My Long Awaited Adventure

I am sitting at the Denver airport waiting for my overseas flight to Italy.  My paternal grandfather’s family is from the Le Marche region of Italy.  Most people have never heard of it.  In fact, it is one of the least visited areas by American tourists.

Le Marche, is a region in eastern Italy between Apennine Mountains and the Adriatic Sea.  Le Marche is divided into five provinces: Ancona, Pesaro, Urbino, Ascoli Piceno, Fermo and Macerata.  The largest town is Ancona and it houses the regions airport and it is home to the second largest Italian port on the Adriatic Sea.  The region boasts several beach side towns that draw many Italian vacationers in the summer months.

My great-grandfather, Mariano Cacarozzo, was born in the city of Fermo, which was back then a town in the Ascoli Piceno province, in August 1888.  His only sibling that I am aware of, was his sister, Adelina, who was born in 1893 in S’Elpidio a Mare, another small town in the region.  Mariano died long before I was born.  Growing up I do not recall any family members mentioning he had a sister.  I knew that he and my great grandmother, Emelia Pierluca, were married in 1914 and I knew that they immigrated from Porto Civitanova or now called Civitanova Marche .  When I started to delve in to genealogy and I found out about the free website Family Search, I discovered that the most the civil records from Civitanova from 1860s to the 1920s were on that website.  They have not been indexed, so they are not searchable, but you are able to browse the records here.  I browsed the marriage records for Civitanova for the entire year of 1914 and that is how I discovered Mariano had a sister named Adelina. 

Here is a photo of Mariano, his wife Emelia, and his first child Nella in 1915.

I asked my Uncle Lou whether he had remembered if his father had a sister named Adelina, since he lived in Civitanova until he was approximately 13 years old.  He did remember her and he believed that his siblings and parents lived in one house, his grandparents next to them, and Adelina’s family lived on the end.  He said although the homes were connected to each other they lived in separate homes.

I now know the exact location of where they lived in Italy.  Luckily, my uncle and my grandfather saved their identification cards which lists the address they were living at when they were issued.  Google maps show that there are still three homes right next to each other at that location.  I cannot wait to check them out in person.

55 Cesare Battisti, Civitanova Marche, where my grandfather lived in Italy.

The reason why I have anxiously been awaiting this trip, is because I exhausted my research in the United States.  I successfully requested a couple documents from the local town archives and my grandfather’s military records from the state archives by email.  However, I made additional requests and my requests have gone unanswered for years.

There is a major mystery as to my family’s surname.  Supposedly our true name was Pietracci and the family lore was that my grandfather changed his name to Caccarozzo prior to immigrating to the United States.  In my research, I found on Mariano’s birth record, his father’s name was listed as Raphaele Cacarozzo detto Pietracci.  So there is some connection to the Pietracci name.  It could be a nickname, or maybe he was a foundling, I am not sure, but I really want to know if any of the stories I heard as a child were true.

Since I exhausted my available research that I can do from the United States, I needed to either hire a professional or go there in person.  I decided to do both.  I hired a professional genealogists through the Association of Professional Genealogists (APG).  I asked her to help me get over my speed bumps, local any living relatives, and assist me gaining access to the various archives in that region to research on my own.   

I know I will not find out answers to all of my questions, but I know I will be cherishing every minute of walking in my ancestors footsteps this week.