally met him there, you know, and I tried to use Anthony's approach of, you know, getting the oral history right, and we sat down at his table with his wife and his daughter and the consigliere was with us because he spoke a little bit of English. Well, I asked questions and I wrote them out and used Google Translate to translate the questions and then recorded them, hoping to take the audio recording and translate it. But everybody talked and translate it. But everybody talked. No, I mean everybody, they all talked simultaneously so I I can't extract, you know, what he was telling me. I get a few words but that's about it. So that wasn't a.
Speaker 1:That experiment failed well, I, you know, when I was doing my stuff, I have found out that on my, my mother's side, my oldest uncle didn't come until 1950 because he was left behind. And I found out that my, my cousin had recorded him in Barese before, before my uncle died. And I asked my cousin. I said you know, did you? You know, do you have this? Did you translate it? And then he said no, he said you said you know, I did it. And then it was so um heart-wrenching that I I never really listened to it and I said, joey, you know, you gotta translate this for us. So the family knows, and his story was just so great because he, you know it's, it's the history of his history being in my grandmother's town from when they left in 1915 until he left in 1950. So the war years and how he met my aunt and all of that kind of stuff was just so, so fascinating, right.
Speaker 2:And I mean, I learned anecdotally while I was there. You know about the struggles within the families. You know, during fascism time, during Mussolini's time, you know there was a story about a German soldier during World War II had died in the village and the lieutenant that was in charge of the area said I'm going to take 10 men, 10 of the locals, and shoot them in front of the church unless you tell me who did this, who killed him, who was responsible for his death. And the priest actually came out and said no, shoot me, don't shoot them, me, don't shoot them. And the German soldiers couldn't do it. So the priest saved these ten men and that was a story you could never imagine.
Speaker 2:And then in the piazza Piazza Garibaldi, by the way, the main piazza of town there's a monument there and apparently after the war they were trying to heal these divisions because some actually supported the fascists and you know the country was polarized and families were polarized and they went around to six or eight of the little towns in the region and put these monuments up, recognizing that, and they had the Madonna, you know, naturally, in a parade and everything. And they put these monuments there to help to heal and to help unify people saying know, that was, that was then. Let's get together as what we have in common, which is our religious beliefs and our and our italian heritage. So, yeah, well, you know people.
Speaker 1:People had to do what they had to do to survive. My, my uncle, was lucky. He had been in the army before the war, the italian army, um, and then by the time the war broke out, he, um, I don't know if he had two or three children by then, so he was, he was exempt going into the italian army. So, uh, you know, they did, you know farming and stuff like that, and I guess that was, you know, his part of the war. But they, they were in a town called torito, which is outside there's probably about a half hour from body by train, so they weren't occupied, uh, by the germans, uh, but they could see, you know, they could see when they bombed, you know the harbor and all of that.
Speaker 1:They used to see the planes come over and see the bombs dropping. And my cousin, who she's in her nineties, so she remembers the war, she said, you know, my grandmother would gather up all when they saw the bombing. They would, she would gather up all the kids and they would run into the field. You know everybody run into the field because they were afraid that they would bomb the town. But they didn't. They were lucky. They were lucky.
Speaker 2:One of the photos that I really treasure that I've included in here for you is a photograph of my uncle, my mother's brother, who served in the US Army and was part of the occupation of Italy after they invaded I don't know, because the US military records were burned in that St Louis fire. I don't know whether he was part of the invasion force you know that came through Sicily and then into Italy or not, but he has a photograph of him standing in the Piazza del Cucagna, where my grandfather was born, with my grandfather's older two brothers and his sister and a cousin. And so, one of the quests I put the picture up on Facebook, on the Town of Hilarious Facebook page, and said does anybody know who that young lady is? Well, that created a big stir. You know, oh, it's her. No, it's her.
Speaker 2:Notes are. You know, and I know where that is. And I, well, I got to go to the place where that photo was taken and you, you don't recognize it exactly because they added onto the building. So, but it, but it. It showed that you on to the building, but it showed that the child, the son of the person who left malaria, came back, and he came back in 1945 to help free that country again. So everything I search, every thing I find, is like peeling another layer of the onion back and it's going to keep me occupied, mentally, I think, and physically, for the rest of my life.
Speaker 1:So you like me, there's the family thinking nuts. Yeah, oh yeah, oh yeah.
Speaker 2:Yeah, my wife, like me, does the family think you're nuts? Yeah, oh, yeah, oh, yeah. Yeah, my wife, and it appears that I've infected my sister and her daughter so, who accompanied me in July, and so they're, they're, they're captured. But my wife said that she has been looking at the back of my head now for the last 25 years. So, and now I'm into this. So, yeah, it's great.
Speaker 2:So a funny story emerged while I was there doing the presentation. When I was there in 2023, we walked into a bakery and the person that owned the shop she spoke a little bit of English, and so there were other people in there and she asked us where we were from. So we exchanged a little banter and she was translating for the other people in the shop. Well, by the time we walked out, there were five or six ladies standing out front who wanted to talk to us, and you know, we could understand little bits and pieces of what they said.
Speaker 2:And they said you have to talk to this man, eugenio. He lives right there, you know, and we tried to talk to Eugenio, who could understand only a little English, but I took a photograph of him from behind talking to one of the village elders who was in the second story balcony up there, and I used it in my presentation to say you know, when we were here last year, we got to interact with a few people, but not many, and so I included that photograph. Well, eugenio came up to me after he was. He attended the presentation. He came up to me after it and said you know, I didn't recognize me in that photograph because I didn't know I had a bald spot.
Speaker 2:And so I mean things like that just happened, you know. Yeah, that's so funny.
Speaker 1:Our first trip was like 20, almost 30 years ago now, and I didn't know any of this stuff and again you know, my father had told me he had family in tory del greco and saw a sign, but you know I wasn't really into it and, um, a son was a baby and all that. And then, and uh, again, I could kill myself because had I known then what I know now, I would have been maybe not living in italy, but I definitely would have a place there, that's for sure.
Speaker 1:There's no question about that. Um, but we, we were in, um, uh, I don't know if we were in, I think we were in, I think it was sorrento, um, and it was a butcher shop that said sorrentino, you know. And so I was just outside taking a couple of pictures and, uh, the owner came out and you know, I knew enough Italian, not that I know much, but I know enough that he's asking me, you know why I'm taking a picture. So I said, you know Sorrentino from America. So he wasn't understanding. So I showed him my license.
Speaker 2:Right.
Speaker 1:And he goes oh, ashben, ashben and he goes.
Speaker 2:I'm in the next door.
Speaker 1:Because the owner next door, he spoke English, he wanted to know where we were from. So, yeah, I mean just from taking a simple picture of this and having the even though we weren't related, just having the same last name spurs them on to this whole conversation. You know, and and uh, it's just it's. You know, like I said, it's just an incredible experience to be there, and I that first trip I didn't. At one point my wife said, you know, oh, you love it here. And I said, well, I'm among my people, but I really didn't feel that until you get immersed into it and you go to the towns, and because of my grandmother and her roots, they own property all over the place, and so when we went into these towns, they treated me like I was some long lost person that they had to engage with. It's, you know, it's. It's foreign to us because we don't think of things that way, but they do, they do.
Speaker 2:They absolutely do. And you know, one of the more meaningful things that happened is that when, when I corresponded with Carlo Ippoliti, the person who had his family line back to the 1400s from the Vatican research, after the presentation, he saw that I, when I talk about my grandfather, I get emotional, and so he came up to me afterwards and he gave me this hug and he said it's our blood, and people here they don't understand it, the younger especially. They just don't understand it. So I couldn't. I couldn't when we were in the church.
Speaker 1:I, I, I couldn't, I couldn't talk, I, just I, I couldn't talk. They had to rescue me.
Speaker 2:That's it. That's exactly it I had to. I had to turn my back, you know, on the audience and and focus on other things. But my grandfather, he went back. He went back in 1972 with his wife and with her sister and her husband, and so it was the only time he ever went back to Flaria. And I asked him I remember that I wasn't there, I was in the Navy at that time and so I asked him later you know how was your trip? Did you enjoy it? And he said, yes, I enjoyed seeing my sister and my brothers again.
Speaker 2:His brother was passed the year following, so it was good that he went when he did. But he said it was his first and his last airplane ride. That was it. And I asked my grandmother what it was like for her, because that was not her village, that was his. And she said, oh, it was terrible, because they were walking down the street and these ladies were hanging out the windows calling his name. Hey, they recognized him. Apparently he was quite the womanizer in his early years. He didn't care for that a whole lot.
Speaker 1:Yeah, and so now? So what about your grandmother's family?
Speaker 2:Have you been researching them too, I suppose, I did a bit and I encountered a guy who had done a lot of ancestry work and had developed a rather extensive tree on her side of the family. There's just so many of them, I mean. In contrast, I have a photograph of my great-grand and I knew her, my great-grandmother.
Speaker 1:Wow, that's super, wow, that's fantastic.
Speaker 2:Yeah, for like for almost 15, 18 years. Wow. So she, she was a real character, but in any case, that family is just so large. But this guy, mike, told me that he had gone to Campolieto and that he said all the older generation had left and the younger people, as soon as they were old enough, they would leave because there's no work, there's, there's no challenge, there's nothing. But the intriguing part is the relation. Is the samnites, um that came, that settled that area, um, so I was hopeful again that DNA would maybe connect that chain. But I had to put that on the back burner to focus in on this part. And you know, just like my dad and his family, it's so scarce here. It was so scarce in my life because I only knew my grandfather, no other relatives. Now the windows have opened and I'm seeing a bunch of living relatives because they're still there. So that's particularly exciting for me.
Speaker 1:Yeah, when we went to Capricota, there's a big Sam Knight ruins, just Pietro Bonante, I'm killing the name, but we were met by a Sam Knight scholar he's written two books on it, nicola Mastronardi and he gave us a tour of the place and, um, I have a. He gave me his book not that I could read it, uh, but they was there too. You know, he gave us uh, like this, um brass plaque written in the Sam Knight language and, um, we met the mayor of the town and he gave us a thing. We had to buy that first trip. We had to buy a, uh, a suitcase to bring all the books home, because every town we went they gave us two and three books about, uh, the town and then the families and all of that kind of stuff.
Speaker 1:But yeah, I had never heard of the sam knights before before we went on that trip. And you know, I just I just last month I gave a talk at the italian club on them and then nobody else ever heard of me either. But you know, they were a force against the.
Speaker 2:Romans.
Speaker 1:And you know, the Romans got a lot of their tactics from these people.
Speaker 2:That's right. And they were a bunch of farmers Right, they were basically clannish farmers. No, no cohesive kind of government. And the other interesting part is that Elaria is located in an area with a lot of Etruscan ruins, so you have that element behind all the Roman history and everything. So it's just as a fan of history, I guess I'm like overwhelmed. We have nothing like that in the US.
Speaker 1:No, no, and you know, in the ruins there which, of course, predate Rome we sat in the amphitheater. The seats were the most comfortable seat that I ever sat in because they were so ergonomic the way they were done. They didn't have a back, but they made you sit up straight. It was unbelievable. I was like I can't believe how comfortable this seat is.
Speaker 2:You're sitting on a piece of stone. Yeah, yeah.
Speaker 1:It was truly, truly amazing.
Speaker 2:That's right.
Speaker 1:Probably close to 3,000 years ago or something like that, that they, yeah, they were able to do this. Um and uh, yeah, I, I and I asked nicola about. I said why. You know, you know, he's a historian type of guy, like we are interested in history. I think that's why we do this. But he said, you know, my family is 500 years of Sam Knight, so that's my, that's my heritage, you know that's right.
Speaker 1:And you know that's again. That's the way they. That's the way they. They think. They don't think only in the present. You know they think in the past. That's right.
Speaker 2:You know I was. I was envious of Anthony's stories because he talked about how they all lived together and I remembered there was a little Italy section in Pittsburgh and that's how my grandmother and grandfather met when he returned from the war. She and her family lived there and he rented a room and he was 26 when they got married. She was 16. I found her the consent form that her father had the sign for him to marry a child. Basically was the way it was written.
Speaker 2:But those places I remember as a kid. It was like going to a foreign country. It was when you drove down the street. It was like you entered another world. And Anthony said something that stuck with me. He said if I wanted to go back to the 18th century, all I had to do was walk downstairs. You know, and and that struck me because if you wanted to visit another country, all you had to do was drive down the street and it was like a mile from my grandfather's house well, and that's the way you know where my, where my parents grew up, in corona and in new york.
Speaker 1:Um, I don't know if you ever did you ever ever see the King of Queens? You ever watched that show?
Speaker 2:No.
Speaker 1:There's a there's a scene at the beginning where he's they go get a lemon ice and it's from the lemon ice King of Corona.
Speaker 1:We lived my my grandmother lived just a few blocks from there, right by the world's fair in New York, but it was, yeah, exactly like that. You walked down the street and there was the Italian bakery, there was the Italian, you know the sausage store, and then there was the vegetable place, and then there was the deli, and you know, you'd walk down the block and people would be talking Italian. There were very, very few non-Italians in this, probably I don't know 10 or 12 square block area.
Speaker 2:And you can see it in the US census records. Now that they released the 1950 census records, I can see that street in Pittsburgh and see all those addresses and the people that were there, all Italian. I mean it just yeah, yeah. And the way that the census records were recorded incorrectly, with the transcription errors and the spelling errors and everything else, that makes searching really tough unless you dive in and actually look at the record itself, not just the transcript dive in and actually look at the record itself, not just the transcript.
Speaker 1:Yeah, it was probably. It was at least 15 years ago, maybe a little bit more. I worked for Chase and this Khadidra, young black woman who worked for me and we were. I was living in Florida at the time, she was from Chicago, but we had a thing going on in New York and we were uh, I was living in florida at the time, she was from chicago, but we had a thing going on in new york and we were walking. Just the two of us were walking down the street in little italy and new york and we were passing one of these, not not a big bakery like ferrara's, but a small little. Just you know, you walk in and you could probably touch each wall, right, that's how small this place was and I said oh, you have to come in here. I I said come on, we're going to go in here. So we walk in and I said take a deep breath. And I said this is what it smelled like when I was growing up.
Speaker 1:And she was like, really, I said, yes, we would walk into a bakery and this is what you would smell, this is what you would get, this is the. This is what you would get. I'm lucky we have an Italian. We're in a small town in New Jersey but there's a nice Italian bakery like three, four blocks from us, you know.
Speaker 2:So like a real old style Italian bakery, with with everything you know I come back to the U S after after, after a few weeks over there. It's oh man, culture shock. It's terrible, and you know you know, it's what we've.
Speaker 1:We found over there, especially in naples. Naples has the best coffee, the best pastry hands down, if you ask me. But, um, you know, when they their pastries, uh, even though they have the same names, they look the same. There's so much lighter. There's not as much sugar. Uh, that's right, uh, and they're, they're um not as like this heavy kind of filling thing, you know, and the same thing with the food, you know there's three or four ingredients, that's all that, that's it, and it's not masked with all this other stuff.
Speaker 2:you know, and in a way I mean, when I see some Italian cooking shows with some of the modern chefs that try to use these exotic ingredients, I think back. I mean it was three or four things. They put it together and it's magical. You know four things. They put it together and it and it's magical. You know, so one of the um, one of the things I had to do my my sister when we went in 2023. My sister had never been to italy, so I had to introduce her to the four pastas of rome and I was very proud to, uh, her first Italian gelato, and so you know, she's had gelato in the US, but then you have gelato in Italy and you have bread in Italy and you have pastries, you know, and there's no comparison. So I've ruined her for the rest of her life.
Speaker 1:Well, my daughter thought she was going to have the best fettuccine Alfredo that she ever had and I had to break the deuce, so it doesn't exist anymore.
Speaker 2:No, because you know you walk into a market, walk into your local Safeway or Kroger and ask for guanciale Right. See what you get, kroger, and ask for guanciale right, see what you get. You know. And and you can't make Alfredo with cream. It has to be, it has to be the pecorino, you know. I mean so simple ingredients, but so prepared, so well.
Speaker 1:Yeah, yeah, exactly. So I have to ask you before we we go now, have you, have you um researched the clock inside?
Speaker 2:so I researched the clock inside your dad's family yes, and in fact, um, I went to ireland, um, I I researched that as much as I could here, uh, in the uS, but then I went to Ireland and that's where his family unlike most Irish families a majority of them didn't marry and they didn't come to the US. Only two of my great-grandfathers it was my great-grandfather and his older brother were the only two that came to the US, settled in Norwalk, connecticut, where I was born. All the males died at a very early age and there were 10 brothers and sisters from Ireland. Only two left. The rest of them never married, so that line just died off.
Speaker 2:It's from County Cavan and County Leitrim in Ireland, which are the least populated, you know, central. They were flax workers and spinners and stuff, but that's where, when I went there and I want the farmlands that they, they worked. That's where I got an initial sense of belonging. But nothing, nothing like Italy, nothing, nothing like Filaria it's, you know my Irish side is is so, so small a part in my overall life. I did my job, I researched it as thoroughly as I could, but I didn't do it with the same zeal and passion and feeling of belonging that my Italian side has given me.
Speaker 1:Yeah, yeah, now I can understand that, because you were so connected to them growing up.
Speaker 2:Yes.
Speaker 1:I mean me having four Italian grandparents. That was just normal. There was nothing else to even consider unless you had brought a friend over for dinner or something like that. And then they were like what's all this food? What does it stop?
Speaker 2:The other thing was you know how I learned. You know and I learned from my grandfather as a child. Those are the lessons I learned and like so many others, he had no formal education. He couldn't read or write English even to the day he died, which I can't understand. How he became a naturalized citizen, but I found out how they conscripted him into the army and en masse, they naturalized them before they sent them to the Musayyar Qam. But in any case, he taught me lessons that stick with me to this day. I remember working with him in the garden in the spring turning the soil and it was a warm day and we were sweating and everything. And he said to me have you seen your uncles today? And I said no. He said have you?
Speaker 1:seen your uncles today and I said no.
Speaker 2:No, he said have you seen your cousins today? I said no, I haven't. He says when it's time to work, you'll not see them. When it's time to eat, they'll show up. And that little nugget, you, you know, it's so typical, so typical. Never forgot it. And there's a whole bunch of those little nuggets of wisdom that he imparted on me and he was to this day. He taught me more about the world and more about life, I guess, about the world and more about life, I guess, than his voyages to the US, then getting back on a ship.
Speaker 2:He was sick the whole time. He gets back on a troop ship to go to France, back on the troop ship to come back to America, which I'm glad he survived. World War I or I wouldn't be here. It turned his hair white and it was traumatic for him but he survived it and they nicknamed him Whitey and that stuck with him for the rest of his life. But he was in my heart, as now the village of Flaria is. So when I got on a plane, part of me stayed yeah no, I feel the same way.
Speaker 1:I just you hate to leave. You know as much as you want to come home, you really hate to leave. You know, like you said, you leave part of yourself there especially. You know the country is beautiful, the food is great, but the people to me were just fantastic.
Speaker 2:And the pace of life. You know pausing to appreciate the smells and the views and everything and the views and everything. And I learned that the farmers of Filaria were not vegetable farmers. You know cultivating these big fields. It's pretty mountainous there, but when you look out over these forests it's hazelnut trees and this is the primary area for Nutella to come in and harvest these hazelnuts. So they farmed the hazelnuts, which is right now I guess september is uh harvest season, so you don't want to talk to anybody uh right now because they're busy.
Speaker 2:They're they're working and that hasn't changed for how many years?
Speaker 1:well, yeah, and that, and that's when we went to, when we were in Fusato, one of the towns. They made everything, you know the capicola was made by them, the bread was made by them, the olive oil was made by them, the wine was made by them. Nothing was bought in the store.
Speaker 2:And.
Speaker 1:I said, I said I never had ham like this before. And and they said Well, we still do it the same way. We did it 300 years ago. We, we kill the pig on the day after Christmas. And then we hang it for three months and in March we eat it and it was just like so nonchalant this is the way we do it, and and do you mean you don't do that?
Speaker 2:uh, it's what we've been doing for 300 you know how do you do it, you know? Oh yeah. Well, we go to kroger and get a package, you know yeah, and they still, and they still.
Speaker 1:Um, you know they, there was a game that was kind of like a bowling game, only there was, you know, a small little ball like a bocce ball, and you're rolling the thing down this rocky path. It's not this smooth thing. And the other thing that they did, they were masters of spinning tops, and I had no idea that this is like a like a worldwide thing and what they. I forget if they put it in the palm of your hand or on the back of your hand, I don't remember, but they would spin a top and then they place it on your hand and then you had to hold it there as long as you could. They would time it and you know, hold it along, it's and and they said, you know, like the record was two minutes and 30 seconds or something, some crazy number like that. Yeah, they just do these things, you know, forever forever.
Speaker 2:And you know the reason why the shops are shut is because it's too hot, you know. So they close them in the afternoon, but then everybody comes out of their house, you know, when the sun goes down, and that's when they're sitting outside and they're talking in the piazza, in these little areas with tables that were vacant in the afternoon, they're full of people. In the evening. They don't sit there watching tv, they talk to one another yeah, they were all talking outside my window and body at two o'clock in the morning.
Speaker 1:You're like, don't they ever?
Speaker 2:go to bed.
Speaker 1:They did eventually. But well, listen, john, this has been so much fun, fantastic stories and I really, really enjoyed the conversation.
Speaker 2:Well, thank you, thank you. Well, thank you for having me. I mean I've enjoyed your conversations with with others so much and um, it's um, you know it's a welcome break from the tedium of recording all these records and things. You know it brings it to life and so thank you for doing that.
Speaker 1:And thank you for doing what you do. It's my pleasure, it's my pleasure.
