Beyond DNA: Peter Hurley’s Italian Odyssey

In this episode, Peter Hurley’s journey to Mangone is where roots meet route. It’s a trip where genealogy and family research become a roadmap to understanding. He proves that when you dig deep into your family tree, you don’t just find names and dates- you find destinations.

Peter sets off on a 28-day odyssey to Mangone, his mother’s ancestral village in Southern Italy. Though his local guide bails, Peter finds his way to the mayor and town historian Rafaelle, who becomes his impromptu guide. They explore an old church where Peter’s ancestors were baptized and visit WW1 memorials that deepen his connection to his roots. While Peter doesn’t discover living relatives, he finds something just as valuable: his family’s enduring legacy in Mangone.

Equipped with genealogy and family history research, Peter returns from Mangone with fresh insights and vivid memories. His adventure serves as a how-to guide, offering a wealth of tips for anyone planning their own ancestral trip!

Podcast Transcript

Pat:

Fill To Capacity, crazy, good stories and timely topics. Podcast for people too stubborn to quit and to creative not to make a difference Inspiring, irreverent and informative. Stay tuned. Hi, I'm Pat Benincasa and welcome to Fill To Capacity. Today's episode "Beyond DNA Peter Hurley's Italian Odyssey." Peter Hurley is a man of many journeys, from construction yards to Colombian jungles, he's lived life like an open road. The world's been his classroom, leading youth groups in four countries and eco adventures from Ecuador to Patagonia. He hung up his globetrotting boots, got a degree in communications tech, worked in a newsroom and then had a 20 year career as videographer and editor to managing media production. He is now retired, which means he's into serious genealogy and family history research. Welcome, Peter, so nice to have you here!

Peter:

Thanks, pat, it's great to be with you.

Pat:

We've got a lot to talk about. In this episode, we're diving into the journey of a lifetime. We will explore the do's and don'ts of visiting the land of your ancestors, and Peter will share his epic 28 day adventure through southern Italy to the village of his mother's family. But before we begin, I'd like to start with the surge in DNA testing and genealogy sites that fueled this ancestry tourism. People are eager to connect the dots between their genetic makeup and geographical origins. It's like the science is providing the why and the trips are the how. In exploring one's roots, a DNA test might reveal that you're 60% Irish, but setting foot on Irish soil, that's a different story. So, Peter, for people wanting to visit their ancestral home, they may not know where to begin. What tips would you give them? How should they prepare for something like this?

Peter:

Well, Pat, I think the first thing that people need to do is to, before they even step outside of their country or outside of their house even, is to sit with themselves and think about what is it that they want to accomplish with any heritage travel? I think for a lot of people it's like, well, I'd just like to go back to the old sod, or I'd like to go back to the town, but if you sit down and think a little bit about it, well, why do I want to go to the old sod? want to go to that town? And when you come up with more concrete objectives, that's going to make it a much more satisfying trip. It's going to help you focus on what it is that you'll be able to accomplish once you get over there. For example, you might want to identify some relatives that are still living in the old town or the area. Your goal might be to fill in some blanks in your family tree, and the only way to do that is to go to a local church and find the documentation. It might be something like well, I'd love to know and see the house where my great-grandparents lived. The more that you think about those concrete whys, then it will bring that trip into focus and help you a lot in terms of planning and realizing a great trip.

Pat:

So the organization up front is really critical.

Peter:

It's key. Yep, it certainly helps a lot. For example, before I left, I had a lot of good online databases to work with and I had a lot of the nuts and bolts the BMDs, as they say the birth, marriage and death documentation. But the more I thought about that well, I don't need to go to the municipio and dig out all these records, they're available to me online. So when I get there, what is it I'd really like to do? And I went hey, I want to go to the cemetery. I want to see if I can find some folks there, and it also freed me up then to think about learning more about the history of the region. That could help me paint a better picture as to the type of lives that my ancestors lived.

Pat:

So, Peter, maybe you've already answered this, but what was the key motivator? What was that one thing that really pushed you to go to the country? What was it?

Peter:

Well, it was an aunt. I remember when I was younger a lot of our family history stories came from my dad and, as your listeners can probably guess, with my last name, hurley that's an Irish last name and we grew up hearing lots of stories. My dad was very proud of his Irish heritage. Him and his brothers did a lot of research and that's kind of where my interest grew from. But as I got older I began to think well, that's just one half of the family. That's just one quarter of the family if you think about it. And I remember that my mother used to talk a lot about her family, but in more of an anecdotal way. She never looked for the dates or it was never a big concern of hers or an interest of hers. But in our house we ate Italian food. We had Italian words that would pop up every once in a while, especially when my aunt and uncle came to visit. Italian was their first language. So it was there, but more in the background. But it was in the background, but it was more of the fabric of our family history than it was with my dad's, which was more about dates and when they came and where they lived in Canada and all of that kind of stuff. So I remember talking to my aunt one day about where the family came from and she said, oh, it's this little town called Mangone. It's up in the mountains and one day I'm going to go. So that was about it. And then a few years later I heard from my cousin that she was taking her mom to visit Mangone, and that just stuck with me. She was, oh, probably in her late 60s at the time that she did that. But it stuck in my head that that was something that I could do at some point and that was the genesis of my interest in going to Italy and tracking down our Mazzei family roots in Mangone.

Pat:

So you went to your ancestral village of Mangone. For our listeners it's about 12 miles south of Cossenza in Southern Italy, and it's also the village where my parents were born. So I have a vested interest in this conversation with Peter.

Peter:

In the interest of full disclosure, I suppose we're distant cousins.

Pat:

Peter, I have this theory that Italy is so small that if you dig back far enough, we're all related somewhere. So I suspect we are cousins. So you went to Mangone. My first question, it sounds like you had some pretty terrific organizational skills. You were ready to go. Did your trip go as planned?

Peter:

Well, in some ways it did. I kind of did a lot of the things that you would expect to do. I reached out to family to find out if anybody knew of any existing relatives in town. The answer was no. I did find contact information about the town, the municipio, the church. I did a lot of research with,G oogle Maps, looking at the town, and I joined a social media group on Facebook actually, that specializes in collaboration genealogy, so I heard a lot of stories from people who had already been to Mangone. Of course, I spoke with your brother, Gary, But what I didn't count on and this kind of goes to one of the core messages I'd like to leave your listeners with, is that you may hit an unexpected brick wall in planning or actually executing your trip, but don't take that as permanent brick wall, but there's always a way to break it down or to walk around it, and in my case, the brick wall was that the guide that I had contracted with ghosted me. So I had everything lined up for the trip, all the logistics were taken care of. And weeks out from the trip, when I reached out to him to find out when we were going to meet and what he had been able to find out so far, I didn't hear anything from them. It was basically crickets. So I thought, well, you know he's busy and maybe we'll catch up once we get over to Italy. So every few days I'd be shooting him a message and nothing. We're working our way through Calabria and, like I say, every few days I'd send them a text and I didn't hear anything back from them. And the day before we were to arrive in Cosenza, which, as you pointed out, is just north of Mangone, we were going to stay there and just do day trips to the town. Well, the day before we were to arrive in Cosenza, I still hadn't heard from the guide. So I thought oh well, you know, I'll just enjoy walking through the town, visit the cemetery and that'll be nice. On a whim, I reached out to our Airbnb host and I just said well, would you happen to know of a student who speaks some English, and wouldn't mind joining us for the day in Mangone. That might help out a little bit. Well, she texted me back within the hour and said my husband happens to know the mayor of Mangone, so I'll get back to you. And in less than an hour she responded and she said well, Tuesday you've got a meeting at three o'clock with the mayor and, by the way, his wife will be there and she speaks English. So, through all of my planning and my best efforts and parent brick wall that was thrown in at the last minute, I persisted and I ended up having a fabulous couple of days in Mangone, largely because of this contact that I made through the Airbnb host.

Pat:

Well, you bring up an important point that sometimes you've got to roll with what's happening and try to make the best of it, but for you, oh my God, you spun gold out of that situation! I'm curious because I too went to Mangone. I went in the 70s, and there's something about going to the village of your ancestors, and so I'd like to ask you what did it feel like for you to be there?

Peter:

Well, it's very hard to describe. Let me put it to you that way. I thought I was prepared and I had kind of visualized what the experience was going to be like, having done all of this research online. I had all of the names, I had many of the dates, I'd looked at Google Maps. I felt like I kind of knew the town in a way. But when I first arrived and you're just kind of getting oriented and you look around and it was very quiet, it was just me in these cobblestone streets with these stone walls and all of a sudden it was like I don't know how much information I would have got off of a Wikipedia page or an ancestry Search or whatever. But nothing could duplicate that feeling, a sense of place, by being there, having your feet on the ground, being able to literally smell the rocks and hear the sounds of the church bells, hear your footsteps as you're walking down the narrow streets on the cobblestones. It was fabulous.

Pat:

You know, we spend so much time in virtual geography that when we are in physical space, like what you're describing it is really profound. Someone used the expression once, they felt "genetic palpitations when they went to their homeland and I have to say, being in Mangone myself, I felt it before I even met people that were there. When I went there, the town was, as you say, quiet, streets were empty. I was backpacking with another kid and this woman comes up to me. I thought, boy, she looks like my, my grandmother's sister. But I didn't. I did, I had not made contact, we didn't have internet back then and I said in Italian, I am the daughter of Ida Rizzuto and Francesco Benincasa, the doors fly open. She gives me that, you know the double pinched cheeks and it's a difference of a split second. It felt like, and the whole universe kind of tipped on its axis. I know what you're describing. Now it sounds like the mayor and his wife played an important role in your Mangone experience.

Peter:

Well, as I mentioned, I had this appointment set up through the Airbnb host and when I showed up, they were just so welcoming. They sat me down and asked me what I was interested in, and we just started to have this conversation about my family. And to have somebody who actually recognized the name that could confirm that indeed, your family was from this town, that they go back a long wa s wonderful. . Piece of bad news that they had for me is that they weren't aware of any current relatives that were living in the town that they thought that there were people that lived in some of the outlying villages. They had moved, but that the Mazzei family was extremely rooted in the town of Mangone. And I had had a chance to visit the cemetery prior to meeting up with Orazio Berardi and his wife, Alessandra, and I had noticed a Mazzei in the cemetery and I asked him about that particular person because he had passed away in, I think, the late 40s, early 50s. He knew that family and he was explaining to Alessandra in Italian much faster Italian than I could follow, and the name Italo that came up and it just sort of rang a bell. When there was a break in the conversation I said what did you mean by reference to Italo ? He said Italo was the son of Leonardo, who is the fellow that was buried in the cemetery. And all of a sudden I had this recollection of my niece who had been to Italy as a nanny about 10 years earlier. She had been given the name of a Mazzei by my aunt, the one who inspired me to go to Mangone in the first place, and she had connected with this Mazzei who lived just outside of Rome and his name was Italo . When my niece came back and told me this story, my sister and her husband had been in Italy at that time and they actually went with my niece to visit this fellow who lived alone. They had a good visit. He treated them really well. They figured they were cousins, but nobody actually knew what the connection was. So the mayor, as I'm sitting across the table from him, mentioning this Italo Mazzei, I could remember what my niece had told me about him, that he rented fancy cars and that he was a poet. As Orazio, the mayor is telling this story and I'm saying to his wife, did Italo rent cars? And as she translated to Orazio, he goes yes. And I said to Alessandra, was he a poet? And Orazi o's eyes get a little wider, and goes yes. And it turns out that Italo who my niece and my sister had met, was the son of Leonardo, who was buried in the Mangone cemetery, who I had just discovered that morning. We had quite the conversation and made a lot of connections and confirmed the fact that this fellow that my niece had met, indeed was a second cousin.

Pat:

What a story! Now you also met someone

Peter:

Right, and that was kind of like the cherry on top of an already you know delicious visit. As we were sitting he said well, you're obviously very interested in the history of Mangone, even beyond your family, and I said yeah, I'd like to know about what the conditions were like when my family was still here. And he said well, you need to talk to my cousin Raffaele. He said, give me a minute. He leaves the room and he comes back a couple minutes later and he said Rafael will be here in a couple of minutes. He shows up and it turns out that he was indeed the historian of the town. He had written a book and he recognized the family name. He knew some of them from an earlier time in his life. We got talking and he helped to give me a lot of context about the town and the conditions and the types of crops that were grown back in the day and all of that. And one of the things that I had as my objective in going to the town was to visit the churches. There's two beautiful small churches in Mangone, a Madonna Dell' Arco and San Giovanni Evangelista, and Both had been closed for a long time because of renovations. And I just threw out the question would it be possible to visit the inside of the church? I'd already gotten some photos from the outside and Rafaela reached into his pocket and he pulled out a bunch of keys and he said well, which one do you want to visit first? I guess one of the advantages of visiting a small town in Italy, or a small town anywhere for that matter. It turns out that Rafaela is a leader in the local Catholic Society and a caretaker of the churches. We went over and we visited the Church and it was beautiful, and he thought that I was leaving later that day. So he said well, it's too bad you aren't going to be around longer, because tomorrow I could take you to see the other church, which is actually the older of the two. And I said, well, it so happens that I am going to be here for a couple more days. And he says, well, how about nine o'clock tomorrow morning? And I came around next day at nine. In addition to taking me into the church, he also gave me very memorable tour around the town and was able to identify the original neighborhood where my family lived. One of the highlights of visiting the church actually was as we were walking through and he was showing me parts of the church that dated back to the late 1500s, and I noticed a baptismal font in the main body of the church and it was a beautiful chunk of carved rock and I asked him. I said, well, how long has that been here? He said, well, the church was established in about 1584. And he said that was probably installed within a few years after that. And I said so, all people in Mangone who were baptized since that time were baptized in that font? And he said, yes. He said if they were Catholic and they were baptized in this church, that's where they would have been dipped. So, right there, I looked at it and I went well, I've got my family dated back to at least the mid 1700s. I was looking at the stone basin where all of my, let's say, ancestors would have been baptized.

Pat:

What a story! You know, what is it about baptismal fonts? Dante Alighieri, in his Divine Comedy, there's a canto in the Purgatorio where he lovingly describes a baptismal font as a beautiful carved font made of pure white marble. There's something about that, and I think the tone and the words that you just said is that that is the link of heritage, that font, and it's so important. Peter, how many people get to view an ancestral village totally from the inside out? That's breathtaking.

Peter:

Y eah, there were a few goosebumps. I must say one thing I did want to mention, going back to your earlier question about how I felt when I first arrived in the town. That also brings to mind a recommendation I would have for anybody who's fortunate enough to get back to a town where their family is from, especially if it's a smaller town is to think about what would have been an activity that your ancestor would have done, a daily activity. Yes, it might have been something like they got married in the church. But there are other things like, well, where did they do their laundry? Where was the bakery? And make that one of the activities that you have while you're there. So, again, go earlier in the day, identify where the communal washing station was, because usually in these towns there was no indoor plumbing, so the women would take their basket of clothes and they would go to the communal stone washing place and probably their kids would come with them and they would be getting caught up on the local news. And so there's an activity that can really bring it home to you and give you a real connection with your ancestors is to do something. Walk the same streets that they would have walked to a destination that they would have had.

Pat:

Oh, that's wonderful. You know, I stumbled on to doing that when I was in Mangone. Again, I was a college kid with a friend and we stayed at the house of Zia Catarina and the heat source for the house was a corner brazier. As we are getting ready for bed, she tells us tomorrow we're going to the bakery. I'm thinking, whoa donuts and you know all these Italian pastries. We get out in the morning, we walk and it's a communal oven. That was the bakery. And so, as you say, I had no idea, but that's where the town women would go to bake their bread. That was the bakery, a communal oven. That's quite shocking, you know, as an American, to come into that situation and see that. Now I want to ask you what was it like for you to see your great uncle's name not on just one but two World War One War memorials in the town?

Peter:

Well, that was an interesting story, because when I met with the mayor and his wife and we were trying to make a connection with Mazzei family. I mentioned to him that I had a great uncle, Vincenzo, who had died during the First World War in near Bologna, actually in 1917. He didn't die in battle, he died of a disease. He was in a hospital there, and I had only recently discovered a photograph of him, and so I pulled out my iPad and I had saved a bunch of images in case I needed to share them with somebody, and here was a perfect case in point. I brought it up and Orazio looked at it and he said oh your great uncle is on our war memorial. And he said, as a matter of fact, I think he's on two war memorials, and so that was kind of special to then go out and find them and again give very deep sense of place. I had a relative that I knew of and somebody who had been recognized by the community for his service not only to his community, but to his country.

Pat:

Yeah, I think you're segueing into the next question; what questions were answered for you during this visit, and were there any mysteries that popped up?

Peter:

Well, I think the most important question that I alluded to before was are there any living relatives? Because that was something that I had high expectations was to meet somebody who was still living in the town, and unfortunately nobody came to mind, and if I'd had another week or so I probably could have tracked somebody down in one of the nearby villages. By the same token, they did confirm for me the legacy of the family in the town, and I was also very happy to find out that it was a town that had been relatively unchanged in many ways. It was when my ancestors left. The town had about 1900 people, according to the census records that I could find, and Mangone today has about 1800 people. So lots of changes, of course. But you walk down many of the side streets in the town, you know, close your eyes, spin around, open your eyes and you could be back around the late 1800s or early 19th.

Pat:

I think one of the spectacular things about your trip was how you posted on Facebook and I would say this for anybody planning to do a trip you didn't just take random photos, you identified what you were looking at and I'll tell you, peter, I so enjoyed it. It was like I was traveling with you, church that's the big church in my family. The pictures of that church that you posted and everywhere where you went, your photographs were spectacular. They were breathtaking, but the identification that you put on there really made it a wonderful travelogue for those of us who are trapped behind the screen here, you know, following along with you. So you really did a beautiful job on that.

Peter:

Well, thank you, Pat, and there was sort of a method to that or another purpose other than just documenting my trip. It was meant to create a record for me because one of the things that people should think about if they're planning on doing a heritage trip, an ancestral travel trip, is what happens with all that information. And then you actually go back a step further. What kind of information is it that you want to capture, and then what are you going to do with that information? I had two reasons for documenting everything on Facebook. One was to share with my family and friends and give them all a sense of place, but also to have a record, and Facebook will be around for a few years, and so that is something that some legacy information about the family that can be shared by my cousins, by my nieces, long after I'm gone. Then people will have a place that they can go and check it out. So for people that are planning on doing something like that, keep that in mind. What is going to happen with the information that you collect, and maybe it will help you then think about well, what kinds of information should I be collecting? As somebody who comes from a media background. One of the recommendations that I have is think about the recording devices and how you're going to capture certain types of information when you go. Obviously you're going to want a good quality cell phone that takes good pictures. Make sure it's something that can take a decent picture in low light, because you might be in a church that doesn't have a lot of lighting. You might be given access to an archive where, again, it's a low light situation. If you're serious about capturing good images, that might be one thing that you would think about upgrading or bringing along a camera that can handle those types of tasks. But also, what form do you want to record this information in? Is it going to be something that you're going to just dump onto a hard drive when you get back or leave it on your phone? You might want to think about putting it into a format with details about what you've recorded so that it can be shared with family for generations that come. This is something that people don't often think about. I guess what you could call succession planning for the information that you gather for not only for these trips but for all of your genealogical research. If it dies with you, then it is a bit of a waste. Facebook is a great platform for that, Instagram as well. But also think about a way that you can document the trip and also have it in a format that you can hand off to a cousin or a son or another family member who may not continue the work directly but at least could be a caretaker for it and pass it on to maybe their children or their cousins.

Pat:

You know that is a huge point. When you talk about family historians, usually when people go on vacations they'll take pictures in the moment. But what you're talking about is something much deeper. We're talking about a digital legacy and so documenting not just the trip but the locations, the dates, who you talk to and if you could make notes about oh, there is so-and-so second cousin or not sure how we're related, because you're right, it might not be a generation after us, but maybe a hundred years from now someone's going to go into that information and go oh, that's what Peter did. I see where he went. I mean that's really important. And I guess the other piece I would add to that if you have a chance to talk to older relatives, I so regret that I did not do that. You know, when you're in your 20s, 30s or 40s you don't think about. I should ask grandma about when she did X, Y and Z to get those stories recorded.

Peter:

Yes, I have the same regrets. I remember my folks sent me up to Prince Rupert, British Columbia, to work a summer in the fish plants up there and I think there were ulterior motives to get me, as a 16-year-old boy, out of the house for the summer. But it was great for me because I got to spend time with relatives in Prince Rupert, which is where my Mazzei family arrived after leaving Mongone, and I remember staying with my great aunt for a couple of weeks and her husband and they both were Italian speakers, and so a lot of the time when I was in the house I didn't understand what was being said because they were speaking Italian and their friends would come over. They spoke Italian. But I do now think back on that time and what a great opportunity it would have been to have just said hey, you want to sit down in front of my cassette recorder for half an hour and tell me some stories. But we can now learn from that and make sure that we do what we can to do a good job of recording the information that we're fortunate enough to find and pass on.

Pat:

Absolutely, and I like your point about how do you choose to convey that information. Well, it's not hard to do an e-book. There are so many platforms like draft2 digital, all sorts of different things. You write it, you load it up, you add the photographs and there you have this precious gift of your family history. There's a lot of different ways to do this.

Peter:

Well, and I think it also starts with how you visualize your trip. Kind of going back to one of the first points that we talked about, is it before you even leave your house Is, think about what you want to accomplish during your trip and go prepared to do that. Have a camera or a good iPhone with you, but also make sure you got good old paper and pen and take notes and sometimes it's not convenient or appropriate to take notes while you're perhaps meeting a relative or meeting a city official or something like that, but just be thinking about how can I capture this information? As soon as you're done with a get together with somebody, even if it means scratching down some key phrases, that will just trigger the memory at a later time and when you can do. Maybe at the end of the day, over a good glass of wine, sit down and flesh out your summary a little bit about the day's activities. You will be so thankful that you did that, because when you get back you're going to get caught up into the rush of your regular life and you might not get back to your notes or back to your photos for a few months. So having anything that can kind of trigger memories and recollections of what was said will be very helpful.

Pat:

On that note, I would say, even doing a travel journal and or a day log is terrific, and when you have train tickets or stubs, just put them right into the journal so that you have that. Wow, these are all terrific suggestions. Peter, you know, your journey to Mangone is a compelling reminder that exploring our roots isn't about retracing steps but about taking new ones on ancient soil. And what you talked about the idea of those gifts of serendipity, the people that you met is really a remarkable, remarkable story. Thank you so much for sharing your incredible journey with us.

Peter:

It's been my pleasure, Pat.

Pat:

Wow, I feel like I was just there. We're just having, you know, good coffee, some cheese and good bread, and we're just talking about this. So thank you and thank you listeners. If you enjoyed today's filter capacity, please tell your friends and subscribe. Thank you and ciao for now.