Desperately Seeking our Dearly Departed ( the beginning )

Great-grandfather John (Giovani) Lavezzi visited my dreams. He brought me a story that caused my thoughts to poke around the debris of busy 18th and 19th Century Italian history, seeking strangers.

Napoleon conquered Italy in 1799 after beginning life as an ex-pat Italian youngster from an Italian island. Over-compensator that he was, he took on the world, making the Italian peninsula an impoverished supplier of goods and services to France. For all that he was French in ambition, he was an Italian family man, installing his family around Europe in positions of nobility wherever an opportunity presented itself.

My ancestor Caterina Lavezzo was born before this new system in 1779, an unknown extra on the world stage. She witnessed upheaval and rapid revolutionary change in her 83 years, but I had no idea that Caterina, dressmaker, and wool weaver, existed.

She is found first in a Ligurian hamlet so tiny it doesn't show on many maps, but Soglio possesses great natural beauty.

The church of San Michaele de Soglio shines, marking the mysteries of life through sacraments, and monitoring commitments to church, faith, and order. She rises out of the mountain and overlooks the valley below, the cemetery lying at her hem, a short walk down on stony steps through Chestnut trees and grape vines, fruit trees on either side. She is an old-lady church, every surface liberally embraced by artwork, religious enthusiasm, and radiant light. She, no doubt, wishes that she were more and better attended, for that is the concern of advancing middle age.

Caterina's family had been here for hundreds of years, living in this and an adjacent town or two, moving little, as is the Italian common way, trusting most the close at hand. Caterina married a man with the same last name as she, a distant cousin perhaps.I searched, wondering what prompted her to seek a home further up the valley. a bit isolated from the original community of familial ties.

When next we find her, it is in Cogno San Savino, a borough of the larger hamlet of Bettola. She is a mother, and a recent widow, giving birth to what is no doubt, her last child, at the advanced age of 34. It was a late pregnancy for the times, which were so dangerous to birthing, snatching women's lives so cruelly that pregnancy was an extreme act of courage. She is attended by a midwife, although her elder son is one of the witnesses, which is allowed by existing rules; the other witness is a shoemaker, a "second neighbor", and their testament provides proof that the child, Gerolamo, my GGGrandfather is born, on June 15, 1813.

The record spurs our ancestral journey through logbooks we later found, over heated objections from the municipio’s “privacy” concerns. We prevailed because we Americani fought to know our inheritance of art, religion, genetics, and history — our testament to one family's life story of loss, hope, and dogged determination.

J. Lavezzi