Growing up, I only had the privilege of knowing my grandparents. My great-grandparents were lost to the ages well before I was born. So was all their history – their parents’ names, the towns they were born in, the stories of their journeys to America.
Not knowing who these people were has always haunted me. Their lives and their joys and struggles were meaningful and it simply wasn’t right to let them be swallowed up by time.
When I was 12 years old, one of my school assignments was to create a family tree. I wrote down what little information my grandparents were able to recall and turned it in to my teacher. The tree was awful bare and, at first, my teacher thought I didn’t bother to do my work. I saved that assignment in my little box of treasures and all these years later, I still had the tree – my only link to who I am.
Last year I decided it was time to give that tree some roots. Time and patience were on my side – information was not, but the internet is a magical and wondrous place…
I have traveled back 250 years and found that my roots run deep. There, in the pages of some old Sicilian records books, I found my family and that connection I’ve been looking for, for so long. Now they are not hidden away.
Welcome home.
The Farmers in the Dell 