Cericola Birth Records

Monday August 2, 2012

          We left our apartment at 8:00 AM in Calitri for the 1 ½ drive to Orsara.  After arriving in Orsara, we went directly to the Office of Civil Registration.   They had office hours from 9 – 12AM.  We sat on the wooden bench outside the busy office waiting our turn to speak to the man in the record office.  He didn’t speak English.  After some hand signals and much discussion, Ken filled out a form to request a record of birth for his grandfather and grandmother.  We would have to come back tomorrow and hope the records were ready.  In the meantime we satisfied our anxiety by eating pastries from the local pasticcieria (pastry shop).  I was one of the few women sitting outside on the main street.  Women seem to be shopkeepers, trash collectors or are at home, but rarely seen just sitting and talking.  Men were a different story.  Many men seem to sit and talk.  Older women dress in black and sit just inside or outside their doorways.  Up the street we bought pizza al cipolla (pizza with cooked onions).  Ken said it was just like his grandmother’s pizza.  We headed back to Calitri for our afternoon rest.  Most towns close up all their businesses from about 1 to 4 PM.  People go home and eat a big lunch, rest, and businesses and towns come alive again about 5 PM.  We adapted easily to this new lifestyle.

 

Onion Pizza and cheese pizza

  

Tuesday  August 3, 2010

          This is the reason we came to southern Italy – to find family roots.  After having onion pizza and melon for breakfast, we set off for Orsara again.  This time the Civil Registration Office was not busy.  

Civil Registration Office in Orsara

The same man was in the office.  He wanted to see the records we brought from the USA – the marriage record from St Michael the Archangel  in Butler, PA .  On that record Antonio Cericola and Anna Maria DeSanctis were married in Butler, PA on February 2, 1911.  Domenico (the man in the record office) left and came back with original ledger books.  He showed us the birth of both Antonio Cericola and Anna Maria DeSantis.  If that wasn’t enough, he showed us their marriage record in Orsara.  Yes, they were married in Orsara before coming to the USA.  

Original marriage record of Antonio and Anna Maria DeSantis in Orsara di Puglia

Here is the information on the official birth and marriage records from the Comune of Orsara.

Antonio Cericola

Born in Orsara di Puglia on July 9, 1886

Mother – Teresina Cercola

(No father name)

Anna Maria DeSantis

Born in Orsara di Puglia on September 9, 1886

Mother – Angela Michela Schiavo

Father – Pietro DeSantis

Antonio Cericola and Anna Maria DeSantis were married in Orsara di Puglia on September 9, 1906.  That was Grandma Cherry’s birthday, she was 20 years old.

He prepared official documents of all the records and we paid him €7.74 - that would be about $9.50 US.

The church photo on this blog is the church where they were baptized and married – Chiesa di San Nicola.

First Day in Orsara

Sunday August 1, 2010

Being in Italy, just the two of us, was a bonding experience.  Very few people living in the hill towns speak English and everyone in town knows who those few are.  We arrived in the native town of the Cericola family, parked the car, and walked into history.  As we walked into town, all eyes were on us.  People from Orsara spotted us right away.  No words were spoken except Buon Giorno (Good Day or Hello).  We walked slowly to absorb everything.  It was Sunday.  Men were everywhere sitting in small groups, talking and laughing.  One woman talked to a friend from her balcony using both hands.  Another woman stopped as we admired her granddaughter - so proud. The streets smelled of tomato sauce, onions, peppers and basil.  This is Orsara.

We walked down the main street in town and saw the tattered awning of the Cericola Florist ahead of us.  A family member?  We entered the shop and tried to communicate with the lady inside.  She spoke no English and we spoke very little Italian – practically none.  She stepped into the street trying to find someone who spoke English.  Finally, Michael, a young man from New York, came to our rescue.  He was visiting some relatives here for a month.  He helped interpret but found that there are many Cericola families and it would be hard to tell if she was a relative.  We smiled, thanked her and moved on.  Michael told us about many sites to visit in town.  Next we followed the black pitted volcanic stones in the street down to an old church.  We entered the church in the middle of mass, stood in the back and were awed by the beautiful singing in Italian.  The photo at the top of this blog is that church. 

We ended our first visit here with a trip to the old cemetery just outside of town.  It was not well kept behind the big iron gates.  Inside we found many Cericola, DAntonio, Rocco and one Romano grave.  These graves were all older and had a photo of the person on the headstone.  I took many, many photos, hoping later that some of the headstones will belong to an ancestor. 

Tomorrow we return in search of family records at the Commune Office in Orsara.  We need to find the birth records of Antonio Cericola and Anna Marie DeSantis.

First trip to Italy

This blog is being written by Ken and LuAnn Cherry.  When we met in 1970, I was told the story of the Cherry name change.  Supposedly the name Cericola, Italian of course, was changed at Ellis Island when Antonio Cericola came to America.  There is no proof of that story but there is documentation of Antonio Cericola and his life in Italy and America.  Our love of history and family has taken us on two recent journeys to Italy.  To be exact our journeys were planned for the town of Orsara di Puglia, the birthplace of Tony Cherry (aka Antonio Cericola).  The story begins with the first trip to Italy in July 2010.

First you must know that we are travelers.  We have been traveling to campgrounds, soccer games, football games or historical reenactments since 1989.   We drive everywhere.  We often put 20,000 miles on our car in one year.  Both our sons played soccer and football.  Jason, our oldest son was a football kicker from 1994-2011.  He played at Butler High School, University of Massachusetts, Slippery Rock University and many professional indoor arena football teams.  Justin also was a football kicker as well as a punter.  He also played for Butler High School and the University of Rhode Island.  Justin led us to Italy.  We always knew we would go someday but Justin had a life change that hastened our trip to Italy.  In 2006, Justin decided his career choice should be a chef.  He attended Cordon Bleu Culinary Institute in Pittsburgh for a time.  Being a goal driven determined young man, he left culinary school and set out on his own to learn the trade.  After various jobs and experiences, he landed in Brooklin, Maine as the executive chef in July 2008.  In a quest to learn more about butchering, he found an opportunity in Tuscany Italy to study under Dario Cecchini, renown Panzano butcher.  He went to Panzano in June 2010 and studied for 3 months.  Justin convinced us that we should come to Italy and visit him during that time.  It didn’t take much convincing. 

So we booked our flights on British Airways from Newark to Milan.  We decided to fly into a northern city and rent a car to make our way south through Panzano and finally to Orsara.  After a one day visit with Justin, we set our sites on Orsara.  Not finding any accommodations online in Orsara, we opted to rent an apartment in Calitri.  The apartment was actually a historic house in the medieval section of Calitri, a hill town south of Orsara.  You need to understand what a hill town is before you can imagine what Orsara is all about.  Hill towns abound in southern Italy.  They are actually self sufficient communities on the top of very large hills.  People don’t need to leave their town because they are happy with everything that is there.  Most of the towns are very old and were constructed since the year 1000.  Many of the old parts of the town are still surrounded by the stone fortified walls.  To enter the historic part of the town you will often enter through an original stone archway.  These archways are the gates to the city.  Orsara is such a town.

Day 1 in Orsara – Sunday August 1, 2010

We were both extremely excited to make the one hour drive to Orsara di Puglia.  Did this place really exist?  It is so small that it is often hard to find on a map.  Our journey began.  The scenery was breathtaking; mountains, rivers, flat fields of roma tomatoes, grapes, olive trees for as far as you could see, and date palm trees.  As we exited the main highway we saw it – an exit sign for Orsara di Puglia.  We stopped to take a photo, it did exist.  Orsara was not on the flat land but at the top of a hill.  We drove 8 km up the side of the mountain in our rented Fiat making several snake like curves until we reached the top of the mountain.  We found Orsara di Puglia.

Orsara di Puglia (looking down the street from where we entered town)