“In every conceivable manner, the family is the link to our past, and the bridge to our future.” – Alex Haley I am the granddaughter of Italian immigrants.  My grandfather Basilio Basili, came to this country from Rome in search of his brother who had left home rather unceremoniously.  His father, a strict disciplinarian who worked for Mussolini, wanted his youngest son to join the Merchant Marines and, to avoid doing something he did not want to do, the younger boy jumped ship and headed to New York City to begin life anew. Basilio’s mother, heartbroken at the loss of her youngest, asked the older son to come to America to find his brother and see if he could convince him to come home.  Sadly, the younger brother never saw his mother again.

Basilio, a former soccer player, was a sports writer for an Italian paper and he, armed with a couple of stories to cover while he was in the States, set out in search of his brother.  Within a few months he had located his brother, but as luck would have it, on the journey to this country, aboard the Italian Line ship the Conte di Savoia, a beautiful young woman who was sunning herself in the adjoining deck chair, caught his eye.

He blushed as he told me the story.  We were sitting at the diningroom table.  He was a proud man, a quiet man and I was a young graduate student who was trying to learn as much as I could about this man that I had idealized for as long as I could remember.  My grandmother sat next to him, coaxing him to tell me the story, filling in the blanks with her remembrances.  It was the first time I had heard this amazing tale and I soaked it up like a sponge.  There was something magical about that moment; the words spoken in his Italian accent, my grandmother's sweet smile as she encouraged him to tell me about his life.

"Can't you just tell me the information?" my son asked as he worked on a project for his history class.  He needed to learn about his family's immigration to this country.  And I could have.  I could have told him the story my grandfather told me.  Given him the facts as I remembered them.  The information as he called it.  But I chose not too.  No, like I had done many years ago, we would go to the source.

I thought back to that moment all those years ago.  Calling it information made it seem so impersonal, so sterile.  This wasn't information,  this was a story.  Our story.  The story of how we got here and for a moment I wished he could have met him, heard the words as I heard them and understood what I understood that day, that I was part of something much bigger than what I had known up until then.

We called my uncle who graciously stood in for his father, telling the story slowly, deliberately.  He patiently answered all my son's questions and sorted out the confusions of a sixteen year old who was hearing this for the very first time.  After he hung up the telephone, we searched through old photographs, putting images together with names, watching the story unfold and come to life right before our eyes.  “This just might be the best project I’ve ever had,” admitted my oldest as we poured through the pages of an old photo album.  “Look at this, Mom.  This photo was taken in 1938 in Rome,  Who are all these people?”

It was late in the evening when he finished.  The report was written; the story told.  His story.   It was a tale of history, a discovery of a family; a story shared that day at the dining room table.  A story that continued a journey that began long ago.  A journey that now my son had joined, too.