Briana's Genealogical Journey, Pt. 1

Recently I was asked what part of Italy my ancestors (on my dad’s side) were from, and I was incredibly embarrassed to say that I didn't know. After asking my dad, I learned that my ancestors hail from Naples and Sicily. However, I still wasn’t particularly interested in knowing more; I guess I just wasn’t fully convinced that knowing about the origins of my family would have any impact on my life today. Honestly, it’s difficult to explain what I thought about my family history because for so long I hadn't thought much about it at all.

Now that I work in an environment that is heavily involved in genealogical research, I find myself fascinated by people who spend hours collecting not just general knowledge about their ancestors, but actual first-hand accounts and details from primary sources. My interest has been piqued, and I've decided to take my own genealogical journey.

When I got started I realized that I really knew nothing about genealogical research and wasn’t sure where to begin. Being the bookish person that I am, my first instinct was to go to the library and check out as many books on genealogy as I could carry. Pretty much everything I’ve read so far begins with the same advice: Before going into some rabbit hole of internet research, ask your living relatives about their lives! While some relatives might not be ridiculously forthcoming with personal stories and information, at the very least they will most likely provide the names and locations of their parents, siblings, cousins, etc.

So I went ahead and started by asking my dad about his family, explaining to him that I wanted to start tracing our ancestry. Turns out, a lot of my dad’s cousins had already started off on similar journeys and were more than willing to provide a slew of findings they’d already pulled from various resources! I again felt a little embarrassed: Here was all this information and all these interesting stories about people who were related to me, and for some reason I’d never bothered to ask about them. I guess I kind of assumed that if there was anything interesting in my ancestry, someone would have already told me by now. But as the books and articles I read about genealogy confirmed, a lot of people just don’t see the urgency or importance of rattling off a bunch of stories about their past to their children or relatives, and so the stories end up getting lost… unless someone asks!

Now my goal is to organize all of the information that I already have and slowly start tracing individual ancestors. I haven’t made much progress yet, but I’ll continue providing updates in this blog. To be continued…