My writing here is ordinarily focused on our travels, be it by air, land or boat. I diverge from these now. I think that these stories have some general interest. Also I write about these matters for my direct heirs and other relatives, that they may know about those who came before them.
The Italian side
We were told that my mother’s family came from Palermo, and that on my father’s side the origin was Irish.
In 2010 I decided to seek Italian citizenship by what the Italians call ‘Jure Sangris,” by blood. Under that law I was able to proceed through my mother, as I was born after 1948, when the law changed, allowing maternal proceedings. My mother was born in the US so I went through her father, Giuseppe he was born in Italy and thus had clearly been a citizen of Italy. We were told he and my grandmother were born in Palermo.
.To obtain Italian citizenship by Jure Sangris requires that you obtain the birth certificate of the person through whom you make the claim. So I would be going to be dealing with Palermo’s bureaucracy. I lived in Rome for a year so spoke some Italian but probably not enough to do this task. I also knew that Palermo suffered bombing damage in WWII so documents might have been destroyed. I would be dealing with underpaid and perhaps harried public servants. I wondered how well Italians would care for and organize documents.
I also had to find out if my grandfather had naturalized (become a US citizen) and if so when. If before my mother’s birth then she was not an Italian citizen so I could not become one. Otherwise she was and so was I by law, as the bloodline had not been interrupted.
The US government keeps records of everyone who has naturalized. If they can not find a record, then they send a document saying so, and the Italian authorities take that as meaning the person in question had not naturalized, so the application can proceed. You get naturalization documents through the Department of Homeland Security at https://www.uscis.gov/records/genealogy. That document states the person’s birth place. When Giuseppe’s arrived I found that he was not born in Palermo, but Partanna, a small town in the province of Trapani. A letter from Kathy Kirkpatrick (no direct relative), whom I had previously employed to find Giuseppe’s birth certificate, brought me a copy of Giuseppe’s birth and marriage certificates from a cooperative and efficient Anagrafe office in Partanna. The marriage certificate in turn led me to grandmother Francesca’s birthplace in Santa Ninfa, 6 kilometers way and over the hills, although in my case nothing about her mattered as I was proceeding only through Giuseppe. Years later I visited both towns in this rural area, neither terribly far from the infamous Corleone.
The paternal side
On my father’s side there were even more surprises. In my immediate family we were told that the family came from Ireland. In 2016 my wife and I were house and cat sitting at a friend’s house in Flackwell Heath, near Oxford, England. There is a library just down the street. I walked over and it was there that I learned that the Kirkpatricks originated in or around the tiny town of Kirkpatrick-Fleming, not in Ireland, but Scotland.
Then circa 2020 I used ancestry.com to try to trace my family origins. Starting with the excellent work of Arkansas relatives whose work went back to around the time of the Civil War, I traced the family back to 12th century Scotland. Ireland came into the picture around 1737, when Dumfries Scotland born James Kirkpatrick’s son Francis was born in Ireland, probably Northern Ireland as that’s where the Protestant Scots went rather than the Catholic area of the island. (The Arkansas relatives were told of a joint Scottish and Irish heritage, per one of my 56 first cousins)
They weren’t there for long. His first child, Francis, was born in Ireland but from the records I have found it appears he was the only one of five born there. So we do technically have Irish roots from Ireland but it was more of a stopping off point. For centuries before then and back to the time before people had family names Scotland was our land.
I was quite surprised to learn that the Kirkpatrick family is well known in Scottish history, starting with Roger de Kirkpatrick, a neighbor and close ally of Robert the Bruce (originally Brus or Brux, a town in France). Robert was king of Scotland 1306-29. The Kirkpatrick family motto, “I Mak Sikkr” (I Made Sure) was granted by King Bruce to acknowledge the role Roger played in the slaying of Robert’s chief rival for the throne, Red Cormyn. See my post at https://garyjkirkpatrick.com/i-mak-sikker-roger-de-kirkpatrick-and-robert-the-bruce-king-of-scotland/
During the course of this phase of my investigation I learned of the castle built by Ivone de Kirkpatrick starting circa 1132. It is called Closeburn Castle as it is in the town of Closeburn. It is still with us and is the longest continuously inhabited castle tower in the UK. It remains inhabited to this day. I also found out that the Kirkpatrick family holds an United Kingdom baronetcy dating from 1685. No one is qualified to hold the title is alive today. The last one died in 2010. My connection to any of the people mentioned above is quite distant. See my post at https://garyjkirkpatrick.com/journey-to-century-13th-the-family-castle-in-closeburn
Then came another huge surprise when I found that there is a Spanish branch of the Kirkpatrick family. One of its members was named Eugenia Montijo de Palafox y Kirkpatrick. Eugenia became Empress of France subsequent to her marriage to Napoleon III in 1853. She was an active participant in the governing of France until he was deposed in 1870. Members of that branch give tours of the Kirkpatrick castle to this day. The website is Closeburn Castle. See my posts at/, https://garyjkirkpatrick.com/closeburn-castle-scotland-the-kirkpatrick-familys-home/ , https://garyjkirkpatrick.com/the-kirkpatrick-empress-of-france/
The Mystery of Matteo (1893-1960)
My mother’s side came to the US from Sicily as early as 1913 when a Francesca Augello (my grandmother) went through Ellis Island , and again in 1914 (Giuseppe my grandfather) and 1915. Among those on the ship coming from Naples on January 2nd, 1915 was a young man named Matteo Calzanera. As children we called him Uncle Mathew. He was accompanied by his sister Anna Palermo, aka Annette, whom we called Auntie, and their grandmother, Sebastiana Rubino, after whom my mother was named per tradition. As Palermo was my grandfathers family name, why was Matteo’s last name Calzanera? Why did my grandfather Giuseppe refer to Matteo as his wife Francesca’s son and not their son? If Guiseppe was not the father, who was?
In 2018 I requested a copy of Matteo’s birth certificate in an effort to clear up this mystery. I ordered if from Partanna on the presumption that he was born there, and it turned out that he was indeed. These birth certificates normally include the names of the mother and father. In Mathew’s case, neither the father nor the mother’s name is recorded. Until or unless someone sorts this out, this mystery remains unsolved.
