My daughter Megan and her husband Bryan traced their family roots and a newer friendship through Europe in 2009. Here is the story that was published September 16, 2010, in The Orange County Register:
There was an unexplainable silence in the car as we left Ghisalba. We had everything to say, but where to start? All we could do was laugh.
We had spent the past 36 hours with a group of Italian strangers – eating their food, sleeping in their beds and being chauffeured in their cars. Ghisalba had been a whirlwind, and we were still in a jet lag haze. The whole experience seemed dreamlike.
Ghisalba was the first stop on our three-week-long European tour. Unlike past journeys to see the famous sights, this trip took us beyond the tourist zones to the rural and charming lands of our ancestors.
Like many Americans of European descent, we have mixed ancestries, with some lines tracing back to early English settlers and others connected to relatives who emigrated later from Germany, Ireland, Italy and Croatia.
In recent years we have taken an interest in understanding our roots, starting with asking our grandparents questions, looking through old photographs and documents, and even building a surprisingly deep family tree on Ancestry.com. While creating our family tree was helpful in understanding our lineage, the stories and information that had been passed down made the Old Country feel within reach. Inspired by what we had learned, our quest became to visit the places our ancestors came from and meet the distant family still living there.
ITALIAN ROOTS
We launched the quest in the summer of 2009. After landing in Milan, Italy, we made a quick stop at breathtaking Lake Como before meeting the Iottis of Ghisalba. Ghisalba is a tiny town in the countryside surrounding Milan. It is the place that Bryan’s maternal great-great grandfather left for America around 1900.
Bryan’s family had lost touch with their Italian counterparts decades ago and it wasn’t until 2000 that those ties were restored when Bryan’s great-uncle Vince did some ancestral research. After writing the mayor of Ghisalba to see if there were any Iottis still living there, he was put in touch with some cousins, and in 2001 he made his first trip to meet them. To his surprise, the relatives were not only delighted to have him but also had been wondering for years what had happened to the American branch of the family. They explained that a letter sent in 1931 with $20 enclosed was the last they had heard from the American Iottis.
The family treated him “like royalty” and they have kept in touch ever since. Hearing Vince talk so fondly about these relatives made us eager to meet them.
Before our arrival, Bryan’s distant cousin Luca, whose broken English was on par with our terrible Italian, explained that we shouldn’t get our hopes up because “Ghisalba – no bella.” He informed us that Bergamo is indeed “bella” and he would take us to this larger and more beautiful neighboring city to see the sights. Even though he didn’t speak much English we could tell that Luca was extremely talkative and had learned most of our language from watching American movies. He spoke mostly in simple Italian and we somehow managed to understand him with the elementary Italian we had learned while studying in Rome in 2005.
When we met the family, they all appeared very excited to see us. They were more than welcoming, insisting on paying for everything and having us sleep in their master bedroom while they relocated. They took us to a local pizzeria, cooked us meals and took us on a town tour visiting all the living Iottis and even the deceased in the town cemetery.
Bryan at an Iotti grave.
They also took us to see the castles and nearby towns in the countryside and the beautiful city of Bergamo. Everyone was warm, and despite the language barrier we somehow kept the conversation and laughs flowing the entire time. Even though the Italian and American sides have been separated for generations, we could tell they were cut from the same cloth.
Upon departure, we were given a packed lunch, a bottle of wine and custom mixed CDs for the road. Our next stop was picturesque Lake Bled, Slovenia, where we met Megan’s parents and sister before heading south to Dubrovnik, Croatia. In Dubrovnik, we would be meeting up with Megan’s grandfather, who would introduce us to his Croatian cousins. It would be a whole family event, with Megan’s parents, sister, aunt, uncle and first cousin all in attendance.
CROATIAN COUSINS
This was the first trip to Croatia for everyone in Megan’s family except for her grandfather. We were first introduced to our Croatian counterparts on the glimmering marble streets of Old Town Dubrovnik. Jutting into the Adriatic, Dubrovnik rises from the sea, its fortified walls stretching around charming white stone buildings with distinct red tile roofs. In stark contrast to our Italian relatives, practically every Croatian relative spoke flawless English, making communication effortless.
We stayed in Dubrovnik for one week with Megan’s parents in a rented apartment with a commanding view hundreds of steps above Old Town. We made the trek many times and found ourselves continually running into relatives in the compact district. This turned out to be very useful for insider tips on things to do and see.
Megan’s American first cousin Aerin and Croatian third cousin Nina, both 11, made friends the day we took a boat trip to nearby islands. Nina’s English was perfect and she made a wonderful tour guide, even sharing a helping of Croatian history along the way. One night Nina’s older sister Doris, 20, took us out to the bars where she typically spends the evenings with her friends. Megan’s 20-year-old sister, Michelle, said it was remarkably similar to how she spends evenings with friends back home.
On our last day we went out to the old seaside village where Megan’s great-grandmother was born. It was stunningly beautiful, sitting atop cliffs high above the clear blue waters of the Adriatic Sea. The people still there appeared to live a slower-paced life, inhabiting 250-year-old stone houses and tending to vegetable gardens while shepherd-less sheep wandered the only tiny road into the village.
Being surrounded by such serenity, simplicity and beauty it is hard to imagine why anyone would willingly leave. We certainly wanted to stay longer.
GERMAN FRIENDS
Our next stop was the city of Ulm in southern Germany, where Megan’s friend Martina and her fiance, Wolfi, hosted us for the night. Megan and Martina met online a few years ago while Megan was taking a stab at learning German. They found each other on myhappyplanet.com, where people around the world can help each other learn languages. Martina helped Megan improve her German a little bit, but mostly they used Skype to chat in English. We spent only one day with them, but it was another unique experience.
Martina and Megan in Ulm
Martina and Wolfi were very similar to us – in age, economic status and interests. Seeing how they lived was like seeing how we would be living if we lived in Germany. We had a great time with them. They generously opened their home, fed us and insisted on paying for a dinner of the region’s traditional giant pancakes and tickets to climb the tallest church in the world – the Ulm Minster.
All three experiences were different and wonderful. We had such a good time that we are eager to expand our knowledge of our family tree and explore the possibility of meeting more distant relatives in other faraway lands. Fortunately for us, not all European connections were lost, making our journey relatively easy. We believe that with a little work we could even repair some broken connections to Ireland. It may be a challenge, but we know the discovery and experience of seeing where you came from is rewarding.
Megan and Bryan are a married couple who live in Laguna Beach. The submitted their story as part of the Register’s ongoing “Reader Report” series. They chronicle their travels at the website twostepsfar.com.