In 1997 I turned 30, and suddenly felt like a real adult. I have always had a very close family, and to us family is everything. I think turning that new decade made me take stock and wonder about my place in the world and my family, what my future might bring and what legacy I might be building.
I realized I didn’t know very much about how I came to be, but one little fact I had always found intriguing was that my mother’s mother was born to Polish immigrants in a small town in Pennsylvania in the same county as my father was born to Italian immigrants, less than 25 miles away in another small town. I always thought that was a real “small world” kind of thing, especially since they both had to end up in Chicago, where my mother and I were born. Then I think it through further and imagine how the other families converged, and my mind starts to wonder. What are the chances of all those things happening? What were the odds that my parents would meet?
In other words, how did I get here?
So I began researching my family history.
I started by interviewing my parents, aunts and uncles, in person, by phone and by mail. I asked all the basics – names, dates, locations of births, deaths, etc. At that time I could only name a couple of my great-grandparents. I was surprised to discover so many things I hadn’t known before, things that were just sitting there – in that previous generation’s cache of knowledge – and was simply untapped. I guess, no one had asked. But looking back on it now, I am a bit surprised by how little they knew. I guess they’d never asked either.
Names, faces and stories get lost through each generation, and if we don’t seek, we don’t learn.
Today I have recorded over 2,000 family relatives, traced both my mother’s family and my father’s family back to the 1600s, including reaching twenty-six of my 5x-great grandparents and eight of my 6x-great grandparents, and a 7x-great grandfather, namely Antonio Lucia, b ca 1670-1685. (That’s a great-great-great-great-great-great-great-grandfather.)
This site used to contain a lot details from my family tree software, but maintaining that became rather difficult, and after the site broke for the second time, I decided I needed to simplify, and turn it primarily into a blog. My family tree is available on Ancestry.com, but lot of information will be posted here, as well. I hope to use this as a repository for all my genealogy research, in order to share new discoveries and information with family far and wide.
If you’re on Ancestry, you’ll find my tree here.
Don’t hesitate to reach out!