Karen DeMeola, assistant dean of finance, administration and enrollment, University of Connecticut School of Law. Courtesy photo
I have long been intrigued by our cultural and my own fascination with the family tree. Friends have traced their families back to kings, queens, slaves, slave owners and historical figures both benevolent and unsavory. My family narrative is one built on the Italian immigration story. Various relatives have contributed significantly to the family tree, going back three or four generations.
My great grandparents immigrated to America for a better life, found a community of other Italians and started a life premised on the fallacy of the American Dream. Like other immigrants, our family experienced intolerance, poverty, long work hours and the love of family and community. It is easy to romanticize the American Dream, fantasizing an equitable system in which we can pull ourselves up by our bootstraps and change the status quo. I have over time pieced together the real narrative our of family, which became much easier over time as some of the secrets were buried in a language lost with assimilation. Some lines can be easily traced back to Benevento and Naples, while other lines are not so clear. I have no memory of hearing Ellis Island stories; I visited the online site to check for any name listed in our family tree, but could not locate everyone who appeared in U.S. Census data.
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