Researching Your Roots Takes Some Digging

How I wish Henry Louis Gates Jr., the host of “Finding Your Roots” on PBS, had invited me to be on his show when I began researching my family history.

That would have helped me prepare for my trip to Montazzoli, Italy in the summer of 1974, but Dr. Gates didn’t launch his show until 2012. I started my research for my book, Searching for Concezio, the old-fashioned way that I learned as a reporter: by going directly to the primary source. In a very real sense, I didn’t have a choice: most Italian immigrants who arrived in America during the third “wave” of migration from 1880 to 1920 carried a suitcase in one case and the name of their sponsor in the other. I had only three records to rely on when I began my search, as I described in my blog, “Finding the Facts in Your Family Story.”

That’s why I decided to visit the small isolated village deep in Italy’s rugged Abruzzo region in 1974, a few years after graduating from college.

“Thank goodness your grandfather left,” said Great-Aunt Erminia, my grandfather’s sole surviving sister, as we stood on the balcony of her small stone house. I didn’t hear her at first: I was more interested in capturing the outline of  proud profile and the Appennine Mountains in the background with my camera. Then she pressed my hand against her heart and began weeping as she repeated the words. “Thank goodness your grandfather left. Farming here was like tilling the side of a rock.” That was the first time I heard those words—but it would not be the last.

The stones in my great-aunt’s house, which my father signed over to her family in 1955, were dug out of the mountains that framed my first glimpse of Montazzoli. The view looks charming as you drive up the winding road to the isolated village, which sits on a high plateau. But those same stones dug from the soil made farming difficult for tenant farmers like my great-grandparents, Tommasso and Rosa Di Pace Perrucci, to feed their family. Along with hundreds of thousands of other heartbroken parents in the impoverished Mezzogiorno, they waved goodbye as their children left for America. Five of my grandfather’s seven siblings left Montazzoli and never returned.

I’m not sure if “the facts” can capture all of the impact of that story, but that is what I am striving for in the pages of Searching for Concezio, which I hope that an agent and publisher will one day agree to represent.

Have you visited the birthplace of your immigrant ancestors? Did you find your “on the ground” research trip meaningful as I did? Will you tell me what you unearthed that revealed your family’s story and surprised you?