Searching for Giuseppe

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My life-long quest to find the Italian birthplace of my great-grandfather

I am searching for two people: Giuseppe and Angela. I have been looking for them for 35 years and I still can’t find them. Sometimes I get so close. But just when I am about to pin them down, they slip away, lost in the mysteries of time.

Giuseppe and Angela are my great-grandparents on my father’s side. They were born in Italy around 1864 just a few years apart. They both grew up somewhere in Italy, in different towns. Each left with their families for reasons of their own around 1888. He was 25 and she was 23.

They met a few years later, fell in love (presumably), and got married on October 3, 1893, in Saint Francis Catholic Church in Hoboken, New Jersey. They had their first child together, Luigi, exactly 9 months later on July 9, 1894.

Italian citizenship by descent

The descendants of Luigi are lucky. They can obtain Italian citizenship by descent through their great-grandfather Giuseppe. Giuseppe is also my great-grandfather but I can not get Italian Citizenship through him because he naturalized before my grandfather, Francesco, was born.

This is so frustrating to me! Did Luigi have any children? Did one of them start studying Italian and develop a passion for everything Italian like I did? I doubt it.

When I first learned that you can establish citizenship in Italy through your paternal great-grandfather, I was ecstatic. I dived deep into my genealogy to gather the documents to submit to the Italian Consulate.

Unfortunately, it did not take me long to stumble upon the one document that interrupted my Italian family bloodline: Index to the Petitions for Naturalization. Dated December 19, 1896, six years before my grandfather was born.

It turns out you can also get Italian citizenship by descent through a female ancestor. This is very difficult and you need to hire a lawyer because it involves proving your case in court based on the “1948 cases”. Italian law says that if your maternal Italian ancestor had their child before 1948 you are out of luck. This was recognized as discriminatory so this can be challenged in court. But it sounds very expensive and will take years Maybe I will try this someday.

Genealogy research is an emotional rollercoaster

Genealogy is a slippery slope. It is filled with so many hopeful paths. You are going down one of them and everything is fitting perfectly. You are so close to finding out the exact name of the town where your great-grandfather was born in Italy when a niggling doubt enters your mind.

Something is not adding up. You want to ignore it and go with this beautiful story you have created out of census records, birth certificates, passenger lists, and family anecdotes that show where your family came from in Italy.

This has happened to me many times searching for Giuseppe. All my life growing up I clung to the scant stories knew about my grandfather and his father from Italy.

This is all I had to go on: Giuseppe came from northern Italy and he was a boscaiolo, or lumberjack. He emigrated to New York and had my grandfather and aunt Lena. I never met Aunt Lena, but she used to send us dolls for Christmas. Then my great-grandmother died and he put my grandfather and his sister Lena in an orphanage for several years.

Later Giuseppe got married to someone else and got them out of the orphanage. When my grandfather Francesco, was 16, he ran away and joined the Navy. Then he got married to my grandmother and had my father who later had me. And then my grandfather died when I was four years old.

I remember crying so hard at four years old for this Italian grandfather that I hardly knew. It was like somehow I knew that later in my life I was going to become an Italianista, someone super passionate about Italian, and that I would never be able to ask him questions about his mother and father and where they came from.

Alomost finding Giuseppe

The first time I got close to solving the mystery was during my year in Italy when I was a junior in college. My Italian boyfriend and I were coming back from an excursion to the Alps. We stopped at Lago di Garda for a bite to eat. Right next to where we parked was a rosticceria, a shop that prepares and cooks a variety of hot and cold dishes. The rosticceria was called Forelli e Chiarini.

I was ecstatic. This was the first time I had found anyone in Italy with the last name Forelli. We went into the shop and asked them where the Forelli family was from. They told us they came from a little town called Fiavé, only 15 km back up the mountain.

We drove back up to Fiavé. We went into the graveyard, and sure enough, all the Forellis were there. As we were looking around, a priest came out to talk to us. I told him my story and he took my name and address and said he would do some research for me. We also met two living Forellis, two sisters that had a coffee shop in town. I explained that we might be related, but somehow they didn’t feel like family.

When I was back home in Madison, WI, I received a letter on thin airmail paper from the priest. He has traced the Forelli line back to the 1500s. I have held onto this fragile piece of paper all these years. A key piece of evidence in my search for Giuseppe.

Twenty-three years later, I was staying in Cittadella for a week for a job interview for a school. I told my host my story. Cittadella and Fiavé are both in Trentino-Alto Adige. Both my host and I felt certain that Giuseppe was from this region. It all made perfect sense and it was my destiny to move to Cittadella and teach fifth grade.

My family and I were all set to move to Cittadella for this job. But during the planning of an international move with a family, I learned that you need a visa to work in Italy. Unfortunately, there were no more work visas available that year (2010). So I looked into the possibility of gaining dual citizenship through Giuseppe, but it was impossible because he had naturalized before my grandfather was born. So I was disqualified.

We decided not to move to Cittadella. This broke my heart but it just seemed too risky with young children. The pay was going to be dismal and it just didn’t make sense to live there without a visa. They had told me that if my husband did not also have an income, that “moriremmo di fame“. We would die from hunger. Of course, I told them that my husband had a thriving web business. He did have a web business, but he didn’t have any paying clients. So common sense prevailed and we stayed home.

Nati in Trentino

My host, Fabio, kept in touch with me all these years. I am friends with him on Facebook. From time to time he sends me information about Giuseppe. Last summer he sent me a link to Nati in Trentino. This is a website that traces ancestors born in Trentino between 1815-1923. Sure enough, Giuseppe was born in Fiavé. This confirmed everything the priest had recorded in the fragile airmail letter.

The only problem is that if this Giuseppe were really my great-grandfather, then he would have been 70 years old when he had my grandfather. So as much as I wanted to cling to this story, this is not the right Giuseppe. Maybe he is the father of my Giuseppe? I have found no evidence for that.

My search for Giuseppe and Angela continues. I feel like if I could just see their marriage certificate it might show where they were born in Italy. For ten years I have been trying to make it to the Family Search Library to look up their marriage certificate on microfiche. Ten years ago, I was about to go, but we were in the middle of a move (almost to Cittadella – a charming Medieval walled city; but, alas, instead moved to Rosarito – a beach town south of Tijuana) so I put it off and then life went on for a while. Now again I have been meaning to go, but the libraries are closed because of the pandemic.

Their marriage certificate is my last hope of ever finding where Giuseppe and Angela came from in Italy. Maybe I should just leave it alone. Right now I still have hope of finding Giuseppe. But the marriage certificate might be just another dead end and as vague as all the other documents and simply say they came from the Kindgom of Italy. However, finding where my great-grandparents came from in Italy is a desire so strong that part of me will always be searching for Giuseppe.

I originally wrote Searching for Giuseppe on Medium on May 23, 2021.