Finding One's Home and its Lessons

I think that all of us want to make a connection between who we are and where we come from.  In the last few weeks, my wife and I traveled to Italy.  My father was born in a small town just east of Naples in 1913.  His parents, who were naturalized U.S. citizens, were visiting their hometown of Laviano at that time.  For years, this was pretty much all I knew about my father’s start in life.

As I have grown older, however, I have become more interested in my father’s story and what I could learn from it.  I hoped that my first trip to Italy would fill in some of the blanks.

The picture above was taken sometime in the early 1920’s.  My father is the small boy on the left.  The young girl in front of him is Geraldine, his sister.  Aunt Geraldine is ninety-six years old now, the only one in the photo still living.  A few weeks ago, my wife and I sat down with Geraldine and we talked about her family.  Well, our family.

Her father, Donato Travisano, was born in Laviano in 1871, the youngest of three sons.  In 1880, his mother entrusted him to an acquaintance on a boat sailing out of Naples heading for America.  His brother, who had already made the trip, was supposed to meet Donato when he arrived.  He never did.

So my grandfather Donato, nine years old, fended for himself and lived on the streets of New York City for an entire year, until an older woman in the neighborhood began to look after him.  Years later, Donato finally reconnected with his brother, but there were some issues that eventually caused them to drift apart.

Our family has no real connection with that part of the family to this day.  From time to time I’ll run across someone else with the name Travisano, and we’ll try to figure out if there is some connection.

I think about Donato and how his experience as a young boy shaped him and caused him to be the father that he was to his eight children.  I wonder how my father was affected by his father’s start in life, and then by extension, what that did for me.  My Dad is gone, so I can’t ask him any of those questions now.  I wish I had given my Dad a little more of my time when I was younger.

A Jewish prophet once wrote that the iniquity of the fathers will be visited on the children to the third and fourth generation.  If that is true, then surely what Donato came to be had some effect on my Dad, and in turn, on me and even my children.

In our time and current culture, we value our freedom to choose and live our lives as we see fit.  Surely that is something to cherish, yet that freedom has to be held in tension with the reality that our decisions and actions will ripple through the years to our family, to some that we will never even meet.

Another Jewish prophet expounded on the truth that what we sow, we will reap.  It seems that even our great grandchildren will be part of this.  I can’t help wondering what was going on in the mind of my great grandmother as she put her nine year old son on that boat so many years ago.  I wonder how my great grandchildren will be affected by decisions that I make today.

This reality drives me to find some guidelines for my actions in the books these two Jewish prophets wrote in:the Hebrew Scriptures and the New Testament.

My journey in these books can be found at: www.cmvchurch.com