Digging Up Family Roots in Sicily

Written By Unknown on Minggu, 18 Agustus 2013 | 17.36

Gianni Cipriano for The New York Times; Shorto Family

Top left and upper right: San Pier Niceto, Sicily, the author's ancestral town. Lower right and bottom left: Masseria Santa Mamma, an agriturismo where the author stayed in Sicily. Center: Antonino Sciotto, the author's great-grandfather, in a family photo.

As a writer I've always tended to seek out origins. My first book, about the search for the historical Jesus, was an attempt to get at the "real" story behind my Catholic upbringing. After living in Manhattan for several years, I wrote "The Island at the Center of the World," a book about the Dutch settlement of New Amsterdam, the seed from which New York City grew.

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Gianni Cipriano for The New York Times

Mario Italiano and his son Alberto in San Pier Niceto.

Recently I began considering my family. Among its manifold curiosities is our last name. People always ask me about the derivation of "Shorto." The story I'd heard as a child was that after my illiterate Sicilian great-grandparents settled in my hometown of Johnstown, Pa., they enrolled their children in school and said the name aloud: Sciotto. And the administrator wrote it as he or she heard it.

Anecdotes like that were good enough before, but once I began to take a serious interest in my roots they felt soft. I wanted a better sense of who we were and where we had come from. I'd grown up with some of the atmosphere of the Old Country — the primal aroma of frying meatballs, the smothering embraces of old relatives, whispers of Mafia shenanigans, funny traditions like taping a silver dollar to the bellybutton of a newborn. But really it was an American childhood. There was almost no information about how it all began, about the generation that had emigrated at the start of the 20th century. It wasn't even clear where in Sicily the family hailed from.

Having done a good deal of historical research in my time, I knew that seeking out family roots must be a business filled with vagueness and generally lacking in eureka moments. I cautioned myself that tracking ancestors would be a crapshoot. So my initial objective was modest: to trace the path backward, from Pennsylvania to Sicily.

Maybe it was good to set the bar low, because it didn't take long to get results. Some relatives said they thought our roots were in a town near Messina. My father's cousin's wife, who used to drive the oldest aunts to their doctors' appointments, and thus served as listener, said she thought the ancestral home was called "San Pedro Something." I didn't think we were from Mexico, but took "San Pietro" as a possibility.

I did an Internet search of Sciottos in Sicily. A village called San Pier Niceto, 13 miles from Messina, was among those with the biggest number of hits. My father then suggested I call his cousin Anthony Verone, a retired doctor in New York City. Anthony, it turned out, remembered quite a few things his mother had told him about Antonino Sciotto, my great-grandfather. Once he'd left Sicily and established himself in Pennsylvania, he apparently became Johnstown's first moonshiner; foreseeing the end of Prohibition, he had a scheme in place to start a legitimate distillery, a plan that was cut short by his early death. Did Anthony recall his mother mentioning the name of the Sicilian village our enterprising forebear had come from? He pronounced it straightaway: "San Pier Niceto."

So I had confirmation: the hometown of my father's grandfather. But Anthony told me one thing more. Not only Antonino Sciotto, but Anna Maria Previte, the woman he would marry, had also come from San Pier Niceto. I'd known Previte as a name in the family, but didn't realize that both of these ancestors had emigrated from the same Sicilian village to Pennsylvania coal and steel country.

By now my interest was piqued. A more substantial plan began to take shape, one that involved airplanes.

I'd been to the Italian mainland many times, but never to Sicily. I had no intention of trying to do the whole island. The plan was  that the contingent of our blended family that was able to join me would stay in one place, relax, eat good food and give ourselves some sense of the island's dizzying history. I'd be exploring my family background, but, again, in a limited, roundabout way. As for San Pier Niceto, my idea was to just show up in town and poke around: simply to get a feel for the place my people had come from.

Russell Shorto is the author of the forthcoming "Amsterdam: A History of the World's Most Liberal City."


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