Every family has a story. Sometimes, it starts with a name; other times, it begins with an ancestral home. Harder-to-reach family histories require a detective of sorts, someone who can comb through archives and map out complex lineages.
Genealogist Stephanie Merlino has helped clients uncover Italian familial roots for more than three decades. It all started with her own quest to better understand her Sicilian heritage. This emotional journey led Stephanie to discover her gift for finding connections and decide she could help others.
"I'm almost like a savant when it comes to this," Stephanie says. "I can find any family anywhere. As long as the records are available to me, I will find them."
Stephanie and I recently discussed her path to genealogy, her unique approach, her favorite part of the job, and her goal with every genealogical report she produces.
What inspired you to become a genealogist?
About thirty-something-odd years ago, I realized that my family wasn't from the United States. I learned just by interviewing my family that we came from Sicily, from a small town—Valguarnera Caropepe—with a very rare surname—Interlicchia. So, I started to look at that surname and its different variations.
Back then, we didn't have email and all of this stuff, so I hand-wrote to each person I could find in the phone book in Argentina, Brazil, and Italy. So it just culminated in a process where I started interviewing my grandparents and their siblings, and all this information started flooding in. When I wrote to different people, more information came in. And I was able to connect them all into this gigantic tree of thousands and thousands and thousands of people.
Once we got Facebook and everything like that, I started to contact some of these people, and I realized that one of my cousins, Vincenzo, still lived in the town we came from. So I went to visit, and he happened to own a bed and breakfast. I ended up staying there, and I would go back there every year for a long period of time. It just became a huge story, and I decided I wanted to help other people.
Valguarnera Caropepe photo by Stephanie Merlino
How do you approach tracing family lineages?
I start by sending my clients what's called a family and ancestor chart, and I will have them fill it out, and then I will start going backward. So I will start with the information that they gave me. Say they know that Giuseppe Conti was born in 1876 in Aci Trezza. I will go to those archives and pull that record out, and then I am like, "Aha! Now I've got the parents." And I do estimations. I'm saying, "I don't know if this is their first child, second child, or third child, but I'm going to estimate now. We've got their ages. We've got their occupations." So I estimate when they got married.
I start going in that direction but backward until I get to the end of the records. I don't just use the direct line. I'll pull out aunts, uncles, kids, everything. It gives you a broader picture than just your straight lineage. I'll even go so far as to find information on the boat your family came over on—where it was built, who built it, how long the journey took, and when your family landed. It all starts with getting as much information from the client as possible. And if they don't have a lot of information, I will go in and try to fill in the gaps.
Valguarnera Caropepe photo by Stephanie Merlino
What's your favorite part of doing this work?
There's just something about the records; it's like they talk to me. Then there's the satisfaction of seeing the faces of the clients or when they email me, "I didn't realize you were going to go this deep or you were going to get this information."
Photo by Stephanie Merlino
What is your goal with the work you do?
The overall goal is just to connect people with where they're from. When the people in Italy and Sicily came here, they kept some traditions, but as the generations keep getting watered down, they forget about them. They forget about where they're from, and they forget about why they might act a certain way, why they have this certain tradition in their family that they've kept going, and why those things are so important to their father, their mother, or their grandparent.
I'm trying to bring more awareness to the younger generations about where they're from because this is a wide world. And America is so far away from Europe and so separated from other places that people really forget. They don't understand the sacrifices their families made to come here and make a better life for them.
As you dive into the records and get into the crux of it all, it's almost like the records start talking to you. They're screaming, "Find me, remember me; I was here once before."
Family photo courtesy of Stephanie Merlino
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