Immigrant Secrets

Book excerpt: My father never mentioned his Italian immigrant family. Never. We only knew - or thought we knew - that his parents died in the 1930s. Except they didn't. I spent decades working with records managers, archivists, and genealogists on the technologies used to preserve information. Despite this, I never spent any time looking at my own family history. The only thing my father ever said about his family was that his parents died in the 1930s. Once I began the search for my grandparents, I mostly ran into frustrating dead-ends - until the release of the 1940 Census. My grandparents magically appeared in the Census - but as "inmates" at the Rockland Insane Asylum - along with an extended family of aunts and uncles and cousins, all living within driving distance, but never mentioned.What happened? Who were these people? And why all the secrecy?The book is part mystery, part family history, part historical reconstruction. The story in the book of the search itself is a rather typical family history journey, albeit one that revealed things I never could have imagined about our family. The story in the book of my Italian grandparents is in fact a story. But it is, as they say in the movie industry, "based on a true story." As Christian columnist and New York Times bestselling author Rachel Held Evans said in her 2018 book Inspired: Slaying Giants, Walking on Water, and Loving the Bible Again, "Origin stories are rarely straightforward history. Over the years, they morph into a colorful amalgam of truth and myth, nostalgia and cautionary tale."