52 Ancestors in 52 Weeks for 2025! Week 1

January 02, 2025

Week 1 Prompt:

This week’s theme is “In the Beginning.” (According to “The Sound of Music,” the beginning is a very good place to start.) Who was the first person you wanted to find when you started your genealogy journey? Was there a family member who sparked your interest, maybe by giving you a bunch of genealogy “stuff”? This would be a great week to write about them!

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As a child, I was given an assignment for Brownies (Girl Scouts), to create a family tree to earn the My Family Story badge.

Filling in my mom's side of the family was easy. We had always lived within five minutes of the majority of my mom's family. My dad's family was a different story. I had Aunts and Uncles in Flordia, Texas, and the Carolinas. The majority of the older members of the family had long since passed, and the remaining family was fuzzy on details like dates of birth and names. My dad's grandparents were both from Italy but, hadn't met each other until they separately emigrated to America and settled in Hershey, Pennsylvania. I was able to scrape together the basic information for my Brownie project. It wasn't until I connected with a genealogist in Abruzzo last year that I was able to do a deep dive into the Italian side of my family history.

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Apollonia Mary Napoleone, my great-grandmother was the matriarch of the Casini family. Born in Assergi, L'Aquila, Abruzzo, Italy, she lived the majority of her formative years in a village in the mountains. She married her first husband, Domenico Giusti, in her teens, sometime before 1913. She first emigrated to Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, on 23 September 1913, and Domenico was listed as already being in America. At some point, they both returned to Italy. Giusti was an Italian soldier who died in combat in 1916, during World War I, fighting in the Italian Alps against the Austro-Hungarian army. When Apollonia arrived at Ellis Island on 15 June 1917, she appeared in the documents as a widow.

31 miles north in Amatrice, Lazio, Italy, lived Giuseppe Louis Casini, my great-grandfather and Apollonia's future husband. Amatrice is about 900 miles above sea level and even more mountainous than Assergi. Giuseppe's mother, Angelina Di Antonio, was born in Arquata del Tronto, a village near Amatrice that was totally destroyed by the 2016 earthquake. Giuseppe emigrated to America on 2 December 1912, arriving at Ellis Island, New York.

All of the men - both the Napoleone family and the Casini family - were farmers by profession, while many women in the Napoleone line were wool workers.

The historical context in which Giuseppe and Apollonia were born was one of profound poverty; both were born in the interior of the mountains of The Italian Apennines, an environment not very conducive to the cultivation of agriculture. Being farmers in that historical period meant giving half of the harvest to the owner of the land; no one was the owner of his own land.

All of my Casini ancestors who died up until 1800 are buried in the church of St. Mary of the Assumption, in Assergi, Italy. The church was built in the 12th century and was originally part of a larger monastery founded by Saint Equizio. Inside, there are several Renaissance-style frescos and a crypt, which is from the ancient church of San Franco of Assergi, the patron saint of the town.

The Italian Apennines