genealogy – Messy Suitcase Travel Blog

November 17, 2018

Italy, Part 4: Solofra, and Radical Discoveries

After we left Naples, we traveled into the mountains to dig deeper into the family history.

Solofra

My grandfather Domenic Troisi was actually born in a small mountain town called Solofra, about half an hour east of the city of Salerno. His father, Beniamino Troisi, met his mother, Maria Michele Buongiorno, in Solofra when she was working for his brother, the local priest. Here’s an excerpt from my grandfather’s Memory Book for his 50th anniversary:

BENIAMINO TROISI FU BIAGIO met Maria Michele Buongiorno at the home of Father Carmine Troisi who was later elevated to the Canonico and Primicerio Curato to the Parochial and Collegiate Church St. Michele Arcangelo of Solofra Province of Avellino, Italy, December 21, 1941. Miss Buongiorno at the time she met Beniamino, brother of the priest, was keeping house for Father Troisi. Both the Troisis and the Buongiornos were respected families of Solofra.

Entrance to Terranova Agriturismo

So our little group of family seekers – which consisted of my cousins Janice and Loraine Carapellucci, Loraine’s husband Dave Handley, sister Julie Holm, daughter Lexie and me – converged on Solofra on Oct. 31, settling into a charming farm BnB, Terranova Agriturismo, just outside of the village. Our plan was to experience Domenic’s Solofra by attending Mass at St. Michael the Archangel’s on All Saint’s Day.

Discovering family

But as we were eating an Italian breakfast of bread, pastry, cheese and cappuccino that morning, who should arrive in the BnB’s dining room but a man I’d never seen before who looked slightly familiar, named Alfonso Buongiorno. It turned out that Janice had made contact with Alfonso through a friend back in New York, and he was our third cousin! His great grandfather had been Maria Michele’s brother, so we shared great-great-grandparents.

Alfonso shared my cousin Janice’s passion for genealogy, and a generous Italian sense of hospitality. Over breakfast, he shared many things he had learned about our family over a decade of digging, while I took notes like crazy.

Here are the highlights:

Revelations

Buongiornos from both sides of the ocean

The first revelation was that the Buongiornos actually lived in Tuscany before coming to Solofra. But before that, they came from the Netherlands and Spain. In Spain, they were likely Sephardic Jews who had been forced to convert to Catholicism. Many families who did this changed their surnames to names like Buongiorno (which means Good Day) or Bonanno (which means good year) so that they could continue practicing Judaism undercover yet still be able to recognize each other.

Alfonso had done a little research on Troisis as well, and said the name was Norman in origin – which Janice, who had also learned this, had taken to mean Normandy, France. No, Alfonso said, it’s actually Norman as in Vikings, most likely from Norway and Sweden! He said many Troisis were blond and blue-eyed because of this heritage.

So we came to Italy to learn we were actually Spanish Jews, Dutch, and Vikings! This helped explain some of the oddities of the DNA test I took last year.

Leather and gold

For the last 500 years, Buongiornos have been tanners, producing fine-quality leather for overseas clients. A member of the family would live in Naples and act as a liaison to sell the product. They also used to be in the gold business until a king stopped buying their product. Today many of their leather clients are being lost to Chinese mass production and cost undercutting, so the family business is grappling with how to respond to a bit of a crisis. But the family also owns rental properties in Calabria, the southern coast of Italy across from Sicily.

Meeting family

The best part of Solofra was discovering family there! We were invited to Alfonso’s home and met his wife Maria and children Raffaela, 18, and Francisco, 15. We talked genealogy and he showed us a framed family tree he had commissioned. He presented Janice with a binder containing scanned copies of paperwork he had acquired through his own genealogy research, which almost made her drool with anticipation.

The church

The church has a plaque on the outside dedicated to Monsignor Carmine Buongiorno, also called Il Canonico, my great great uncle. Inside there is a chapel set up by the family through an endowment. His gravestone is in the floor of a back room, behind the sacristy.

All Saints Day

We joined the All Saints Day procession of Solofra residents walking in the rain under dark umbrellas down to the town cemetery, preceded by the town band playing mournful tunes. Once there, where you could buy colorful flowers from a roadside peddler, we entered the heavy gates and split up, looking for old Troisi and Buongiorno graves. As we wandered among the raised monuments, we watched people clean their family members’ graves and decorate them with flowers and pictures. A memorial mass was held in the chapel in the middle, and the choir voices drifted through the alleys between the small houses that held multiple family members’ graves. It was fascinating.

Here is Alfonso’s family tree:

Next up — Italy, Part 5: Lexie learns about her heritage

October 29, 2018

Italy, Part 1: Naples

Walking in my Grandfather’s Footsteps

I have one thing to say to my grandfather, Domenico Troisi: Thank you so much for leaving Naples!

A few hours spent around Via Cesare Rossaroll in Naples, Italy, where Domenic lived as a child before immigrating to the United States in 1907, has made me eternally grateful that he came to the United States. This impoverished, filthy, decaying pesthole of a neighborhood, teeming with loud people and louder cars, narrow streets and narrower alleys, ancient buildings with paint peeling off, blowing litter and dog shit everywhere, is beyond depressing.

And this godforsaken alley is where my grandfather lived with his father and two brothers, first in a dingy flat with a shared toilet outside in the hall, and later in a small room separated by a curtain from his father’s “magazino,” or tailoring shop and store combined.

The Memory Book

Domenic described this neighborhood in his 50th Anniversary Memory Book, published in 1970. But his optimistic style does not capture the over-stimulating, exhausting reality of his Neapolitan living situation. Fortunately, my cousin Janice Carapellucci and sister Julie Holm both spent considerable hours and effort researching and digging to locate the home where he lived and the chapels and other landmarks he referenced in his memoir, so that a small group of Troisi cousins could make a pilgrimage to Italy and back to the place from whence we came.

Naples

I’ll be blunt: Naples is no tourist town. It’s working-class, gritty, loud and obnoxious. It reminds me of some parts of NYC and helps me understand how the Big Apple, with so many Italian immigrants, came to develop some of its pushy, in-your-face character. Walking from the train station this morning, first I was hit by multiple flailing elbows while walking the few blocks to get there, then I was almost deafened by a whole line of cars leaning on their horns to express their outrage at some poor sap holding up the line in front of them. This could have happened just as easily on the Lower East Side of Manhattan.

Life off Via Cesar Rosaroll

But back to Domenic. First, his family lived, as his brother D. Paul described in the memoir, in a small apartment: “Our apartment was called a flat, with community toilet out in the hall; the central heating consisted of our cooking stove in which we burned charcoal when we could afford it. We scavenged kindling at the curb market where we picked up discarded boxes and crates.”

Domenic’s alley

After his mother died in 1906, this Spartan lifestyle deteriorated, according to Domenic: “My father gave up the apartment and put what furniture he could salvage (in) back of the store, dividing the room with a curtain across the entire width. He felt that by so doing he could take better care of his three boys. Many of the meals consisted of pans of spaghetti, or paste e faggioli, which were supplied by a restaurant in Porta Capuana in exchange for tailoring and clothes my father made for the family of the restaurant owner. I cooked most of the meals on a small kerosene stove in back of the store.”

He was only 12.

Transported Back in Time

Walking in the neighborhood where Domenic spent his childhood, I felt transported back in time 110 years. It seems like nothing has changed, except that there are cars and motorbikes clogging the streets now instead of horses and carriages and pushcarts.

Domenic’s door

People still live in the same squalid conditions, with the addition of indoor plumbing. Clotheslines with sheets, socks and pants still flutter in the wind from balconies above the alleyways. Homemade Roman Catholic shrines to the Virgin Mary and assorted saints can be found in every alcove, with some large ones dominating street corners, festooned with plastic flowers and Holy Water, better maintained than any of the nearby homes. People still live their lives in public with their doors wide open. You can look in as you walk by and see an extended family sharing one small, dark living space, a small kitchen behind, people hanging outside the door, smoking.

The whole place probably smells better, thanks to modern plumbing and the absence of horse manure in the streets (although there was plenty of dog poop). Otherwise, it’s largely unchanged.

Where We Came From and What It Means

Seeing where you came from can make you even more grateful about where you are now. In the decision by Domenic’s father, Beniamino, to board the Steamship Bulgaria, we dodged a bullet. No wonder a squalid tenement on the Upper East Side, where Domenic, his father and two brothers lived with his uncle’s family after they arrived in New York in 1907, “was almost a luxury for us.”

Domenic, Donato and Dante (L-R)

No wonder Domenic was so driven to get ahead, to get educated, to learn English, to improve his living situations, to build that glorious house on Vernon Avenue in Williamsport, PA, where my mother and her nine brothers and sisters grew up.

Walking in Domenic’s footsteps was physically draining and emotionally exhausting. I’m glad I did it. And I am really, really glad he left.

Grazie, Nonno.

October 5, 2018

The Retirement Itinerary: Europe First

LISA

People are asking, “Why are you in Europe? We thought you were moving to Mexico!”

Well, we are … but not yet. We are not going to Mexico till January 2019.

First, Le Tour de Europe

First, we are launching our adventures with five weeks in Europe — Iceland, Germany, Spain, England, Italy and Greece.

We are visiting family — our oldest child Aryk at Keele U. in Newcastle Under Lyme, England, and then London because why not? (Also got tickets to Hamilton and the Harry Potter Studio Tour.)

We’re visiting Lisa’s brother Pat and his wife Ines and their family in Pinneberg, Germany, outside Hamburg.

First we gotta visit Aryk at uni!

We are spending a few days with the family of our awesome foreign exchange student, Laia, around Barcelona and Reus.

We are joining Troisi (Lisa’s mother’s side) cousins in Italy as part of a family genealogy trip. So we’ll be in Rome, Naples and Solofra.

Then we’re wrapping it all up with a few days in Athens before flying home Nov. 7.

Then, New England

Then, we gotta hang out in Vermont!

We’ll be spending about a month at our vacation home in Ludlow, VT – hopefully taking a couple grandmas and Bob’s sister, Beth.

Next, Holidays with Family
We’ll spend the winter holidays in PA with Bob’s Mom and Lisa’s stepmom, sister Julie and any family we can see.

Finally, Mexico
After Aryk goes back to Uni after Winter Break, the first week of January, we’ll begin the next road trip, taking the cats and Lexie on the road from Pennsylvania to Tlaquepaque, Mexico. The trip is about 37 hours, so we will stop in Nashville and spend a couple of nights in New Orleans on the way.

Stay with us — it’s going to be a blast!