Fra Noi Embrace Your Inner Italian
A newsman once interviewed Don Hewitt, who ran “60 Minutes” as executive producer for decades. (He was Mike Wallace’s boss!) He asked Don why “60 Minutes” was a runaway success and most of the other news magazine shows were not. Don answered rather quickly, “It’s four simple words. Tell Me A Story.”
Many of us who research our family tree can get caught up with the nuts and bolts of finding the basic vital facts of our family members: When and where were they born? When and where were they married? When and where did they die? These six basic facts are necessary for our research.
However, many lecturers on genealogy research spend a lot of time reminding us that a family tree with the facts on it, though it is a good thing, is not enough. You need to take the facts you find, look for additional facts not found on the standard vital records, and try to create a story that will grab the listener much more than a plain old chart.
When you meet the old relatives at a family get-together, they may have stories about the good old days. They typically don’t sit at the dinner table and say, “I was born June 15th, 1943.” Not very exciting. They might say, “Did I ever tell you about how I saved my platoon in Da Nang?” Then they roll off a story that gives you chills. The story has probably been told dozens of times to many people. So even if your relative is not a writer, or a gifted raconteur, they can put you in the place where they were, and make you wonder “What would I have done if it were me?”
Many of our immigrant ancestors are already long gone, and they cannot tell the story of the boat trip, Ellis Island, struggling to feed the family, getting the children a good education, and the success they achieved thanks to their parents’ sacrifice. When someone is no longer able to tell their own story, those of us who research family history need to put a story together ourselves.
Let’s presume that your many relatives do not know all the facts, and you show them the chart with the names, relationships, dates and places. Some of your relatives who are “number” people will look at the birth year of the mother, and the birth year of their child or children, and remark “Wow she was 42 when she had her last child!” Or, conversely, “Wow she was 16 when she had her first child.” Or “Wow, she had 14 children.” Or “Wow, six of the children died before they grew up.”
Without even trying, the reader of the chart has made a small story out of what they see. It tells us about life long ago, when they realize that our great-grandma had many children over a long period of time, and perhaps lost several of them. How did that lady stay so strong through constant pregnancy and so much tragedy?
What seems to hook the listener is that since life has changed so much in only a few generations, it is a major difference between the life we live today, and the lives our grandparents endured so many years ago. Who has many children today? Who emigrated from across an ocean? Some do, but very few. People can think about how they would have coped with the many travails they never experienced themselves. “That could have been me. I don’t know how I would have handled that.” A good story makes you think this way, and it makes the story riveting.
How should you construct a story when the participants have gone to their final reward? Start by look for the paper trail they left behind and gather facts. The story needs to come from your imagination, but uses the facts as the guideline. The facts are essential. You could make up a story about an old grand-uncle shot Kaiser Wilhelm of Germany and was acclaimed as a national hero. However, you will look foolish when someone with a small amount of historical knowledge points out that the Kaiser abdicated and lived in exile and was never shot! Making up a story about completely fictional people in fictional situations is ok. Making up a story about factual people, especially relatives, in improbable situations, is most definitely NOT ok. Nobody will believe any other story you tell, because you made up that whopper about Uncle Gus shooting the Kaiser!
If you have some facts but not enough to create a riveting story, what do you do? The first step is to simply create the story. What made our ancestors different from us? What did they do for a living? Were they drafted into the Armed Services, did they volunteer, or neither? Did they come to America and return home and come back again? Put yourself in the shoes of your ancestor. If you can do that, you can make your listeners put themselves there, because they probably have more in common with you than they do with someone who was born 120 years ago. Even though you never met the person whose story you are telling, you are a character in this little play because your reaction to being in their situation is what makes it personal.
I love telling stories, sometimes even without being asked to! I have been asked “What is the most interesting thing you have found in all your years of genealogy?” I found that 16 generations of ancestors were all peasant farmers, then some descendants left Italy. The immigrant had little education and struggled to hold jobs as a laborer. The immigrant’s children graduated high school and got good paying jobs and owned their own homes. The grandchildren earned college degrees and live in nicer homes. From the moment they came to America, the trajectory was onward and upward!
“Which ancestor had the toughest time in America?”
Great-grandfather Carlo Liturri had the worst time here, and the shortest. He came over from Italy and was immediately brought to the hospital where he died on the very day he arrived in New York. He is buried in an unmarked common grave in Brooklyn, a city he had no intention of living in.
“How come great-grandma had only five children?”
She had ten altogether. Two sons died of tuberculosis in their late teens. Three other children died in infancy. Had they all survived and married and had children of their own, our family would be twice as huge as it already is!
“How did great-grandma learn that her husband had died?”
She did not come over with him. She had to manage the family while he came over to find work, which of course did not happen because he died right away. Someone sent a copy of the death certificate to the town Mayor who must have told great-grandma. Now she has four children and no one is going to send money from America. She either found a new husband, or one was arranged for her. She married great-grandpa, then he came to America to earn money to feed the four children that were hers, and one new one that was on the way when he left for America. It took seven years for the rest of the family to come to Chicago from Italy, so great-grandpa met his first son for the very first time when the boy was almost seven!
All of the above stories are based on facts I found during my research. Nobody told me these stories. In fact, the details that passed down the family were sketchy at best. I’m certainly not against oral history. It is important for the living to record their stories for their descendants. As stories are told over the decades, details can be forgotten or lost or distorted, or downright made up! But when you can back up a story with facts, it makes it that much more compelling.
Some of you might wonder whether it is ok to tell a story where you have some facts, but you really don’t know all the details. In many cases, you cannot know exactly how, when, where or why things happened. I really do not know how great-grandma got word that her husband had died. Obviously he didn’t have time to write to her. Who could have known that he died? Even fellow passengers on the ship would not know that he died once he was hospitalized. The relative or friend in Chicago who knew he was coming was probably baffled that no one ever showed up. Hospital personnel would have known because he was a patient for a few hours, but no one would have been with him because he came alone. I have to surmise that either a fellow passenger went to the hospital with him and wrote to the town. It is also possible that since the hospital was where Ellis Island passengers had to go, they had a system for notifying next of kin. The facts that I have are 1) he died the day he arrived as shown on the passenger list; 2) the New York death certificate copy was sent to Triggiano and appears in the Triggiano “out of town” death records for the following year. 3) Great-grandma remarried in 1907, listed as a widow. The rest of the story is not made up, but takes into account the way things must have been back in the early 20th century. No cell phones or long distance phone calls. No airplanes. Just letters sent in the mail, by boat. How long would it have taken to reach her? Weeks or maybe months. Since no copy of such a letter exists (or I just haven’t found the relative who has a copy) we have no way to be 100% certain. What we do know is that someone somehow notified her. As the story creator, your job is to patch together the historical limitations of technology of the time and create a timeline for how long it took for her to be notified. Is it 100% accurate? Of course not. It’s a reasonable estimate. That timeline is part of the story. Today, we post on Facebook within a short time after a loved one dies or call the immediate family as soon as possible. We may even know they are ill via another social media post, and we are not as surprised when the person passes away. How could we react if we found out 2-3 months after the fact that our spouse has died, with no warning, and is buried in an anonymous grave in a city no one in the family lives in? At the same moment, we also know that not one thin dime is going to be sent home to feed the family. Again, if we can place ourselves in the position of the long-deceased ancestor, we are pulled into the story by thinking “What if I had to go through this?”
Don Hewitt retired in 2004 and passed away in 2009 after 36 years of selecting three or four stories every week on 60 Minutes. After five different seasons as the number one ranked television program, 138 Emmy awards (yes 138) and 20 Peabody Awards for 60 Minutes correspondents, and an autobiography entitled “Tell Me A Story,” he must know what he’s talking about!
