When my grandfather (Emilio) and his father (Loreto) emigrated to the United States, both listed Cassino as their hometown in Italy. A few other Vizzaccaro emigrants cited Cassino as their home, but the vast majority cited Villa Santa Lucia (of the seventy or so Vizzaccaro emigrants, 42 hailed from Villa S. Lucia and only nine from Cassino).
I had been working under the assumption that we were distantly related, if at all, to the Vizzaccaro families in Villa S. Lucia, so I have spent the majority of my energy to date examining the vital records from Cassino. The large number of Vizzaccaro households in Villa S. Lucia makes it impossible to ignore, though, and yesterday for the first time I read a reel of microfilmed birth records from the town.
I should note that it appears the records for S. Lucia from the end of the 19th century were largely destroyed (probably in World War II). The film I had (births from 1861 to 1945) did not contain the original contemporaneous records but rather “reconstructions” of the records generated in the 1960s. Folks living in the town could, I guess, enter their own birth dates and parents, along with those of family, in the town records.
These records are necessarily incomplete and somewhat suspect: remember, these people were recalling births that took place up to a hundred years earlier. Some people may not have bothered to participate. Others had died, moved, or emigrated. As a result, there was one birth recorded in 1861, none at all from 1862 to 1876, two or three in 1877, none again to 1883, and then none until 1901. At the turn of the century, the number of records starts expanding quite rapidly.
One saving grace for our family may have been the occupation of Elio Vizzaccaro in the 1960s: the town official in charge of reconstructing these vital records. Elio apparently begged, cajoled, and/or threatened every family member he could track down into participating. I found 65 births to a Vizzaccaro mother or father in the period from 1901 to 1939.
One interesting thing I noted is that many of the names seemed very familiar. There seem to be at least a handful of Vizzaccaro parents in Villa S. Lucia in the first half of the twentieth century who were themselves born in Cassino in the last half of the 19th century.
One name in particular leapt out to me: Maria Grazia Vizzaccaro. This is a relatively uncommon combination of first name and middle name, and happens to be the name of my grandfather Emilio’s sister. She was born in Cassino in 1897, and I found someone by the same name recorded as the mother of Marianna Petraccone in 1916.
I also found the birth of Maria Giuseppa Vizzaccaro in 1917 of interest since the father is recorded as Antonio (the name of Emilio’s brother). A lot of legwork will be required to run down these two leads, but they are exciting and fresh clues to investigate.
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