I Finally Met My Nonna

      I never knew my paternal grandmother and barely knew, and didn’t much like, my grandfather, but here I was at the house where they lived as young marrieds in Sicily—and my eyes were filled with tears.

      What had begun months before as an almost academic quest on Ancestry.com [see “We Went on a Roots Pilgrimage” for a different perspective on the quest] had turned into an emotional revelation.

      My dad was born in the states, the youngest of six siblings. He was only two when his mother died of tuberculosis, so he had no memories of her. Strangely enough, my aunts and uncle never talked about her either, even though they would have been old enough to remember their mother.

      So, I didn’t grow up hearing stories of my nonna or of the old country. Only my dad’s oldest sibling was born in Sicily, he and was just a baby when they left in 1902.

      My grandfather had had a massive stroke before I was born, and had lost whatever English he’d learned after they arrived in New York City, along with his mobility. He spoke only Sicilian—and I knew just a few phrases—so we didn’t communicate directly. I knew him only as a gruff, forbidding old man who sat in a chair by the window and ordered my three aunts around. They never married, and he lived with them until the day he died in the 1960s.

      Fast forward to 2025, and my husband and I planned our trip to Sicily. My family had never been aware of any relatives still there, so I don’t know what I hoped to learn by visiting Sicily other than enjoying a surely wonderful trip.

      But I had a vague goal. Gaining even an impressionistic picture of my grandparents’ young lives would be worthwhile. Maybe we’d get an idea of the neighborhood they might have lived in. Maybe we’d find a record of their marriage—anything, I told my husband, that would be evidence they had actually existed in Sicily. Or maybe we’d find the graves of earlier ancestors.

      So, we hired a driver/guide to take us to Partinico, the town near Palermo where my grandparents were born, married, and became young parents. Anthony, our amiable guide, said he’d helped other visitors looking for traces of their Sicilian roots and seemed to know what to do. As we drove to Partinico with him, his confidence and enthusiasm were infectious, but we tried not to get our hopes up.

     When we arrived, we got out of the car, cautiously optimistic and ready for an adventure.

      Little more than an hour into what had begun to feel like a wild goose chase as we went from municipal office to office, we suddenly found ourselves staring in disbelief at a handwritten line in a giant 100-year-old ledger. It recorded the birth in April 1902 of Salvatore, the uncle I never knew, who died at the age of 18.

      Right next to their names was an address:

      Via Solenna, no. 17

      We got back in Anthony’s car and excitedly headed for Via Solenna, guided by Google Maps. When a main through street was closed off because of a funeral, we found ourselves driving in circles, but Anthony was determined. He fearlessly drove his car down narrow one-way streets—the wrong way—with barely a few inches on either side.

      “That’s it! That’s it! That’s your grandparents’ house,” Anthony screamed out, as he turned onto an even narrower street.

      We were all giddy as we hurriedly got out of the car. The three-story stone building, though not currently lived in, appeared to be in good condition and had a modern glass door. Interestingly, the building had three addresses: 13, 15 and 17.

      Perhaps the whole building had been no. 17 at one time. We could see that an old door at no. 15 had been cemented over. There was a little stoop in front of no. 17. Anthony set the stage for my musings by pointing out that my grandparents would have sat there in the evenings.

      For most of my life, my paternal grandmother was little more than a name—and an anglicized one at that: Catherine. Once I had started doing research and found her passport with her signature, she became Caterina to me. But from that day on, Caterina was a real person with a back story.

      I’d finally met my paternal grandmother.

      Standing in front of their home, I could now picture this trim young Siciliana holding her infant son and thinking about leaving for a new life in America. From her passport, we knew that she had made the journey with the baby a few months after my grandfather had left for New York.

      How did she feel about leaving everything she knew to go so far away? Was she afraid? Excited?

      It saddens me that my dad didn’t live to see the house himself or even hear of our discovery. I’m sure he would have felt much closer to the mother he never knew.

      I know I do. I think about Caterina a lot now.

      I think about her difficult life as an immigrant in New York City with six young children. My grandfather would have worked hard as a barber to provide for his family, but in Sicilian tradition, he certainly would have left the childcare to his wife.

      I imagine her speaking broken English with an endearing Sicilian accent. She was only 38 when she died. I imagine her cradling her toddler—my dad—in her arms as her health was fading. Did she realize that he would never remember her?

      It might have comforted her to know that he‘d grow up to be a good man, have a long, happy marriage, raise three daughters and live to the age of 94.

      And that his youngest child would someday stand at that doorstep on Via Solenna more than a century later—and wish like hell she could have really known her nonna.