How Seven Pieces of Paper from an Old Orange File Threw My Novel -- and my Grandma Albina Ricci's Life -- Into a New Light!

How could seven pieces of paper, each only five by eight inches, suddenly become so important to me and to the novel that I'm writing about my 19th-century ancestor, Great Great Grandma Filomena Scrivano? Why did it take me almost 45 years to look at them? And why did the memories recorded on these tiny sheets end up squeezing my heart, making me feel so much more sympathy for Filomena's granddaughter -- my very own grandmother, Albina Orzo Ricci?

Looking at these yellowed sheets, you would disregard them, understandably, as "Trash!" The pages are covered in scrawl, my own, all of it in red magic marker. Perhaps the most amazing thing about these scraps of paper is that I managed to ignore them for more than four decades. I stored them quite casually in an orange paper file marked "ORZO, Pasquale."

Pasquale Orzo was Grandma Albina's father and my great grandfather. It wasn't until Grandma Albina and all five of her "Orzo" sisters died that the secret shrouding Pasquale's birth was finally revealed to us.

My great grandparents, Pasquale and Caterina Orzo, and their six daughters. My grandmother, Albina Orzo, is second from the right, standing beside her mother.

******

OK, wind the clock back 45 years. My husband Richard Kirsch and I got married in 1978 and immediately moved to a high-rise in Hyde Park on the south side of Chicago. Rich was studying for his MBA at the University of Chicago. I followed my dream and became a reporter for the Chicago Sun-Times covering all kinds of fascinating stories, and specializing in covering environmental news -- I broke numerous stories about the hazards of the nuclear power industry.

Occasionally when we were back East to visit family, Rich and I would drive a couple of hours to see Grandma Albina and Grandpa Angelo in their cozy house at 218 Crown Street in Bristol, the city where I was born. I have a crystal clear vision of their house, I will never ever forget it.

Grandpa had a Victrola -- stored within a handsome mahogany cabinet-- in the dining room. Grandma's big wooden rocking chair sat in one corner of the kitchen, smack up next to the stove and beneath the wooden clothes drying rack attached to the ceiling. Grandma and Grandpa and I always watched Lawrence Welk on TV whenever I was overnight there on a Saturday -- Grandma adored him. In the upstairs bedroom, where my Dad and his brother Bob grew up, I can see clear as day the khaki-colored wallpaper that sported World War II fighter planes flying this way and that. At the other end of the upstairs hall was the walk-in attic with a gazillion boxes and trunks with clothes and hats and furs and one odd thing after another to snoop through.

It was on one of Rich's and my visits -- about 1980 or '81 -- that I sat down one day with Grandma Albina at the white enamel kitchen table she owned as long as I knew her. I was clueless at the time, but Grandma began spilling her guts to me, telling me stories about her childhood that only today I realize helped to shape who she was, and why, for example, she was so incredibly religious. What is astonishing to me is that Grandma never told these stories to anyone else, not even her own daughter, my Aunt Bette -- who has been reading each and every version of my book and helping me to see what my great grandparents Pasquale and Caterina were like.

As Grandma spilled her guts to me about her parents, Pasquale Orzo and Caterina Amendola, I was clueless. I was about 28 years old, and never gave a thought to any of the (many) people -- including Bis Nonno Pasquale, and Bis Nonna Caterina, who died before I was born.

Being the good reporter I was trained to be, however, I dutifully wrote down every single word Grandma said, in red magic marker pen, on those seven skimpy pieces of paper that she probably had taken out of a kitchen drawer. I covered the pages with diagrams and arrows too -- pointing this way and that -- as I tried my darndest to follow what she was saying about her father, Pasquale Orzo, and her mother, Caterina. She kept referring to a place called Paola, a seaside town in southern Italy where Pasquale was born. Apparently she had lived there at some point; she told me that there is a Saint Francis of Paola, much like there is a Saint Francis of Assisi.

GRANDMA ALBINA LAUGHING HER BIG LAUGH -- at our wedding, 9/2/78

Her stories meant absolutely nothing to me and so, after returning to my hectic life in Chicago, I promptly forgot all about what Grandma had said. But I save everything, so I created the orange Pasquale Orzo file and tucked the seven pages inside.

What Grandma HAD LEFT OUT OF HER TALK WITH ME -- because she and her sisters never breathed a word to anyone except of course to each other -- was that her childhood was miserable because Filimona was not married when Pasquale was born. He was "ILLEGITIMATE" -- I use quotes for this detestable word because I challenge its validity. I do the same thing with the ridiculous term, "out of wedlock." These and other words served only to shame my ancestors. Their trauma was so deep that my ancestors never recovered; sadly, they passed it on to their children -- Grandma and her five wonderful sisters -- who turned around and handed it on to my Dad's generation. The shame landed squarely on me and my siblings and my many cousins.

I decided to write "Finding Filomena"

in large part to undo (to the extent it's possible) this destructive legacy of shame and even, self-loathing and fierce anger. As I learn more about him, I understand that Pasquale had a very short fuse, and a mean temper, perhaps because of all the intense humiliation to which he was subjected, beginning when he was a child. Even his last name, ORZO -- the most inconsequential form of pasta -- was given to him by a municipal or church official with the intention, I firmly believe, to humiliate him his entire life.

By "RE" writing Filomena's life story, I have tried to empower my great grandmother by giving her a new history, or in this case, HERstory. Filomena thrives, and finds love and redemption, in my book, in spite of the fact she lives in an era and a nation that was and continues to be highly patriarchal, a culture that has held women back in every way possible.

My ancestor Filomena's last name, Scrivano, ironically, translates as "scribe." Lately I have begun to wonder if by writing this book, I am Filomena's scribe, or, whether she is actually the scribe who is working inside me! It gets complicated, this business of writing a book, especially when you are looking deep into the past into the lives of those responsible for creating you.

It was only a few weeks ago -- August 28, 2024 -- that I finally took those well worn pieces of paper out of the orange file, where I stuffed them after that crucial talk I had with Grandma. Heaven knows what prompted me to pull them out of the file! But I did, and once in hand, I decided to spend a few minutes trying to make sense of them -- no matter that I wrote the notes down, they've always looked like a bunch of scrawl that would simply be impossible to read and decipher.

As I sat in my living room pouring over the pages, occupying the grey sofa where I have written most of the novel, I had the overwhelming (and rather eerie) feeling that Grandma Albina was actually sitting right next to me on the couch. Maybe she was crocheting another afghan -- she managed to make at least five or six dozen in her lifetime, each grandchild getting at least one. (OK, truth be told, I got...more than one.)

Suddenly I could see Grandma's olive skin, her forehead creased in the way it did when she threw her head back and laughed her biggest laugh, her eyes clouded behind her eyeglasses (there's a great photo from my wedding where she's laughing like that.) I could also see my Grandma as she got irritated (Grandma, I'm afraid, inherited what we call the Orzo temper, taking after Pasquale. Numerous others, including my Dad and both my sisters, admit to having it.) Grandma could get really worked up over just about anything, especially if someone -- including her mild-mannered husband and her three rebellious children -- defied her wishes. Complaining in a kind of increasingly shrill tone, Grandma would declare something particularly unfair by shouting out: "Now that really gets my nanny goat!" Sometimes she was funny; other times I'm afraid, she wasn't funny at all.

Despite her foibles, I loved Grandma Albina so incredily much. She wrote letters constantly; during World War II she wrote to her two beloved sons, my Dad and Uncle Bob, who were both overseas seeing combat, every single day. She wrote to me in college constantly and yes, I wrote back; sometimes I think it's because of Grandma (oh yes, and my Dad) that I ended up a writer. Grandma loved to read too. She told me time and again that her favorite novel of all time was Anna Karenina -- "I loved this love story," she said.

She was a fantastic Grandmother, always thinking of us, loving us to the moon and back. She was interested in what each of us was doing, where we were traveling (because she and Grandpa traveled all over the world.) She took us shopping, she took us to the movies, and she bought us the best Christmas and birthday presents. I can still see the tiny white wooden table with black wrought iron legs that she presented me on my fifth birthday.

I was incredibly fortunate when it came to grandparents. Grandma Albina is one of the two most wonderful grandmothers a kid could have. She, long with my Mom's mom, Grandma Mich (for Michelina) were grandmothers who taught me through and through what it means to be a devoted grandma myself. Today I am ecstatic to be Gma to three amazing "grands," two -- Ronen and Dani -- who live in Boston, and the other little "mountain" man, Monte, in Denver.

The very next morning after I read those seven pages, I texted Aunt Bette to say that we needed to speak right away. I wanted to make sure that she, of all people, knew the stories contained in those seven pages. A few days later, I called her in Illinois and recorded a 45-minute conversation in which I slowly and carefully relayed to Aunt Bette, exactly what Grandma had said to me so many decades before. I told her about the discrimination that Pasquale endured, but most importantly, I let her know what had happened to her mother, my Grandma Albina, to make her childhood just miserable.

I think my Aunt Bette was shocked; she had never heard any of these stories. Grandma never told her how she had suffered as a child. Sadly, Grandma and Aunt Bette clashed fiercely when my aunt turned her back on the Catholic Church. Grandma told her that she felt "betrayed." I haven't asked, but I'm almost certain that they had not mended their relationship when Grandma passed away in December of 1987 at the age of 84.

The information in those seven pages, which I relayed to my aunt, is essential, I believe, to understanding why Grandma leaned so heavily on her religion. The irony was lost on her: she was blindly devoted to the Catholic Church, that very same church that took her father away from his birth mother Filomena Scrivano, simply because Filomena wasn't married. That same Church labeled Pasquale "illegitimate," ensuring that he would be a second- or third-class citizen for the rest of his life, and that shame would shadow all of his children as well.

In addition to explaining how her tall, irascible father came to marry her petite, sweet-tempered mother, Grandma also told me that day in 1980 about a particularly traumatic period of her childhood. The details of Grandma's misery -- which lasted about a year -- are spelled out in the seven small pages that are covered, fittingly, in blood red marker.

In the spring of 1910, just as Grandma Albina turned seven years old, she and her parents and three younger sisters left the USA to return to Italy, to their father's hometown of Paola. Grandma told me that her father wanted to try to become a farmer. After only about a month, however, Pasquale gave up his dream of trying to buy land in Paola -- I suspect he met with intense discrimination at home because he was endlessly branded "illegitimate." He left Caterina and the children behind, and that's when life turned downright scary for Grandma Albina.

The family moved in with Caterina's father, Giuseppe Amendola. But he had remarried -- his new wife, Madeline, wasn't thrilled to have a brood of four young kids she didn't know move into her home. She particularly seemed to hate Grandma Albina, who was the oldest, but still just an innocent child.

Like all first-born children, Grandma was expected to look after her three younger sisters, who were babies. Frequently, my grandmother found herself scrambling for food. Even worse, she and her mother and siblings apparently had to leave Giuseppe's house because Grandma describes having to search everywhere for shelter in Paola; they ended up in a one-room hovel.

Thankfully, Pasquale found work back in the United States as a mason, building at least one church spire. He also worked as a carpenter, and eventually built the family a home at 295 Park Street in Bristol. His wife and daughters returned from Italy about a year later. They sailed on the SS Luisiana, arriving at Ellis Island on May 6, 1911. This information comes from my cousin Donna Ricci, who has done an extraordinary amount of work researching Orzo family genealogy. Besides examining birth, marriage and death records for Pasquale and his family, Donna also looked at dozens of ship manifests. The manifest for the SS Luisiana on May 6, 1911, shows that Caterina sailed with the children using her maiden name, Amendola, because she was accompanied by her beloved brother, Gaetano.

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Grandma Albina was actually the second of ten children born to Pasquale and Caterina Orzo. Their first daughter, Adelina Natalina Orzo (known as Lela), was born in December, 1898, apparently with some kind of birth defect. She died at age five, bringing unimaginable grief to her parents. But that was just the beginning of the horror. In 1922, daughters Nicoletta and Lucy died within a week of each other. The cause of death for both girls was whooping cough (pertussis) and pneumonia. I cannot fathom the grief that accompanied this double tragedy. I cannot let my mind go there. And yet, even more heartbreak was in store for Pasquale, Caterina and his family.

They had one son, Francis,

a sweet little boy born in September of 1921. On a summer day in August of 1929, when Francis was seven, he was playing with my Dad, who was three, and Dad's older brother Bob, age four. Pasquale and other family members sat a few feet away on the front porch of 295 Park Street. According to my cousin Donna, who heard it directly from her father, Bob Ricci, Francis told Bob that he would go across the street to pick him some chokecherries. He walked between two parked cars, turned and told Bob to wait for him there. As Francis backed into the street, a car struck and killed him while Pasquale and the family watched in horror. Dad was too young to remember anything, but my dear Uncle Bob apparently was traumatized for life. In 2013, Bob and Donna visited 295 Park Street together; he recalled with great sadness that after Francis died, he and his grandfather Pasquale "stared at the [blood]stain in the road for what seemed like months."

His only son's death proved to be a deep knife to Pasquale's heart. Bis Nonno suffered a stroke not longer afterward, from which he only partially emerged. He was bedridden for the next ten years, cared for by Caterina and her daughters, and at times, by his grandchildren. Dad recalls his grandfather sitting in a chair, drooling, unable to speak. Pasquale Orzo died in 1940, at the age of 70. Which was exactly the age I was in 2022 when I began to turn all of my attention to writing about "les antenati" -- my many Italian ancestors, specifically Bis Nonno Pasquale.

Aunt Bette Foeller (nee Elizabeth Ricci) and her cousin, Phyllis Ingellis, on their Confirmation Day. When my husband and I visited Paola a year ago, in October of 2023, I hadn't looked at these seven remarkable pages of notes. It wasn't until one evening a few weeks ago, for reasons I cannot explain, that I rather casually took them out of the orange file. I had finished writing the inner story of "Finding Filomena," and it left me wondering about Pasquale's life. The reporter in me wanted to know in more detail how his unfortunate birth circumstances clouded his life and the lives of his descendants. I had decided to interview a few of my cousins, too, specifically the children of my Grandmother's sister, Mary Ingellis.

Aunt Bette surveying her garden in Hudson, Illinois, with her father, my grandfather, Angelo Ricci - who grew a sumptuous garden back in Bristol, Connecticut. She has read every draft of my new novel, "Finding Filomena," the story of our ancestor, Filomena Scrivano. ******

That day in 1980 that Grandma spoke to me, she seemed old. But she was only in her late seventies -- not much older than I am today. What I wouldn't understand until I became a GRANDMA myself is that without actually telling me, Grandma gave me in effect, ancestral "jewels," extraordinary details of how her father met and fell deeply in love with her mother, Caterina Amendola, a soft-spoken woman with the longest and most beautiful hair that for her whole life, she wound around and around into a bun at the back of her head.

While I don't remember having the conversation with Grandma, I recall the kitchen perfectly. Albina Orzo Ricci's kitchen spilled over with the fragrance her very special (warm) loaves of just baked bread resting on top of the stove. It was the place she made buttery round Italian cookies with pastel icing and sprinkles, for Easter, along with yummy cream puffs and the traditional "lamb" cake -- she made a simple white cake and divided the batter into two pans, each shaped like half a lamb. Once baked, the two halves were frosted together and on the outside it was heavily sprinkled with white coconut. Thus, the Easter lamb!

Grandma also made the most divine spaghetti sauce. Her eggplant Parmesan was such that I can still recall 50 years later eating it warm, and then, eating it cold between two slices of that fabulous Italian bread. Perhaps the piece de resistance for me was Grandma Albina's "minestra" -- she cooked it for me every summer of my childhood when I would stay with her a few days.

Into her minestra Grandma dropped carrots, onions, tomatoes, parsley and very tender (Italian) flat string beans and of course, zucchini, or in her dialect, "cogootz." All of these veggies were grown with immense love and pride by my mild-mannered Grandfather, Angelo Ricci, in his mammoth vegetable garden. Besides growing boatloads of veggies, Grandpa also grew all kinds of flowers; the ones I remember best are the bountiful roses growing on split-rail fences and wooden lattices and the purple irises -- some of that very same stock now grow at my house and at my younger sister Karen's house in Massachusetts.

*****

The fact that Great Great Grandma Filomena Scrivano was unmarried when she gave birth to Pasquale Orzo on November 3, 1870 seems so incredibly inconsequential from my modern perspective. But living as she did in the small seaside town of Paola, in Calabria, the southern-most province of Italy, Filomena was squeezed. Like all Catholic countries in those days, Italy adhered closely to strict religious laws that shaped civic laws, all of which were imposed to basically punish unmarried women. Ah, but there wasn't a single word of reprimand for the men who created these pregnancies. Things have changed, but really, how much have they changed?

By decree of the all powerful Catholic church, beginning in the 16th century, all unwed women had to give their babies up to so-called "ozpizias," often decrepit and filthy foundling homes where babies were fed by wet nurses who passed deadly diseases from one infant to another. Most of these poor infants -- an estimated 93 percent in my Great Grandfather's birth year (1870) and region (Cosenza) -- died before their first birthdays!

So how exactly did Bis Nonno Pasquale manage to survive this gauntlet? For that you must read my book! I began doing "research" for this book nearly five years ago, when the pandemic hit in March of 2020 (there was no connection, at least none I can identify.) I started mulling over family stories that I had heard growing up, from Mom and Dad, and from my grandparents, about the ancestors, or in italiano, "les antenati."

Simultaneously, I started "craving" the soft mellifulous sound of the Italian language. My yearning to hear and to speak and finally, to write Italian has grown and grown over the past four years. Today I am writing in Italian (a little) and listening to Italian music. And I am planning to return to Naples next year, and visit Paola again, hopefully in early May, 2025, in time for the huge festival in Paola that celebrates "the other Saint Francis," not the one we all know about, from Assisi, but instead, the meek but beatific saint who grew up in Paola and fasted in the caves on the hillside in the 1500s.

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Why did it take me until I was 70 years old to begin caring about my ancestors? I don't know the answer to that important question. Even though both my parents are Italian, and my mom and her parents (Claude and Michelina Rotondo) were fluent and spoke Italian constantly as I sat at their dining room table for endless numbers of meals, I was never interested in learning the ancestor's language (and it wasn't available in school, either.) Instead I enjoyed learning Spanish, and then French, in high school and college.

But something strange started up in the Spring of 2020 and my longtime writing buddy, Peggy Woods, was witness to all of it. Almost overnight, I found myself feeling a deep fascination with Italian.

And when I turned 70 two years later, on November 29, 2022, the intensity of my fascination grew sharply. That's when our daughter Lindsay Kirsch Kaatz, and her husband Geoff, Coloradans who love hiking, had their first baby, on November 26, 2022, meaning grandbaby number three (Monte) and I share the same Thanksgiving birthday weekend. Lindsay and Geoff decided to name their firstborn Monte, (Italian for mountain) in part because Linds wanted to honor her family. She says they were driving along one day and she got a glimpse of the awesome Front Range of the Rockies, and boom, the name Monte ...was just...there.

*****

Great Great Grandma (Bis bis Nonna)Filomena gave birth to Pasquale Orzo in 1870, and exactly a century later, in September, 1970, I entered Brown University as a (full scholarship-funded) freshman. As I was growing up, my mom would often say to me, in a kind almost teasing way, "Ah tu se fortunata!" "You are lucky!" All those years, I never really grasped what she meant. I was lucky...in what way exactly? Lucky to go to college? "But everybody goes to college, Ma? Don't they?"

It's only now, looking back, and especially considering what intense hardships my grandparents and great grandparents endured, on my behalf, on behalf of all of their children and grandchildren, that I really understand how fortunate I am.

Like all immigrants in every age, my ancestors did what they had to do in order to survive. In order to eat. In order to make lives for their families. In order that their descendants would get ahead. It's a very American, and an old-fashioned story, and yet, it's also a brand new story, for every immigrant today who yearns to step onto U.S. soil to make her/his fortune.

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I'm diverging here because honestly after finishing "Finding Filomena," I'm feeling "steered" by the Universe? les antenati? to write about my Mom's side of the family. When her mother, Grandma Mish and Mish's sister, Gina, and their mother, Clementina Ciucci, came to America, they left the Abruzzi -- a beautiful mountainous region northeast of Rome -- in November of 1918, and sail sailed out of Naples on the Olympia, the sister ship to the Titanic. The journey to America was supposed to take about a week, except that it was the middle of World War I. The ship ended up in Gibralter for ten days, during which time Grandma and her famiy ate nothing but bread and grapes.

They didn't arrive in Boston for two months -- by then it was the middle of winter, frigid January. The man who was to become my Grandpa Claude took them to Hartford, CT to a well-known department store named GFox where they bought winter coats. Like all immigrants, my ancestors did whatever it took to give their children food to eat, a roof over their heads and a better life. A chance at success. Two of my mother's brothers, Grandma Mish's boys, got PhDs; Claude Rotondo Jr in Engineering and Delio J. Rotondo, in Education; both had highly successful careers. My Uncle Paul Ricci -- Dad's younger brother -- taught philosophy for years in the California State College system. Countless other relatives have achieved great things.

I have the great good fortune to live in the USA, such a bountifully rich and free country, only because my ancestors took risks, and sacrificed dearly on behalf of me and the rest of my family. Sono cosi grato, antenati. Siamo cosi fortunata. I am very grateful. What a privilege it is to be able to write this book, to tell Bis Bis Nonna Filomena and Bis Nonno Pasquale's stories, to pay homage to him and to his wife, Bis Nonna Caterina, and the myriad other "antenati" who came long before I was born -- oh there are so many people I have never met, people I want to thank.

Lately, I feel like I know them on a much deeper level. My cousins Bill and Pat Ingellis, and their sister, Sandra Druhan-Morse -- who as a high school student used babysit for me and my brother Ric and her brother Bill and oh what terrorists we were! These dear cousins -- children of my Grandma Albina's sister, Aunt Mary Ingellis. My cousins have so kindly sent dozens of amazing photos -- and shared amazing memories with me by phone and email. All of this will enliven the "Finding Filomena" ebook, which is coming out soon.

And then there all of my own photos, spanning four generations of my family:

Every time I look at these old photos, which I treasure, I sink into a reverie. I feel so deeply connected to all of them...in a distinctly ethereal way. And I especially feel les antenati, every time I write in, or speak Italian.

Io amo scrivere in italiano!

I love writing in Italian!

I also have begun to say (out loud) some of my mother's favorite Italian sayings -- what doozies they are. When I hear myself saying them, feel the words rolling around in my mouth, I feel Mom! She is beside me, she is inside me, a great great loving spirit. I feel her arms around me, holding me, as if I am resting on an everlasting cloud. She is always smiling. She is always gently telling me that everything is just

perfetto!

Yes, Mom, I feel you and Dad and my grandparents and all of les antenati and I am happy and at peace, knowing that one day I too will have the privilege of becoming an ancestor in our loving family.