Martin Sheen

Last Friday night I watched my first episode of "Who do you think you are," and I enjoyed the discoveries that President Bartlett, uh, Martin Sheen made in his travels.  He is very lucky to be able to travel all over the world if necessary to find out who his ancestors were, and even luckier they were not criminals. (HA!)  The irony in discovering that one distant grandmother and a distant grandfather were adversaries, and that their ancestors married and were his grandparents or great grandparents or something, was fascinating.  I know they had to shorten the process to fit all the information and the landscape into an hour, but I wish there had been more detail on how his ancestry was found, and who found it for him.

In my own sporadic research I have discovered that both sides of my mother's family seem to have started out in North Carolina, and moved to Kentucky over the years. My maternal grandparents met in Detroit, were married in Indiana, and brought up their family in Chicago (I thought it was only recently that people started moving all over the country throughout their lifetimes).

Even so, I cannot find anything about my father's family. Both grandparents came over from Italy "on the boat," and my aunts and uncles had differing versions of when, with whom, where they got married, etc. The one detail I do have is that my family came from a town near Naples called Saviano. My aunt corresponded with relatives there for awhile, but when they started asking for money, she stopped - or so I'm told.

When I visited Ellis Island in 1999, I found my grandfather's name on the memorial wall there. My brother had purchased the privilege, and had included my grandmother's name, but her name was not printed there. It also turns out that he did not come through Ellis Island, but Philadelphia.  I cannot find a single mention of my grandmother online that isn't associated with her marriage to my grandfather or the birth of many, many children - more than we knew about.

I bought a book at Ellis Island that told you how to research Italian ancestry - there were books about doing the same thing in other countries, too. There were lots of forms in Italian that you could send, and I'm gong to find that book in my storage room and send it to every church in Saviano, and see what happens!