Italian American Heritage, Food Recipes, Genealogy Message Board.

Hello,

This website is many things to me; a tribute to my parents and grandparents, a connection to my siblings and cousins, a gift to my children and grandchildren and a red carpet, "benvenuto" for you.

My father was a first generation Italian-American and my mother, German-American, though the Italian influence on me was much greater. As the first-born male in my generation, I was named after my paternal grandfather, Eugenio, and, as I grew up, became a kind of intermediary between my parents’ generation and my own. From time to time, I was called on by my aunts and uncles to talk to, or help out one of their children – a cousin. Less often, it went the other way, with a complaint from a cousin that I might bring up to a parent. This wasn’t an onerous duty, but one that I derived a quiet satisfaction from. And that responsibility, coupled with the knowledge that I was clearly my grandfather’s favorite, led directly, I believe, to the writing of my books and this website.

I hope you enjoy it. Make sure you go to the genealogy page and click on L'Italia dei cognomi before you leave. By typing in your last name, it'll show you all the locations of that name in Italy. Check out the reviews page. As a proud American and a proud American-Italian, "Genio" and "Legacy of a Hero" are the kind of novels I've always wanted to read, but never could find.

Those of us, second, third, fourth generation Americans have so much to be thankful for and those of us who share the magnificent Italian culture and heritage, without denigrating in any way the contributions of others, have much required of us, having been given so much.

Ten years ago, our family suffered a string of deaths. Coming, as they did, upon the normal attrition of uncles, aunts and cousins, my sister, Judi, the only sibling still living in the Dedham area, decided to have a family reunion while there was still time and asked me to write a family history. I was delighted! I dove into the research, jogged my memory for anecdotes, had long conversations with surviving aunts and older, second cousins on both sides and reviewed film my wife and I had taken on our tours of Italy.

The German heritage proved to be pretty straight forward; hard-working, church-going, with the magnificent singing voice of my maternal grandfather and a couple of fine, Lutheran ministers being the only noteworthy finds in the past few generations. But the Italian research turned up the surprisingly exciting and adventurous life of my paternal grandfather, the stuff from which legends spring. It was apparent, I only thought I knew about my family’s history. Here was an epic story waiting to be told.

The salient fact was that my grandparents and, by the same token, all immigrants from Europe a century ago, were, every one of them, heroes – extraordinary people in an extraordinary era. Yet, although they deserved our veneration and remembrance, were fast being forgotten. Mostly, it was because of our increasingly mobile society.

My parents were born, lived and died in the same town in which my grandparents had settled. Every one of my cousins lived within a few miles of me. Family get-togethers were multi-weekly, where stories and traditions were recounted over the dining room table, reinforcing our collective, familial memories.

In my generation, however, my siblings and I are a few thousand miles apart and our kids have seen their cousins but once or twice a year. Their knowledge of our family’s history is scant, yet still, far greater than that of my grandchildren and that became a real concern.

I wanted them all to know enough not to neglect their heritage, not to ignore their culture or forget about their brave and resourceful forebears – the people who’d insured that they’d be born Americans - and I knew I’d have to try to do something about it.

So the family history turned into a fictionalized account of my paternal grandfather’s real life adventures, a novel called, “Genio”, published in 2001 and still available through Amazon.com, iuniverse.com and bookstores’ websites, and its sequel, “Legacy of a Hero” December, ’03.(Check out Rave Reviews)

That same impulse caused me to develop this website, created in the hope that the people who made up the greatest migration in modern history, the four million Italians who migrated at the turn of the twentieth century would not be forgotten by their twenty-five million, or so, descendents and that some of them, you out there, would come to it, enjoy it, learn from it, add to it and help us all celebrate our courageous forefathers.

But by now, I had the writing bug and, in April, '06, published "Barinelli's War", a novel about the Korean War. You can check it out at "Rave Reviews" also.

This website will be, I hope, a continuous work in progress. Enjoy!

Eugene (Geno) Basilici