Around 1790, a boy was born on the Island of Procida. His name was Vincenzo Lubrano and he was the son of Gioacchino Lubrano and his wife, Maria. As a young man, he traveled from his beautiful island in the Mediterranean Sea to the Island of Sicily. Once there, he met a woman named Marianna Calandra in the city of Palermo. Marianna had been born in nearby Castellammare del Golfo. The two married and had ten children (at least three of these children died young).

Their first born child was a son born on the 13th of February, 1815, and they named him after Vincenzo’s father, Gioacchino. Their eighth child was a daughter born on the 11th of October 1832, and they named her Rosalia after her maternal grandmother, Rosalia Camarda Calandra. This baby girl was my great great grandmother, Rosalia Lubrano. When Rosalia grew up, she married a man named Gaetano Sconzo. Gaetano’s father, Giuseppe, had been born in 1800 on the Isle of Elba, a place where Napoleon had been exiled to in 1814. But Giuseppe had also traveled to Sicily when he was a boy. This allowed Rosalia Lubrano and Gaetano Sconzo to meet and marry in Palermo.

Although Gaetano died in Sicily, Rosalia Lubrano Sconzo traveled with her daughter and sons to America and arrived in New York in 1901 at the age of 69. She died in 1906 of a heart attack in a tenement in Brooklyn. Rosalia’s daughter, Marianna Sconzo Noto, was my great grandmother.

Rosalia Lubrano’s older brother, Gioacchino Lubrano, married an orphan girl named Antonia Di Pardi in Palermo in 1838. Gioacchino and Antonia had nine children. Their seventh child, Vincenzo, married Maria Sansaverino in 1873. They had a son, Salvatore, born in 1884. Salvatore traveled to America and settled in New York in 1909. He married Caterina Palermo in Manhattan in 1910.

There is now a DNA match on Ancestry for my Uncle Robbie, my father’s youngest sibling, to a young woman named Christina. Christina is the great great granddaughter of Salvatore Lubrano and Caterina Palermo. She shares only 11cM on one segment of DNA with my uncle, but it was enough for me to find her.

Our common ancestors were Vincenzo Lubrano and Marianna Calandra. Although Marianna lived to the ripe old age of 82, and passed away on the 7th of August in 1874, her husband, Vincenzo was not so lucky. I found his death in Oreto, Palermo on the 13th of November 1859. He died at the age of about 69 in the Real Casa dei Matti di Palermo. It appears that this is a home for psychiatric patients and from his death record we know that he had dementia.