One of my reasons for creating this blog is to foster the connections that I have made to my paternal grandfather Stefano's birthplace despite that information not being directly passed down. I owe much thanks to the internet's ability to connect us across time and location.
The image above is of the key to the Santo Stefano Juniore church in Salice. We gained access to the church via online pre-planning for our October 2024 visit [a crucial step I missed on our Spring 2019 trip!]
My grandfather Stefano passed away years before I was born and didn't share much about his past with my dad or aunt so our family hasn't known much about his early life... The little he did share was that he was from a large poor family in Messina and started working as a deckhand on boats from a very young age and celebrated a teenage birthday overseas in Buenos Aires, Argentina.
We knew he also travelled from Italy to the east coast of the US where one of his uncles had immigrated. From there he ended up enrolling with the Canadian Army to fight in WWI in exchange for Canadian citizenship. He was shipped off to England with the frontline role of Sapper, but luckily he arrived just before the end of the war so didn't have to go to battle. Upon his return to Canada, a friend convinced him to follow him to Calgary but once he was there he quickly realised he missed be nearing the ocean and continued west to the Vancouver area where our family has since been based.
Today, as more gaps in our knowledge of his life are slowly being revealed- it has been this ancestral pursuit that has provided an extraordinary platform for connecting to people and place... I have had local friends share their skills with online research using sites like "ancestry" to build our family tree and help make connections to others with a shared surname. And in planning our travels to Sicily, we have met many new people from all over who have been so generous sharing their time and knowledge.
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