Curiosity, Compulsion, and Coming Full Circle, Part Two
Eating the Sweet Fruits of a Five-Year Passion Project, continued
When we last left off in the first installment of this series, my summer 2019 trip to Italy had just ended, and I had found some promising pieces to my genealogical puzzle, but I still had many steps to take toward claiming my citizenship through the bloodline. I had gotten an initial taste of my paternal Italian ancestral town and the lay of the surrounding land, felt the invigorating flavor of the city of Napoli, and was eager to return to the Motherland the following summer. However, as we all know too well, March of 2020 came, and the ensuing pandemic put an extended halt on traveling internationally. But what an awfully perfect time to devote an untold amount of hours to my passion project. The NY consulate closed down, but thankfully they said they would honor the postponed appointments whenever they reopened (which was not until the spring of 2022, and even then, with a limited staff of one, devoted to citizenship claims!). My original appointment had been scheduled for December of 2020, and I had been waiting two years for that date to arrive since making the appointment in their online system. That feat alone was practically a miracle as there are usually zero appointments available in NY with tons of people checking obsessively. I tried a few times and boom! I will discuss what I did during the year of closure, but as of March 2022, I still didn’t know for certain if my claim would even be considered because of a missing piece. So I had to go strictly on faith and give it my very best shot. Communication from Italian consulates is nothing but the bare bones, and sometimes it is downright cryptic. But in the meantime, I was doing a two-part investigation: pushing forward with the step-by-step collection of the necessary specific documents for the citizenship (naturalization records, vital records, translations of said documents into Italian by a professional, apostilles - authentication of documents for international interfacing) and also growing many generations and branches of my family tree online with the help of several different websites. I was literally adding hundreds of ancestors that I never knew existed. All of these details were helping me understand many aspects of my father’s family (and I also found several generations of my mother’s family lineage from Sicily and Puglia). The main enigma was the one document and its surrounding circumstances that still remained hidden: the marriage of my great grandparents.
During the pandemic, we made the decision that my elderly father should come and live with me (his only child) and my kids - it was not good for him to be totally alone - and this new living arrangement gave me the opportunity to share with Dad all of my intel regarding the ancestors and our original paese in Italy to which I longed to return. He feels this connection on the deepest level, and it is a beautiful thing to witness. I’m also benefitting from our daily “coffee talk” where often he shares priceless memories from his childhood and youth about himself and his family that my busy adult life hadn’t allowed us to share previously. His tales include riding around his neighborhood in Newburgh with his friends on bicycles with a salt shaker in his pocket for the simple pleasure of stealing a ripe, red tomato from a neighbor’s garden and eating it, a snack he still savors today. Or watching my grandfather, like a true Calabrese man, roast hot peppers on the gas stove top burners till they were blackened, then eat them to detox whatever ailment was at hand with a towel draped over his shoulders to absorb the sweat. Or stringing and hanging fresh figs to dry, bought from the local Italian-owned produce market. His early jobs included driving the delivery truck for that produce market back and forth from upstate to NYC, or riding shotgun helping my grandfather sell and service deli meat slicing machines to the local purveyors.
My dad has even asked me to spread his ashes in his grandparents’ Calabrian hometown when he passes on. But ironically, in his 80 years, he has never set foot on Italian soil, being a member of the generation that felt the full effects of assimilation. Even though he recalls his first-generation American father and brothers speaking a Calabrese dialect of Italian to each other, and can still hear his grandmother, when she was ill toward the end of her life, calling out and praying to the saints in that same southern Italian, everyone was trying to be as “American” as possible. Therefore, with the exception of certain customs and family traditions, our “Itallian-ness” was largely moving under the radar. Everyone adopted anglicized versions of their first names and my dad, who was named after his grandfather, became Vincent instead of Vincenzo. When my grandfather Louis (Luigi) married my grandmother Dorothy in NYC in 1940 (she was his second wife named Dorothy by the way, a fun fact I only uncovered through my genealogical research), every person in her large Norwegian-American family refused to attend the wedding because she was marrying an “I-talian” Catholic. They only took her back into the fold once the first grandchild arrived. Luckily their marriage stood the test of time.
So needless to say, this genealogical journey has already offered so much to us in terms of awakening our souls and plugging back together the circuit severed by the journey my great grandparents took on steamships to New York, like so many millions of others, at the turn of the 20th century. Throughout 2020, I continued to dig further for my roots, exhausting all online sites, scouring ship manifest lists for various relatives from a century ago, ordering birth, marriage, and death certificates from various state agencies, reading antique US newspaper articles, and perfecting my skills at deciphering old Italian vital records with the help of a dear friend. Every week, I was able to piece together more of the family puzzle, especially for my great grandparents, or bisnonni, and their extended family. I discovered that we had a green light to a key factor for acceptance regarding Italian / US dual citizenship by descent once I located my great grandfather Vincenzo’s naturalization documents in the local county archives. Through a professional search done in Italy that came up dry, I determined that my great grandparents Vincenzo and Caterina did not marry there, but in America. I drilled into certain census records to find neighborhoods that they and the extended family may have lived (he had three siblings living in Brooklyn and she had one brother in the north end of Manhattan) so that I could find the antique church records that might contain their marriage. I called and emailed several Catholic churches in Brooklyn, learning how the parishes and enclaves were set up over 100 years ago and picking up “breadcrumbs” along the way. Because I put together that by the time my grandfather was born in 1903, the Santagada clan had moved out of Brooklyn to the border of Wilmington, Delaware and Elkton, Maryland which was one of the nation’s largest Little Italys at the time, I was able to contact a group of cousins in the state of Delaware that no one in my section of the family knew existed. All of this happened while we stayed home, with the exception of a brief trip to Wilmington where my son and I met some living cousins and visited the gravesites of my great grandfather’s brother Antonio and sister in law, his sister Clementina and brother in law, and more recent relatives’ graves as well. We built and tended a large vegetable garden at home and even attempted to nurture a little fig tree.
For those interested, a deal breaker in Italian law for Iure Sanguinis (citizenship through blood / descent) is that if your Italian-born ancestor naturalized as a citizen of another country PRIOR to the birth of the next ancestor in your direct line, therefore renouncing Italy as his fatherland, regardless of bloodline, the legal line of Italian citizenship has been broken. They say there are no exceptions to this rule, and if no record of naturalization is found, you must do an exhaustive search which is certified by USCIS (or other similar agencies). Female ancestors’ lineages present an added complication as Italian women were not official citizens there until 1948. Hence they could not legally pass on citizenship to their descendants the way male ancestors could because they did not technically possess it. If this is something you wish to pursue, fear not, there are “1948 cases” being fought and won in Italian courts addressing the discrepancy between male and female ancestors. Just a caveat: the road to Iure Sanguinis is a path woven with both proof of biological parentage as well as traditional customs and legalities that have nothing to do with genetics. Plus, add to the mix a generous dose of notoriously convoluted Italian bureaucracy. Thankfully in my case, my grandfather Luigi was born on American soil in 1903 and his father Vincenzo did not become a naturalized American citizen until 1921. If you’d like a consultation regarding the possibilities of your dual citizenship case, please contact me here!
In the spring of 2021, it became fairly evident (sometimes touch and go) that travel from the US to Europe would be allowed again by the summer if one could prove vaccination for Covid-19, so I decided, against many odds, to plan a trip to Italy with a few bucket list items on the itinerary, with one goal being finding and meeting my living relatives. I will cover how this miraculously unfolded and so much more in the next installment of our story!
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