Reconnecting With My Dad's Family

My Dad's Family 1952

(Top: Dad's 3 sisters, my Mom, my Dad, his 2 brothers

Bottom: My paternal grandparents, my maternal grandmother)

In the spring of this year I was sitting on my sofa thinking about my father who had passed away 18 years ago. I was feeling sad. While my brother and I had grown up surrounded by my mother's family, we had spent precious little time with any of my father's family.  He left his parents and siblings to come to America in 1953. He had an older brother who also came to America in the 1950's, but he settled in California. As I sat there thinking I remembered how my father would write letters to two of his sisters in Sicily and his brother Frank in California. It seemed like every Saturday or Sunday, when I woke up, I would find him sitting at the kitchen table, pen in hand, writing or finishing up the latest letter and getting it ready to put in the mail. My father hated to write, but he never failed to make the effort to stay in touch with his family all the years he was here, up until the year he died in 2000. I was sad to think that after he was gone we lost all contact with his family and now all his siblings were gone too. All that were left were my cousins, but I had no real contact information to reach out to them.

On May 17th, I found a cousin in Sicily, Giovanni (John), on Facebook and reached out to him with a short message. He was happy to hear from me and suggested we arrange to talk via an app called "What's Up" so we could speak and see each other at the same time. My daughter helped to arrange for a call and we did end up talking for a bit. Unfortunately, my Italian was more than a little rusty and, although my cousin was fluent in French, I had also forgotten much of the French I studied over the years. Communicating was difficult. I was grasping for words while my daughter tried to help me by using and online translator to facilitate the conversation. It wasn't a very long call, but we made contact and it gave me some peace knowing my dad would be very happy to know I made the attempt.

In our exchanges, I explained to Giovanni that I was reaching out to him because we lost contact with everyone only dad's side and that my daughter was working on a family tree. He was more than happy to help and started sending my daughter pictures of his family. Then he sent her a series of school pictures of both my daughters taken in elementary school over the years. It brought tears to my eyes to see that he was holding on to pictures of my children that my father had sent to his mother. It reminded me of how my father was always asking me for pictures of the girls to send to his sisters. Then he sent a photo of one of the letters my father had written to his mother near the end of his life. It was Christmas of 1999 I think. He wrote how he was coming to my house for the holiday to watch the girls open their gifts and have dinner. Then he told them that the doctors said he was doing well, but they want to keep seeing him every three months. I know he didn't want to worry them about his illness and I don't even know if he knew how serious things were getting. That was his  last Christmas with us and seeing that letter made me happy to know he was looking forward to being with us and his granddaughters, who he loved more than anything.

I had planned to try to find my cousin, John, in California, but I couldn't locate him on Facebook. It weighed on my mind. Then one day, on October 5th, while I was busy changing my email address, I get an email to my old address. I recognize the email address as that of my cousin, John, but at first I was leery thinking it was some kind of scam or phishing hack. I bit the bullet and opened the email. Sure enough it was my cousin looking to reconnect with me.  Was are the odds of that? It had been so many years since I last saw him. We figured out it may have been back in 1994 when he was here on a business trip and visited us for a few hours. After exchanging a few emails we decided to arrange phone call where we could chat easily and catch up a little bit. He and his sister, Nina, and me and my brother, were all on speaker phone for a nice conversation. Since we all spoke English, this conversation was a little easier all around. All I could think of was maybe our fathers or God had a hand in arranging this connection which had come totally out of the blue and was very unexpected.

Hopefully, I will be able to keep in touch with my cousins and we will have more conversations. They are the only links I have with my Dad's family. I have to say that what struck me was that although we spent very little time with each other in our lifetimes, the family bond and closeness was there as though we had.