Italian Roots and Genealogy
This podcast is dedicated to Italian Genealogy, finding your Italian Roots and how to navigate through Italian records. Your host has over 12 years of experience and we will have excellent guests that will discuss a variety of genealogy topics. Please subscribe!
Italian Roots and Genealogy
The Valleriano Brothers' Heritage Quest
Uncover the remarkable journey of Italian heritage with brothers Michael and Chip Valleriano, who embarked on a quest to trace their family's roots back to their great-grandfather's migration from Italy to the United States. Their passion for genealogy shines through as they share insights from interviews with elder relatives, revealing the stories behind Ellis Island and how their family settled in Cleveland. You'll learn about Chip's dedication to preserving family stories and the significance of their surname's transformation over generations.
Explore the fascinating history of unwed mothers in Southern Italy and the adoption practices that impacted many families after Italy's unification. The brothers recount Lucio's story, an adopted child who took the name Rocco upon arriving in America, illustrating the challenges of tracing family histories with changing names. As they journey to Serino, a heartwarming discovery awaits when locals recognize their family tree, underscoring the deep emotional and historical ties that bind them to the region.
Experience the thrill of unexpected revelations as Michael and Chip connect with a long-lost cousin through a chance encounter on social media, unearthing hidden stories that enrich their understanding of their heritage. They discuss the serendipity and patience required in genealogical research, sharing tales of postponed trips and fortuitous meetings that open doors to new familial connections. This episode promises to inspire listeners to embark on their own genealogical journeys, with hopes of uncovering the profound sense of belonging that comes with understanding one's roots.
Check out Michaels Blog FEMIKE for some great stories.
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Farmers and Nobles
Read about my research story and how to begin your family research.
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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, italy Rooting Phil Italy and Abiativa Casa. And today I have two brothers, michael Valeriano and his brother Chip Valeriano. So welcome guys. Thanks for being here.
Speaker 3:Thanks for having us Great to be here.
Speaker 1:That's super, that's super. So now, are you guys in the same area? Do you live in the same area?
Speaker 2:We do not. We haven't lived together for 42 years. Wow About that. Yeah, maybe longer. You know, once I graduated high school I went to college. He was four years behind me. Then he went to college. But after I graduated college I went up to New York for a job and he stayed in the Cleveland area. So we both grew up outside of Cleveland.
Speaker 1:And you know I've so many Italians come from Ohio, you know, being from being from New York, we just think everybody who is Italian American came from New York, and I quickly learned that that's not the case at all.
Speaker 2:Yeah eventually we may get into this, but our great-grandfather, who is the reason why we're here today on this show that is, went through Ellis Island and Brooklyn multiple times and eventually he settled in the Cleveland area, most likely for work.
Speaker 1:Yeah, like many others. So when and why did you start doing the research in the first place?
Speaker 2:Well, chip has been doing research for basically forever, for 40 years. But having a young family, as I've heard listening to your show, as a kid I didn't even think about asking. And what to learn? It wasn't until I went to Italy a couple of times and people recognized my name as Italian, but they could never recognize where the name originated. And, as I learned it in all the trips to Italy, names tend to be very regional and that got me asking Chip more questions because he had done more work.
Speaker 3:So, chip, if you want to chime in, Sure, I mean, I was always the curious child and always asking a lot of questions, especially to my dad's mother, my grandmother always asking a lot of questions, especially to my dad's mother, my grandmother and you know, she was sort of the daughter-in-law of the person that Mike and I are kind of focusing on and that's our great-grandfather.
Speaker 3:She had never met him, she was married to his son and I started my journey in the 80s. I came home from college and I acquired a book that had charts and genealogy charts at a bookstore and I just started asking questions and I sat down with her and I sat down with two of Lucio's children and they answered a lot. They had a lot of interesting stories and in hindsight I realized that was sure luck that I sat down and did that, because they're not here with us anymore and that is, you know, you want to go closest to the source and I learned a lot. I acquired some great images that I never thought I would see. I acquired a family photograph that my father had never seen, of his father and the Valeriano family when they were younger, and it was just the sheer luck that I did it. But that is probably the most important thing to do is to sit down with the older folks and ask some questions.
Speaker 1:Yeah, for sure that was really smart to do. Whether it was luck or whatever, that was a great thing to do. I used to see my mother's mom every week and we used to play cards. I was, you know, 10, 12 years old and I never thought in my wildest dreams to ask her any questions about Italy, because she would have told me I'm sure you know. So that's fantastic that you did that.
Speaker 3:Yeah, I mean, I just sort of like I don't know if it's that they just didn't want to talk about it, because I would say to her I remember asking her I said what did you and your mother talk about? And she'd shrug her shoulders and say not much, nothing. Did she talk about Italy? No, so I don't know if it was just it wasn't such a great experience for them that they wanted to leave, or they just didn't talk about they were more focused on survival, more so than anything.
Speaker 1:Yeah, I think that's the case. But you know, I think if people would have asked, I tell people now take your iPhone or your phone and just record your grandparents, or if you're lucky enough to have great grandparents sit down there, and record them, because it's so important, whether're italian or anything else, it's so important to have that connection, you know yeah, I recently said go ahead, mike absolutely I I wish, and not to be a dead horse, but I wish I had spent a little bit of time, which which brings back to our last name, valeriano.
Speaker 2:I assume that the people that see this on YouTube will see the spelling of our last name, which, in and of itself, with two L's, is run. But even our last name is not Valeriano. We don't know what it is. So getting back to our great grandfather. Even our last name is not Valeriano. We don't know what it is.
Speaker 3:So getting back to our great-grandfather, the man who first came to the US in 1898 was the first time, Chip, I think I want to say maybe a little later in 1900. I'm thinking, if I'm remembering right. But yeah, the Valerianos came over early 1900s.
Speaker 2:When I went to Ellis Island I looked him up and you could see Lucio Valeriano with one L on the ship's records in Ellis Island. That was interesting in and of itself, but really what was most interesting to me was something that ship on Earth and his ancestry hunted. Him was a birth record in Italian from Lucio, chip Underhurst, and his ancestry of hunting was a birth record in Italian from Lucio, so Chip. 1900s. Italian writing does not like Italian writing today and it's just not like we would have English writing today versus in the 1800s. So he had it translated At the time.
Speaker 2:It didn't mean a lot to me. What it said was that Lucio was given the name Lucio Valeriano by the town magistrate and the director of the Roto di, and I didn't know what any of that stuff meant. So things started coming to gel in my mind between not being having a recognizable Italian immediately but not knowing where it's from, and then Lucio being given a name and the concept of Verotto didn't make a lot of. Didn't understand anything about that and it was that that combination of this given the name and then having a name and then I'll add the third piece to that is is the thing that I've always.
Speaker 2:It's almost hysterically funny that in the early 90s my father went to school with one last name, rocco, and the following day he went to school and his name was Valeriano. And so that got me on a whole the last three plus years of looking at all the history of your podcasts other people's podcasts about Italian last names, so maybe more so me than Chip, I've been on a mission to find out what our real last name is. It's never going to change with Valeriano, but I just find it incredibly interesting that my dad could go to school elementary school one day one last name, the following day a different last name. If it wasn't real it would be laughable, correct?
Speaker 1:Ah, that's so. You don't know, it was a foundling name.
Speaker 2:So Lucio's name was given to him by the town of Sluofra, outside of Avellino, in the mountains of Campania. It's been said many times in your blog and I'll repeat it the concept of unwed mothers giving up their babies, either through either they wanted to give up the baby or they were coerced either by their family or the church, was an epidemic thing that occurred for millennia I mean going back almost a thousand years. But after unification it got worse for the South, as most of us know, and any Southern baby that was born on a wedlock was almost immediately whisked away from their mother and given up for adoption. In the case of Lucio, we believe he got pretty lucky in that he found a family that never adopted him. The family's name was Rocco, just signal.
Speaker 3:And they're also in our team, in our line.
Speaker 2:Oh, okay, we also have blood of that, which is also interesting. So he was brought in by this Rocco family and the woman had just lost a baby. They got a baby that was lost. I don't know if it was miscarriage or what. It was stillborn, so she was already wet. It was stillborn, so she was already wet. And if you go through, if you read any of the books on um italian uh, baby abandonment, which I recommend to any italian american to understand that because it really tells a deep history of not just the nation that became Italy, but of our heritage and what went on, because there is some probability that every Italian American has been touched by that somehow, especially if they're from the South. So he was brought in by the Rocco family and he assumed the name of the dead baby. So that's how the Rocco name came about. Go ahead, chip.
Speaker 3:Well, what's so funny is the Valeriano family almost lived parallel names. On day-to-day life they went by Rocco, but when they did something legally they would put Valeriano, so Lucho. When he got married put Lucho Valeriano on the wedding papers, but in day-to-day life he obviously went by Gerardo Rocco and then when he came to America he shed the Valeriano name when he actually got to America.
Speaker 1:So didn't that make you guys nuts trying to figure this out?
Speaker 3:Yes, they picked up names and dropped names like crazy. No-transcript, it's very messy.
Speaker 1:But there must have been some sort of tie to those two families. No, you wonder.
Speaker 2:Yeah, and that's what we're trying. That's the process we're going through right now. Chip tends to want to stay in America and he does a lot of the groundwork for me, so when I go to Italy I'm hunting on the ground, at the ground level for this information. So just this past spring I went to Serino, which is where our grandmother was born, and it was also where Lucio was raised. He was raised in Sereno and so I went to Sereno, stayed in the bed and breakfast, didn't know anybody in Sereno.
Speaker 2:My wife and I did five and ten mile hikes up into the mountains and at the bed and breakfast I carried my family tree from Ancestry on my phone and wherever I go in Italy I pull up my family tree and I ask about the names in the tree if anybody knows them. All over the south I've been pulia, bassoicotta, calabria. I biked thousands of miles in italy and I always pull up. I go to town square and I walk up to the old and I show my, my family tree and I always get. I did it in Serino in May walked to Town Square, walked up the old fellows and I showed them my, my family tree and the guy looked at it and he pointed he says 10k, that way in Italian, 10k and I was floored. I was, I mean, I probably like a baby, you know, typical italian right, fine, like a baby. Somebody recognized the my family tree and it was absolutely, totally mind-blowing. And so where he was pointing he was pointing up the road to the town of sereno is made up of seven little hamlets, so each hamlet only has a couple hundred people, and the hamlet that he was pointing towards was the hamlet called Canali, and Chip previously had figured out that the family was from Canali di Serino. So my wife and I walked up to Canali. It was a mind-blowing experience for me Got back to the bed and breakfast and I find out that the owner of the bed and breakfast was born in Canal and all of a sudden it's like they were my family, like the people knew me forever. I mean it was all I could explain to people is it was surreal. It was a surreal feeling for me.
Speaker 2:I've always felt very comfortable in Italy. I walk in parts of Naples at night where people tell you not to walk, and I get treated differently there than I do when I walk in New York City. I'm nervous as heck. I walk in the bad parts of Naples and I felt comfortable. I got to this bed and breakfast. It felt like home, I can't explain it. And these people obviously knew family members. Obviously, there's only 200 people in the hamlet. She must have knew something. We never got to the next level because we needed to leave, but I've already booked a month at that breakfast for next September. All I can say is for anybody that listens and watches you do it while you can.
Speaker 3:Michael Canale is close to Silofra, like what's the difference?
Speaker 2:Yeah, so that's the other thing. So we mentioned that Lucio was born in Sulofra. The town master in Sulofra gave him the name Lucio Valeriano. As the crow flies, canale and Sulofra are only hundreds of meters apart, but they're separated by a massive mountain. So if you're walking and I did do the walk it's about six miles around theanawhi to Sulawesi. So it's the closest village from Sulawesi is Kanawhi. Given that the woman that brought Lucho in was from Kanawhi, I'm guessing that the town magistrate knew about this lady who lost her baby and offered up L food show to them.
Speaker 1:I mean, that's certainly a case for being persistent, I'm sure. But you know I've heard other stories like, as you probably heard, that you know people just walk into the town and I tell people you have to go to the town. You don't know whether they ask or somebody recognizes them. There's all kinds of stories like that and he recognizes them.
Speaker 2:There's all kinds of stories like that. Again, like I said, I've been all over Italy, I've ridden my bike over most of the country. It's the first time that the name was recognized and that really drove home the point that the name is very regional, but not so much today, but definitely back then. So because if you do a search on Rocco in any town in Italy you'll find a Rocco, if you did a phone book search or a Google search, but it's not like it was back then the name Rocco probably was strongly associated to the Rock you know of Avellino.
Speaker 1:Well, people didn't go more than you know. Maybe the next town, if that right Correct.
Speaker 3:Correct and for me, I would say I'm a pretty serious genealogist. I've been able to use DNA through ancestry to kind of get matches in Silofra or who are connected to Silofra, and that has been immeasurable, and I've been able to make cast guesses. But it's pretty powerful when you can find matches in these little towns and you're like, or that are connected to these little towns, um, you know, and I start building out some of my matches charts to kind of figure out who his parents could be, and I have guesses. But it's always hard because each gender, as each generation passes, it sort of gets more diluted. But it's, it's, yeah, I mean, for me I feel like genealogy is the basis of any gene. Anyone who does genealogy is the question who am I, I, who are we? And we have it almost double. Like you know, a last name is so important to Italians and we have a last name that was sort of made up, made up.
Speaker 1:Yeah, yeah. Well, you know, there's over 300,000 surnames in Italy.
Speaker 2:I've only found one other, valeriano, in all of Italy with two Ls Really Wow, that's awesome. And he happens to be involved with the cycling industry. So we do believe we have figured out through Ancestry and 23andMe Lucio's mother likely has been, not even could have been highly likely. Dario's mother could likely has been, not even could have been highly likely and that's an interesting topic in and of itself is how do you reach out to that family, such that one you don't scare them away and, being you know they think you're strange. So we have not really approached that family in any detail. We have not really approached that family in any detail.
Speaker 2:I fundamentally believe that if I do that, which I am going to do in September of 25, I need to do it in person. I want them to see a real person, not just a Facebook request or an email. It's more what I'm going to say, the Italian way. It's a lot more about relationships. In Italy than I grew up working for a big company or Chip working for a big company. The relationship business is diluted in America partially because of the pandemic and everybody working from home, but in Italy it's still that way. It's about establishing the relationship Now, conversely because of Chip's diving into some of the data I've actually. So let me take one step back before I go into it.
Speaker 2:I've always found it interesting that Chip and I even though I have no artistic ability and Chip is an artist and he's not very technical and I'm an engineer that we ended up doing the same thing for a living, which was managing projects, and his were art projects, mine were industrial buildings, building of industrial plants but fundamentally we did the same thing. So it always struck me that there was probably something in our DNA that drove that, that there was probably something in her DNA that drove that. So in the course of hunting, finding her DNA and diving further into it, I found a young woman she's not young, she's closer to our age than not our age In North of Milan, in Switzerland, in Lugano, and I reached out to her through 23andMe and I said I looked at your profile and you're from Serino. You have these last names that are in our family tree. We must be related. I don't normally do that, but there's just such a strong resemblance in the last names or overlap in last names. So she actually replied and, as you know, when you go to europe you have to use whatsapp. So I did this through whatsapp and and she replied and come to find out she's an engineer, she does project management, she rides a bike and she's a triathlete, which I used to be you talk about.
Speaker 2:There's something in the blood that drives to be like that and that just keeps pounding into me, or keeps rattling my head, that there must have been something about Lucio that he had. He didn't know who his parents were, we presume, and he was brought in by this Rocco family but, unlike most abandoned children in Italy, he wasn't abused. You know, if you read any of the books on abandonment, you know that there's 80% chance the baby died within the first year. 80% chance the baby died within the first year. 80% chance. If they lived, they usually didn't live a very good life. They were usually sent out to the field and worked forever until they potentially passed.
Speaker 2:Joe didn't have that. He was brought in by a family that actually cared for him because he came to the US with a trade which was very unusual for an abandoned child. So he came to the US as a bricklayer and that's how I believe he ended up in Brooklyn. You know, as we know, brooklyn bricks and then eventually building stuff. We know of one house in our hometown that he did build. That was brick. So brick is a very it's a very exact thing. You know things need to fit together. I fundamentally believe that's where Chip and I got our desire to want to organize and manage projects. Is that you know from that DNA. But it was luck that he got that because, again, most abandons didn't have that opportunity. I fundamentally believe that we, chip and I, got to where we are is because of whatever he did to get to where he was.
Speaker 1:And you know, I did an interview with somebody and we talked about that, because people think that the DNA is only your physical characteristics, but it's not. There are other inherent things. What I find amazing is that you two guys are both doing the genealogy thing, because most of my cousins could care less and I got a bunch of them, one or two. And the other thing that's funny is my brother. Although he didn't do it as a trade, my brother could draw anything. I mean he, and he decided one day he was going to do stained glass and he did it. And then he said he got tired of that so he decided he was going to, you know, get a sandblast or an etch glass and like, just like that he's doing it.
Speaker 1:I can't draw a straight line, so go figure, but but I do Like. I do. Like I said, I find it very interesting that you know two brothers are actually have the same passion. You know, Spend a lot of time in the same house. You're going to either hate each other or, you know, yeah, but I think there's something that you both have that gene to, because I firmly believe, and you probably do too, that you know the ancestors, that they want to be found.
Speaker 3:You know they want to discover that, yeah, I feel like I feel like Mike and I are being pulled to find the truth and it's almost like we get it's. I think we sort of get emotional thinking about Lucio, because I think about you know, and I think I hear it in Mike's voice how much he had to overcome. I mean, italy is such a family-oriented, historically-based culture and family and who you're connected to matters so much. You know he sort of was to be an abandoned child in Italy was a big thing and you know he made a decision to leave Italy and basically start new. And he, you know, and I think that was pretty courageous I think of all our ancestors who came here with nothing, how courageous they were. I don't even know if I could do it. They were courageous people and they were survivors and they were survivors, he in particular.
Speaker 3:I just think that Mike and I sort of like feel like we have to sort of like write his story a little bit in terms of you know, I feel like I don't know. It's almost like we. It's like Valerian the name means so much to us, but then you think, wow, that was his foundling name. So it's sort of a struggle because you know he left that name behind in Italy, but we love that if it's so, it's so complicated. But you know, and I mean, I don't know, I just when I, I we have one picture of him and that picture, just you, just you know, I don know.
Speaker 2:So the other interesting thing is Bob mentioned to you earlier that our father went to school one day with the last name, rocco, and then the following day the last name, valeriano. But and Chip also mentioned that on all legal papers Lucio was Valeriano with one L. Our grandfather was Valeriano with one L. My grandfather was Valeriano with one L. My dad, when he went to school that next day with Valeriano, the principal or somebody in the town put two Ls in. So the whole concept of record-keeping back then just convolutes the entire process. I mean being able to track, you know. So really, in Italy we go back, we're one L Valervariano, but even because it was a given well, by the way, one alvariano. There's actually quite a number of one alvarianos in the us. There's only like 30 families in the entire us with 12 larianos and they're not likely related because it was a given.
Speaker 2:I can remember I'm sure Chip does my dad whenever he would travel, not that he traveled much, but whenever he'd go somewhere he'd open up the phone book in the hotel and look for a Valeriano, and in one case he found one, and it wasn't too far from our hometown. They weren't related but they ended up being buddies. This family that was like 40 miles away from my dad, and my dad ended up becoming buddies with this family that was 40 miles away, just because they had the same last name, even though they knew they weren't related. So, yeah, so finding that last name, I don't want to change my last name, but the whole story behind it is. It's funny and intriguing and something that it just it drives me to want to learn more about it just because of that.
Speaker 3:So and there are a lot of people you know, I, you know, with foundling last names and you know, and some of them much more stigmatizing in Italian versus ours was pretty, I think, not very stigmatizing, so he lucked out that way. But you know, again, a last name is so important to Italians, and then to have yours made up, you know, see, that's why I keep it's just in the back of my mind.
Speaker 1:I keep thinking that them especially since he was treated well, that there may have been, you know, some sort of family tie. Now my wife's mother, her father, here they went by Poeta, P-O-E-T-T-A, but when I found her grandfather he was Proieto, so he's somewhere in the line. That was a foundling. You know, I don't think it was him, I think it was before him, but obviously somewhere down the line there was a foundling. The most famous foundling that I've come across was John Martin. I don't know if you guys ever heard of him. He was the bugler in the 7th Cavalry at the Little Bighorn and he was the only survivor because he was sent to go tell some other colonel or general or something that they were going to get slaughtered. But his real name in Italy was Giovanni Martino and he was a foundling.
Speaker 2:He was left in the wheel and that gets into a whole other set of things, the whole concept of last naming. In Italy, lucio was lucky in another way in that right after unification in the late 1860s, but even just before unification, napoleon said I need to stop. We need to stop naming babies, brayetti and Esposito and when unification occurred, that government agreed. So then you start diving into that whole process of last naming, of abandons. It's very intriguing. So I write a blog now so that these stories don't go away from my grandkids, because if they don't ask me, they will go away, just like me. My kids aren't interested today because they have too much going on, but I want to make sure that stuff is around. So I was diving deep into last naming. I can't read the legislation, so all I can do is go by what I find on the Internet in other places.
Speaker 2:So the government gave the town mayor, or whoever ran the town, the responsibility to name and to name Valeriano with one L. Valerianus was a Roman emperor in the 200s. Most Roman emperors were not nice men and for some reason Valerianus was and Valerianus was. His family is from up in the mountains near Avelino, so Valerianus was only an emperor for a few years because the rich people didn't like the fact that he was giving their money away to the poor, so they killed him. And I believe that that mayor either knew the history of Valerianus or something related to Avellino and that's how he ended up with the name Valeriano and again Valerianus.
Speaker 2:If you look in Wikipedia is with one L, the whole concept again, because I have lots of friends, chip does too with the last name, esposito, or Esposito and Poietti. Those poor people they got. They were I don't like to use the term abused, but really they were taken advantage of in Italy because they had no family to protect them. And then when they came over to try to escape that to Ellis Island and eventually to Bowery and then maybe over to Brooklyn, the Padrons did the same thing to those poor people. So again, lucio was very lucky that he went by the name Gerardo Rocco, so there was no stigma to the name Gerardo Rocco. So there is no stigma to the name Gerardo Rocco and I think that set of circumstances led to the luck and fortune that Chip and I have.
Speaker 1:Yeah, yeah, no, I could see that. I can understand that and you know that's interesting because I do know that some people, even when they left them at the church, you know some children got you know names like you know beautiful child, and then other children got you know very nasty names or, you know, based on a physical feature or something like that, and they could be very unkind to those people. But it is really fascinating and you know, what's really fascinating is, too, is some of the kids that were adopted from Italy in the 1960s and came to America and they don't. I know a couple who found their families because they were persistent, but the mothers didn't have to leave their name in those cases.
Speaker 2:Well, I'm reading Rial Arino's book currently, and so the previous book I read, as well as the internet stuff I read was from Kurt Kirzner, or Kurt, the guy that's the Kurtzscher yeah, is that how you pronounce the name? I think so. Yeah, he kind of wrote the bible on Italian infinite abandonment. So he's the uh professor emeritus at in Rhode Island at Providence University. Theoretically he's the US scholar, formal scholar on Italian, italian, american studies.
Speaker 1:I have to dig.
Speaker 2:I have to dig him up for sure yeah, I'll send it to you, yeah, yeah, very difficult book to find. It's been out of print. I found it in Australia and if you look on Amazon right now it may be in the $400 to $500 range. I got lucky. It didn't have to spend that much.
Speaker 2:So I guard that book with my life because it goes through over a thousand years of Italian infant abandonment. It's in sequential order the Crown Book that I'm reading. It's more focused on the 40s, 50s and 60s post-World War II and she's really getting into that. I thought it went know somewhere in the when the US stopped allowing as many immigrants come to the US. I was thinking that maybe it dwindled down in Italy because Italy was just getting a little more prosperous under Mussolini. But obviously it didn't, because right after the war it exploded.
Speaker 2:And this whole book is about all the people that were abandoned around the World War and what happened to those people. It's also a sad story. Sometimes it's hard to read. I mean, you read the first book I mentioned. I go to bed at night crying, because I do all my reading at night before I go to bed and I would think about Lucio or these people in the real in the case of Lucio, or the abstract, the people I didn't know, and it was heartbreaking. And so again I give Lucio all the credit. Whatever he did for us he did, and we're a living testament to that.
Speaker 3:Well, and also, you have to remember, you have to put everything through the lens of that time period versus how we feel about things today. I mean, today it's like oh, no big deal, but that was huge, absolutely huge to have been. And I often think about what he carried around internally, knowing that he was given up by his parents, especially, you know again, playing Italian. You know what does it, what does that feel like, not to be given up by his parents, especially, you know, again, laying Italian. You know what does that feel like not to be given up by your parents Anonymously.
Speaker 2:Well, the name of the first book is called Sacrifice for Honor. It was about getting pregnant on a wedlock was a dishonorable thing for the family, so the baby was sacrificed to maintain honor in the family. Typically, they would send the woman away and it was made secret that she birthed a child somewhere. Even in the current book that I'm reading I think it's the, I can't remember the exact title it's the Price of Childbirth or the Price of a Child. I think, yeah, the Price of a Child. Yeah, so yeah, just the titles themselves are sad.
Speaker 3:Yeah, and getting back to talking to my, you know Lucio's children, you know his daughter would say, as did my grandmother. You know they'd say his mother gave birth to him, she was older and she couldn't cope so she gave him up. So that was sort of the line that the children and my grandmother, his daughter-in-law, that was the line that they kind of put forth. You know that she couldn't cope raising him and you know, then his son threw out this. His father was a guard for the Pope. So you hear all these stories and you think is this the line that they were given to make it acceptable, you know, to kind of, you know, make it okay. You know she, you know she was old and she couldn't take care of him. But I have since figured out I think she was a domestic servant and you know, probably was part of a classic storyline. You know that happens with, you know, domestic that happens with domestic.
Speaker 1:Well, I have my story, my father's grandfather. His birth record shows him as period naturala, which means he was born out of wedlock. The interesting thing about it is I have two. I call them birth cards. I have his birth record, but then I also have, from a genealogist that helped me in Italy, what I refer to as like a birth card. So it's a little card there, and on that card has the same birthday. Everything's the same, except for the mother. One says Maria Savino and the other says Maria Leone, and all his siblings are all from Maria Savino, and the other says Maria Leone and all his siblings are all from Maria Savino. So no, he was from a noble family. So what I think is that somehow he was able to be recognized, or was recognized by his father and was then able to assume, or was recognized by his father and was then able to assume. I guess he wasn't considered a bastard in the sense that we would think of it right, Only because they had money and they had standing.
Speaker 3:That could be Lucho's case also you have to share that information with Mike and I about how you went about that process of getting that card with Mike and I about how you went about that process of getting that card.
Speaker 2:I was told by a genealogist that I should try to locate his baptismal record, but I don't know if that's actually going to give him any information, so let me add on to that. So in the town of Slopra the town hall is now in the palace of the Orsini family. So they were, and Orsini's a big name in the.
Speaker 3:US. We know that.
Speaker 2:And so I actually went to the Town Hall in May. I showed that same birth record in Italian to the clerk at the desk and she pointed me upstairs to the records office. And I walked upstairs to the records office. It was 12.02, and the office closed at noon. It wasn't opening until 4 o'clock on Tuesday. This was a Monday and we were already flying out from Naples, so we wanted to get a chance to do that, and so you know.
Speaker 2:So are we associated with the Orsini's, who knows? In the little village of Hamlet of Tenali, again, by the way, in Silofra, that Orsini Palace is immediately across the street from the main cathedral of the town, as always was In Canali. It's the exact same thing. There's a church there that has a statue of a guy named Francesco Salamigna, who also was in our family tree, and Francesco was an internationally famous artist in the 16th and 1700s, and if you go to any church in Naples, there is some work by Salaminia in there. So meeting across the street from that church is a palace for the Pelosi family. So it's possible, is it probable? Yes, is it possible? Who knows? But it's interesting and fun to think about the potential relationships that could be built into our DNA. I doubt the people at that level of society do DNA like people like us do.
Speaker 1:Well, the Italians don't do it in general, because they don't have to, because they could go to a cemetery and find 500 years of.
Speaker 3:I almost want to send my brother to Italy with a box you know 10 boxes of DNA tests, but I think they would look at him like he's nuts.
Speaker 1:Crossed my mind twice. I said I should bring some tests and then I was like maybe you know, maybe I'm imposing on on them, but I have Orsini in my blood going back to I don't know 1500, 1400.
Speaker 2:They're very big in Southern Italy the whole process of being turned away at the door because the door is closed. I mean, I have so much drive built into my system right now to get to that door because if we're to find a birth record, that's like finding gold for me right now to get to that door, because if we're to find a birth record, that's like finding gold for me right now. I know that Chip really wants us to find it.
Speaker 3:Well, and you wonder how much. I'm sure he obviously wasn't the only abandoned child in the town. You wonder if people know, or if people have an inkling, or if there is indeed historical documentation, or was it just understood that, oh yeah, you know, happened, I know. You wonder how much people know about the history of Vanderman in their town.
Speaker 1:Well, and I think I think it would depend on whether whether he was left in the wheel or whether he was just handed off to somebody that you know. There's probably a well, I'm sure there's a difference there, because it may have been like I said somebody lost a child and they said, well, we can't tell you a replacement, or somebody's daughter actually had the child and then the mother said it was hers. You know that used to happen a lot, right? So it happened here. Where people did that, in fact we would have a discussion about somebody that we know that we were thinking, you know what? I bet you it was the mother's child. So on that birth, record.
Speaker 2:It mentions two last names of people that were present at the time that Lucio was given the name Lucio Valeriano, and one is another family name. It's a Salillomanian name, that woman that I mentioned that lives in Switzerland. She's a Sillomanian, so there is some connection there, obviously, in DNA, as well as to Lucio. Getting back to that clerk in Slofra, I do not believe that she would have sent me upstairs if she didn't know and if she didn't feel there was records up there for me to find. Yeah, I bet you're right. Sure, so that Salmania name.
Speaker 2:So Francesco was famous enough that one of the times I was in Naples I go to Naples every time I go there because I find the place incredibly fascinating and fun. The place incredibly fascinating and fun. So his palace is right adjacent to one of the foremost museums in the world for art, and most of the major art from the eruptions of Vesuvius over Herculaneum and Pompeii. That art resides in this museum. So Francesco's house is immediately across the street from this museum and I went there one day and it's not a house, it's a palace and it's now a bed and breakfast and an apartment complex, like a lot of palaces are now, and I was ringing all the doorbells of the apartment and then finally somebody opened the door and I walked in. I'm going in and I start walking down the ramp and I'm with my wife and she's a little more tender. I have a lot of. I'll keep my mouth shut. I know what you mean. I think we get the picture.
Speaker 2:So I start walking down the ramp into what used to be a courtyard but it's now a parking lot. Somebody starts yelling at me you know in Italian what are you doing? And I turn around, look at him and I pointed to myself and said Il Salmonea. And the guy didn't believe me. So again, I take out my phone, I pull out my family tree and I show it in Francesco Salmonea, in my family tree. He turned white as a ghost. He was the owner of Bed and Breakfast and he thought I was there to claim my property. I said no, no, I don't want the property, I don't want the headache. We ended up becoming friends and we talked via there maybe once or twice a year and he brought me into the Bed and Breakfast and he brought me into Salminia's quarters, which I thought were outstanding.
Speaker 2:Wow, that's something, that's nice, that's great, yeah, so whether or not we're true or related, we believe we are. We don't know if he is a great-grandfather many times removed or uncle many times removed, but in the typical Italian naming scheme every other generation of men, there is a Francesco Salomino and this is on my ground side, by the way. So we pretty much believe he's somehow related to us. That's our brushwork in Italy.
Speaker 1:My claim is on the Hotel Caracciolo.
Speaker 2:Oh, that's a beautiful place.
Speaker 1:But I don't think I'm going to get it. So, bob, where is your family from in Italy? Well, my mother's family is from a small town in Puglia, torito, outside of Bari. My dad's family is from well, my father's father. They were originally from Pagani and then they lived in Naplesples, right north of Via Carbonara, and my grandmother's family, my grandmother's father's family, were the counts of Montebello, in Calabria, and also her great grandmother was the Duchess of Capricota. Her mother was Caracciolo, from the Princes of Avellino. So that's my claim to the hotel. I had no idea. I had no idea when I started this thing.
Speaker 1:But next time you're in the Duomo in Naples, there's one of the side chapels that my third great grandmother, the Duchess Beatrice Capicci Piccicelli. She's got a plaque there with her and her husband. Her husband was Giacomo Piemallo, he was the Count of Montebello, and in the floor there's the Capicci Piccicelli crest. But when we went to Capricota, they were just fabulous there, I mean, they just treated us so great, were just fabulous there they, I mean they just treated us so great. And, um, they actually had investments from the, from the from, I guess around 1790 or something like that that my fourth great grandmother had made in naples with the crest on it and all that kind of stuff, and and the priest said this is only just one example. We have lots more like this Avellino. I'll send you what they did when we entered. Have you been to the palace in Avellino? I don't know if you've ever been to Avellino, the city.
Speaker 2:I've been up there, but it was more in passing than it was. It was more going to Serino and Slofa versus staying in Avellino.
Speaker 1:Yeah Well, like most of these places, the palazzos now are the city hall or whatever, whatever. So they bring us into this courtyard, you know, through the archway, and they have people dressed from the like 15, 1600s and they start blowing these trumpets and welcome me, me and my family, in. Oh my, I'm like this doofus. What the hell is going on here? But truly, I asked, I said you know, I'm just this guy from America. And Letizia said to me we don't forget, we don't forget in Italy. So the fact that you can prove that you're a descendant of the princes of Avelino, you're a very important person here. That was flabbergasting, you know, it was just and indeed they treat us like that there. And then also, when we went to Montebello, they treated me like I was the heir or something like that. I mean, that's just the way it was and it was so it was weird to be honest with you.
Speaker 3:Well, I always say that there's more. We have more genetics in Italy than we have in America. That was years. The only time I had been in Italy, I felt like the earth was falling on me down.
Speaker 1:Yeah, yeah, I know, I know it's amazing.
Speaker 2:I mentioned earlier that that family that owned the bed and breakfast with the woman from Canale. When we left she hugged me like a cousin would hug me like a brother would hug me. It was deeper than just. I could feel the belonging from the way she. I only met the lady 48 hours earlier and now she's hugging me like we're long-lost cousins forever.
Speaker 1:I didn't know that my father's first cousins were still alive in Italy. They were in their 90s. We walked into their apartment. I didn't know my cousin, my dad. He's also my dad's first cousin, but he's younger than me. Long story, but anyway. We walked into that apartment and there was a woman that she resembled my grandmother and the instant they saw me was like they dug up treasure. It's so incredible, it really is. It really is.
Speaker 1:I've told this a million times. I'm going to bore everybody, but I'll bore them again, too bad. They had my parents' wedding photo from 1944 that my grandmother sent, my grandmother's handwriting on the back of it. That's incredible, you know, incredible, yeah. And then, just two weeks ago yeah, about two weeks ago I got a message on Facebook from somebody Guillermo Sorrentino, no, it's not a Sorrentino, I can't remember his last name now. He said I'm your cousin and he sent me a picture of my father's family before my father was born. I have the same picture and I only knew that my grandfather had a brother here and a sister in Italy. He had actually four other siblings. After 15 years of doing this research, out of the blue, this guy tells me I'm your cousin.
Speaker 3:That's gold, I mean. I think that's what Mike and I are hoping for in slow, for that. Someone knows something, or you've heard a story once or something. Someone knows something, or you've heard a story once or something you know because you know you, as you, as you interact more and more and more with people, especially family, and not something else pops up and something else pops up. It's like about peeling an onion, and I'm hoping that's what happens when mike goes back to silofra, that you know another. Something else comes forward or you know something occurs. You know, when he went the last time and the office was closed, it wasn't his moment to find out. You know, obviously, lucho wanted him to wait another year or so, but I do believe that's the only thing we'll find out.
Speaker 1:That's kind of what happened with us. We we had to cancel our trip to naples because it was like a you know just when co, you know, covert broke out and we postponed it for a year and a half, and a couple of weeks before we went I was notified by my cousin, nic, and he's the one who brought us the apartment. So had we gone 10 months before, I probably would have known him and probably never would have got there. So timing's everything, I suppose. So next time you go the guy will be open.
Speaker 2:Well, I'm going to make sure of it. There's no question about it. I'm going to be there almost a month, so I should be able to Park yourself in front of the place. By the way, Renato and Marisa, the people that own the Bed and Breakfast in Serino, I'm coming for a month. Yeah, yeah.
Speaker 1:Super, super. Well, listen guys, this has been absolutely fascinating. Great stories for sure, no question about it. I mean, we could probably go on for another three hours, oh, easily. But you know, when you get there and you find everybody, we'll have to do a replay. There's nothing else.
