We went on a roots Pilgrimage

      As we get older, do we care more about our roots?
      I think we do. More and more friends have signed up for ancestry.com, lots of them have checked out the Ellis Island website, many have traveled abroad to visit their ancestral areas and find the villages and homes their people came from.
      Maybe it’s because, as we get closer to the end, we’re more curious about the beginning.
      We didn’t much care, of course, when we were younger, when we were kids. We didn’t want to talk much about the old country and the old ways. And we wonder now why didn’t we ask our parents and our grandparents more about their lives and about their roots?
      Where did the grandparents come from and what happened to them? What was the name of the village and what country was it a part of then?
      So now, like many other people our age, we went on a sort of roots pilgrimage. We flew to Sicily, to Palermo, to find the town my wife’s grandparents were from.
      We had a little information, but not much. A skimpy family tree with a few birthdates and part of a passport. But we did know the name of the town—Partinico, across the mountains and about 45 minutes from Palermo.
      We drove there the other day with a driver/guide who could help us uncover the mystery of my wife’s background.
      We went first to the municipal town hall, but they couldn’t help us. They directed us to the provincial police department, and from there to the demographic office—the place where they keep the records.
      Our guide showed the women there our handwritten family-tree notes, and asked them to look up births at the turn of the century. At first, the local bureaucrats were reluctant; it was work, and not the kind of work they wanted to do. But our guide cajoled and charmed the two women there and finally they got out the giant old ledgers and looked.
      They turned page after page. Finally, they found the name of my wife’s long dead Uncle Salvatore, born in 1902 and his parents, my wife’s grandparents. They found an address.

      We drove off in search of the address, through tiny, winding streets that barely allowed our car to pass.
      And there it was, number 17 Via Sollena. Faded salmon color, some exposed brick, part of it two stories high, one part three stories high. A new modern  door, but the old door was still visible, although blocked.
      No one living there now. This was the house where my wife’s grandparents lived, with the baby who would become uncle Salvatore, whom she never knew. At the age of five months, he went to America, with his mother, a few months after my wife’s grandfather had come over.
      This was the house my wife’s father, born in the US, never saw. The house of his parents.
      An elderly man, a neighbor, walked down the street and put his key into the building next door. Our guide asked him, in rapid-fire Italian, about the house we had found. Yes, the man said, and our guide translated, “that’s the Di Falco property.”
      Di Falco was the last name of the dark-haired, half-Jewish, half-Italian young woman I fell in love with nearly 60 years ago.
      We took pictures, we took videos, we marveled at the building and how it was still standing, still there so many years later. We were all blown away. My wife was giddy with excitement, amazed that all this had happened, that her search had reached fruition. She was more than elated; she was moved.
      This was where my wife’s grandparents— and maybe great grandparents and who knows how many others – had lived 125 years ago.
      My wife had found her roots, no ancestry.com needed.