October 2002 Genealogy Forum News

Italian Magic?

Back in the day when I was researching my father's family I had a strange event happen which opened doors to my quest.

My father's mother - very illusive on paper and dead many years before I was born - was the subject of my search. All I knew was her name, some of her siblings, and her death information. I also knew she was married twice and that my father was the baby of all her children. All my father's siblings were dead, and the in-laws who still survived were either not parting with information or not speaking to my family. Dead end. So I again took up reading everything I could find on Italians from Italy to America and every place in between.

During this research I managed to find out that she married my father's father in Newark, New Jersey. At some point, my father remembered that his mother's first husband was in Brooklyn, New York. Still being very new at this at that time, I started to look into Brooklyn censuses, and writing away for vitals - no luck. Brooklyn was so big.

My father had obtained a listing of Catholic Churches in Brooklyn and began years ago to try to find his mother's records. Well, this list of churches with addresses was about twelve pages long. Attacking it was a feat taking patience and postage both - neither of which my father had.

Again, back to the library. I inter-library-loaned many books to come to me out here in the hills of Pennsylvania, and one of these nice little books was a collection of works put together in the 40s by the W.P.A. It started out with very interesting reading, explaining how the Napolitanos or the Sicilians created their own neighborhoods in New York. They tried to replicate their old friend and family groupings from the old country. A Sicilian living in America would marry a Sicilian and not someone from another part of Italy. And vice-versa. The book went on to explain the differences in the cultures, the celebrations, the superstitions etc.

I was reading intensely when I came to a paragraph was entitled 'Italians and the Catholic Church'. Knowing full well that my people were Catholic and being drilled with the culture and the religion since birth, I shrugged it off and figured there would be nothing in this chapter that I didn't know. So i skipped it. I continued on through the book until I had an urge to go to the bathroom. Upon my return to the kitchen table where I was reading, the book pages had feathered to a part of the book in the chapter about the Catholics and the Italians. As I sat down to start to finger the pages to where I was supposed to continue reading, a paragraph on the open page hit me like a baseball bat in the face.

I can't quote it directly, but it basically said that the Napolitano clans migrated to a certain section of Brooklyn, and took over an abandoned Presbyterian Church to make it their own. Their first parish was called Saint Stephen and when that parish folded, it became Saints Peter and Paul, and was located on such-and-such a street in this section of Brooklyn. On a hunch, I sent a letter to that Parish and asked them if they had the records for Saint Stephen and if they did, could they elaborate on the enclosed information about my grandmother and any of her children, her (first) marriage and/or deaths of her family members.

Within a week, I received a marriage certificate, 4 birth certificates, 4 baptism certificates and the death certificate of her first husband. All certified copies with church seals. This information opened a whole chapter on her and her family. I'll never ignore a chapter in a book again. Weird? yes, and it gave me goose skin for days after those certificates showed up. My father was so excited to see the certificates and as a result, I have been able to complete that family group. Weird eh?

© 2002 GFNEWS, a monthly publication of the Golden Gate Genealogy Forum, Inc. of Franklin, MA.
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