(I wrote the original version of this essay at the request of Sal Lagattuta for inclusion in his Mezzojuso Heritage web site.)
Except for a brief stay when he was only one year old, my father never saw the town where his ancestors had lived, as I now know, for hundreds of years. Yet, he must have mentioned it to me more than once as I was growing up, for many years later, I can hear him pronouncing its name,"Medz-ah-YOOZ," and explaining that it meant "half-way down," because it was built on the side of a high mountain. (Many years later, I learned that that was not the derivation of the name at all. But his explanation created such a strong impression, and, judging by photos of the town, is so apt, that I enjoy recalling it, anyway.) I never saw the name written, and my grandparents, who had grown up there, never spoke to me about the place. My only knowledge of it was the strange-sounding, possibly mis-heard, syllables: "Medz-ah-YOOZ."
For many years, I didn't think about the town. My teens, twenties, and thirties were taken up by more urgent concerns, especially that of fitting in with my "American" friends and environment. I didn't - preferred not to - think about my Italian, much less my Sicilian, roots. Only in the twilight of my forties, after my father and mother had both died, did it begin to seem that researching those roots might be worthwhile. That strange-sounding name came back to me, and I wondered whether such a place existed, and whether it really was the home of my Sicilian ancestors. Browsing in the genealogy section at the public library, I found an old gazetteer. Under M, there it was: "Mezzoiuso," as the official sources spell it. Just seeing the name in print was like a bolt from the blue, confirming that the odd-sounding syllables that had persisted in my memory had a reality on a far-away island intimately bound up with my own origins.
Around the same time, I discovered online genealogy bulletin boards and made the acquaintance of a number of remarkable and generous people researching their Italian roots. One of them, John Cusimano, was the first to tell me about the Arberesh villages and heritage of Sicily. One of the milestones in my search was the day he sent me copies of the telephone directory listings for the town of Mezzojuso. In these mundane-looking pages I had my first encounter with my name spelled with an accent over the "o." Just seeing that and the town's other surnames excited me beyond reason. Later, the directory pages proved invaluable in deciphering unfamiliar names found in the civil records.
In early January, 1993, I made a fateful trip to a nearby LDS Family History Center to see whether, by chance, the catalog made any mention of my obscure little town. To my amazement, there were seventeen rolls of microfilm for Mezzojuso! Sure that I must be dreaming, I ordered two rolls of film, one of birth records and one tantalizingly called "Memorandum." When the films arrived, I rushed to examine them. The "Memoranda" seemed to be marriage banns, but they proved to be too much for my inexperienced eyes, minimal Italian, and as-yet undeveloped patience. I turned to the birth records, "Atti di nascita," with greater success. I was fortunate to start with years (1859-1860) in which the births were recorded on pre-printed forms and indexed alphabetically. There were several Schirò babies born in the first year I checked. I was immediately hooked on the pursuit of possible ancestors in these records. Reading the records presented many challenges: the peculiarities of Italian orthography, poor or inconsistent handwriting styles, water-damaged or, worse, missing pages (even missing years).... But the joy and excitement each time I found a possible ancestor (or even a friend or acquaintance of a possible ancestor!) made the effort seem worthwhile. At first, the puzzles were numerous: what was that letter that looked like a large bird taking flight? (It turned out to be the letter "R.") Is that number a 2, a 7, a 4, or a 1? (I'm not always sure, even now.) Is the person's name Giuseppe or Giuseppa? Sometimes even the most obvious surname, my own, could be camouflaged by the clerks' habit of writing its initial letter as simply a diagonal slash, rather than what we call an S-curve. The longer I worked on the films, the more I felt as if I "knew" those families and the town of 135-175 years ago. The native surnames became so familiar that at some point I realized that I almost always could tell whether someone was a resident of Mezzojuso or one of its outlying frazioni or an "out of towner." For example, the surname Perniciaro is quite common in Mezzojuso, but the name Pernice is not. In my experience, the latter always indicated a resident of Fitalia (officially, Campofelice di Fitalia), a frazione of Mezzojuso. Certain names were so unusual (e.g., Don Sigismondo Xhanino) that they stuck in my memory and made me wonder about the flesh and blood that stood behind them.
Days and months at the microfilm reader became years, and I came to feel so close to the lives of those mid-19th Century townspeople that I could not suppress a happy smile when I found the birth records of twins (even triplets once), or concern when I encountered "projetti," illegitimate children whose births were attested by the custodian of the "ruota" and whose parents were listed only as "ignoti" ("unknown"). I remember well the most difficult week I spent on this research: working through the death records of the terrible year 1837. That year contained more than twice the usual number of deaths, probably resulting from one of the periodic epidemics of cholera that swept through Sicily in former times. The two sessions I spent reading those records of woe seemed like a month. Many of the records contained only blank spaces for such vital information as the birthplace or the names of the parents of the deceased. Either the clerks were too exhausted by the tragedy to even complete the forms, or there was no one still living who could provide the information. Whatever the reason, these stark pages added to my sense of the devastation that occurred during that one year. With a great sense of relief, I finished with 1837 and went on to 1838. This experience gave me a sense of how precarious my ancestors' lives could be in the beautiful little town. It gave a hint of why, half a century later, they could have been moved to forsake their homeland for the promise of an unknown America.
I have now finished my first look at Mezzojuso's birth, marriage, and death records. The extracted records constitute a sizable database, but this project is nowhere near completion. (No genealogy project is ever completed. Mine is no exception!) There are still the Memoranda, the Allegati, the Riveli.... For the time being, however, I've left off Mezzojuso to research the long-awaited films from my mother's home town of Pietragalla, Potenza. At some point I will return to Mezzojuso. I know my first glance at the first film will feel like a homecoming. Some day, with luck, I hope to actually set foot in the little town half-way up the mountain. I'm sure that, when I do, many of the people I meet will seem familiar. After all, I've followed the lives of many of their ancestors from birth to death.
Photo Tour of Mezzojuso