After living through cancer, you want to take advantage of every opportunity you can so….
Inspired by family lore shared in my childhood about my ancestors coming by boat to New Orleans from Sicily, I’ve spent more than 25 years on a journey to understand my family background. As a kid, these stories meant relatively little to me, but somewhere along the line I became intrigued about what that journey must have been like for a 9 year old (my G-Grandmother) and a 14 year old (my G-Grandfather) traveling without their parents on a big ship from Italy to America. The story seemed so amazing that to be honest, I wondered if it was all true.
To begin my research, I purchased the premium package on Ancestry.com to access international records but could find no proof of either of them existing before they showed up in US census records.
Finding myself stuck, I turned to a genealogist Rich Venezia (http://Richroots.net) that specialized in Italian ancestry. It was through him that I learned about anglicized names, Italian naming conventions, and how to figure out what their likely Italian names were. On June 1, 2018 I engaged his services to find them in the buried records in Italy. On October 19, 2018 I had my G-Grandfathers birth certificate in hand straight from Cefalu – yes that Cefalu, the place made famous recently by White Lotus season 2.
It was about this time that my researcher suggested we investigate whether he ever naturalized; if he hadn’t then dual citizenship in Italy would be possible. We found out in November that he had not, and so my Italian Citizenship project was born.
Citizenship wasn’t an easy path because my Italian citizenship derived from the female line. Prior to 1948, women could not pass citizenship. In my case citizenship passed from G-Grandfather to Grandmother to father. My dad was born in 1947 meaning that I had to hire an attorney to file a 1948 case in Rome.
In late October 2018, I hired Antonio Rossi to handle my case. I started the long process of collecting all the records from the line of people that I descended from including all birth, death, and marriage records. It took several years to collect all the documents, and to have them translated to Italian, apostilled, and packaged up to ship to Italy.
On January 13, 2021, my case was filed in Rome and was heard on May 10, 2022. I, along with my kids, were recognized as Italian Citizens on May 11, 2022. The journey wasn’t over, but it was close. There were bureaucratic hurdles to jump like having all the vital records transcribed in Cefalu, getting registered in the AIRE (registry of Italian citizens living abroad), and finally applying for our Italian passports.
On my birthday, July 28, 2023, we received the greatest gift from my Italian ancestors – the passports showing that we can freely travel to and live or work in any EU country without need of visa or keeping track of the days. So many opportunities have opened up for my kids that I did not have in my young adult life, and it all started with two young people being brave enough to board that big ship and journey out into the unknown.
If you have Italian roots and want to learn about how to start this process, feel free to DM me.
