Exploring Family Tragedies with Compassion & Understanding with Jacqueline Jannotta

Exploring Family Tragedies with Jacqueline Jannotta: Compassion & Understanding
Stories in Our Roots, Episode 70

Heather Murphy: Hi Jacqueline. Thanks for joining me today.

Jacqueline Jannotta: Hi, Heather. It's great to be here.

Heather Murphy: Would you start by just introducing yourself please?

Jacqueline Jannotta: My name's Jacqueline Jannotta. I'm a writer and I live in Portland, Oregon, by way of Chicago and South Florida and even Italy. So I've kind of lived all over and, you know, I should also say I'm a mom. That's probably the number one thing I am, and I have two teenagers, well actually one is just turned 20, daughters and we are, you know, a year away from being empty nesters. So I am writing more and you kind of rediscovering myself these days.

Heather Murphy: . Well, what is your story of how you started researching your family history?

Jacqueline Jannotta: Well, I, you know, there was a grade school project where I had to ask my grandparents, and I think most kids go through that, and that sort of planted a seed. But when I was four, my family left Chicago and we were probably longtime immigra, like, you know, great- grandparents, immigrated, grandparents immigrated, that kind of thing.

I think there was a big, mostly Italian clan there that my dad pulled us away from and we moved to Florida. And I think I felt something missing after that, and I have no first cousins surprisingly. and so that left a hole. Then when I graduated film school and went to Hollywood to work in the entertainment industry I ended up working for a producer who was really into genealogy. And so he kind of sparked my interest. And my first apartment out of college happened to be right next door to the giant, Mormon Temple in Los Angeles, which has the second largest family history library in the country, I think maybe the world.

And so that was kind of laid out for me to go, ah, and couple that with working in Hollywood, where's a lot of nepotism and there's a lot of, everybody knows somebody. And I didn't know the somebodys, and so I kind of felt like something was missing and I want to discover, who are my somebodys? So that got the long search going into family history, which turned into having to learn Italian to be able to read the records, which turned into a lot more.

Heather Murphy: You actually went to Italy for some time, right?

Jacqueline Jannotta: Yeah, so the, the long time falling in love with the language, which also led to meeting cousins. And thankfully for the internet I'm able to meet a lot of people and connect with them across the globe. And I met friends in Italy and cousins in Italy actually. And it was one of those things where when you have little kids and you think about what do you wanna pass down to them, and I knew that if I didn't keep up with the Italian language, cuz there's no reason to speak Italian in, in the US, that that language would die with me.

So I made a commitment to, I'm gonna at least give them some sense of their roots and some sense of, you know, what they come from and the language. So there, there's a local Scuela Italiana de Portland here where we live in Portland, Oregon. And, and so there was little preschool classes and they had a good basis. And my husband and I were like, "why not do this for a year? We can make this happen." So we, with a lot of effort in figuring out visas and all that, were able to live in Italy for a year. And we threw our kids in public school there. And they now have a connection to, you know, bigger world and to their roots in a deeper way, I think. I think they think of themselves as world citizens more.

And this ultimately led to us getting Italian citizenship. Again, through the genealogy research. I never would've been able to even know it's possible or how to do it. Genealogy opened not just a door, but like a giant portal, a much bigger life in so many ways.

Heather Murphy: Yeah, that's amazing. Not very many people have the opportunity to go and live where their ancestors used to live, or at least the country, and experience that culture firsthand rather than just whatever gets diluted in the country they're currently living in.

Jacqueline Jannotta: Yeah, the culture really does change over generations, and when you move away. Yeah, we were lucky and privileged to make it happen, but it's also like where there's a will, there's a way, and it's so possible for anyone to do this if they really want to. I mean, I even wrote a book on how to make this happen a year abroad. Does the book has nothing defeated do with genealogy, but just because it was such a life growth experience just for our us as a family, it made us closer. And also for each of us individually I think it helped us grow in ways that we wouldn't have considered had we just stayed in our routine.

Heather Murphy: Well that's neat. Well, we had the opportunity to work together and you were researching, some of those Italian family members. Could you tell us what you kind of started with and then, what you gained as you delved deeper into this part of your family.

Jacqueline Jannotta: so yeah, when we, when we were working, you know, I was looking at roles of women in my family tree. And you know, my grandmother, my father's mother came to mind and her family. And what I knew of her family was when they were in Italy, they left on, this is her father's family, when her father was a little boy they left their little Italian village on foot, probably on barefoot, and I'm sure so much of it's exaggerated. And they made their way to France and Belgium where they parked for a few years and worked to earn money. And then took the ship over to the US and settled in Chicago where not my great-grandfather, but his father was a rag picker and my great-grandfather and his sister, who was a singer, they would, dance the tarantella and sing for money in the streets and ironically in Evanston, which is a suburb of Chicago where there's a university that they could not have dreamed of going to, but that I went to. So that, that was weird when you think of how generations progress and leap ahead.

So that was the story that I had and that my great-grandfather grew up and he became a union leader in Chicago cuz there were tons of immigrants and a lot of them didn't know how to speak English and he knew several languages from having lived in a few countries. They wanted to protect the workers and they worked in the steel mill, I think, so he became a union leader.

And the story that I had always been told by my grandmother was when she was a little girl, that her father had been getting threatening messages from it's the equivalent of the mafia, but it's called La Mano Nera, the Black Hand, as they were like an early gangster, Italian immigrant gangster mob in Chicago.

And that he was turning them over to the police and he didn't wanna have anything to do with them, but they wanted him to give them money and they wanted control of the union that he had organized. He refused and one night they bombed his house. And my grandmother had said that her sister died of fright.

And that's the, the story I got. And it was like, oh, there was a bombing and she died of fright and Oh, that's awful. But when I looked further into it and you know, with a subscription that now had newspapers available, I discovered that this was just not this little neighborhood bombing, but it made headlines across the country, like little newspapers, big newspapers, you name it ,it was front page news that there was this bombing. That " cradle was overturned," "baby near death," and, and all the stories had slightly different information, that a baby died, that a baby was near death, that the man had died. And my great-grandfather's name was Ciro, Ciro Balzano. And then a couple of news articles said, "distraught mother buries daughter in secret." And I'm like, what is going on?

And you know, you, when you're doing genealogy research you have to look at any documents you can find. So I found, oh, there was a baby, and the baby died two days after the bombing. And curiously, it said he died of gastroenteritis. Like there was no mention of a bombing. There was a girl who had been in the census record the year before, who disappears from all historic record after that. You know, my grandmother had said that she had a sister and she told me her name, and that sister just doesn't exist anymore after this bombing.

So I, I really do think that there were two children that died in that bombing, and I don't know why My one would've been buried in secret and one wasn't named, or, you know, wasn't blamed for the bomb.

Upon further information, you know, there's a historic event you don't just look on the day of the event, but you look for the days following, the months following. And when you have an Italian surname, it always gets butchered so I had to look for various spellings of all these names. And I discovered even more that a few months after there was another murder, and then there were, they had gone after the supposed bomber and the lot of entanglement with this mobster story. But one day the evidence, all the letters that he had turned over to the police had disappeared and that he all of a sudden doesn't wanna press charges. And so, I'm like, what's going on?

I had met a cousin, online years before who descended from the same great-grandfather, and he tells me that, "oh no, our great-grandfather was Al Capone's right-hand man. Didn't you know that?" I'm like, "no." He sends me an early draft of a book that I have since, since we have spoken, found one copy of in one library in Washington, DC, where the, it's a special collection library, it's called "the Mobs Guys" or something, and it's written by an author who has disappeared. His email doesn't work. He may no longer be alive. But he recaps all the gangsters of the era in Chicago. And there is mention of my great-grandfather in there. The librarian sent me some pages and it does indeed say, that he was one of Al Capone's cronies. Now, where this came from and whether it's true, I have no idea.

It's just the oddest thing. And, and I thought why would we have such different stories? You know, my grandmother her sister, her half sister, say "No, our father was a good man, and he was forced into doing this, and he had no interest in the mob and he just had to play by their rules, but he was not a mobster." And the guys get a different story. Now, I suspect that women were told different things and were protected in different ways, or sheltered in different ways than men in a, in a family where, but it did make me really wonder about the bigger picture of a lot of things, not just my family.

Heather Murphy: Yeah. I really think that's so interesting about you and that cousin and how the story was passed down differently and the perception and that can totally demonstrate why it's important to reach out to those cousins, even if it's a second or third cousin, because we all gather our own perception, each child in the family has their own perception and that gets passed down. And you do that for two or three generations and it's amazing what you can find out and what you can learn about your ancestors that you didn't know before because maybe you came through the oldest child and the cousin came through the youngest child and their experience with their common ancestor was completely different.

Jacqueline Jannotta: Yeah, and, and even in the microcosm of a family, if you have a closer relationship with a mother versus a father or you're around one more than the other, you have a whole different perception. So when I looked at this family, it's the story of the great-grandfather. He's the one that had the job and the public facing life. But when I looked at my great-grandmother, his wife, I discover, again through genealogical historic record, that over the course of her, not even 20 years in the US as an immigrant who probably didn't speak English well. She lost seven of her 11 children. So by the time the 1910 census came, she had already lost two children in the bombing. She loses two more later that year. She loses another daughter from a botched surgery. The following year she has a son who dies immediately or shortly thereafter birth. And then she has a couple more kids, one of whom dies a few months before she herself drops dead probably of grief, and pregnant for the last time.

 I look at her lifespan and even the one photo I have of her, she's pregnant. It seems like she's perpetually pregnant. Her husband is caught up in, who knows what in Chicago. My grandmother's the only daughter that survived of that family unit and the sons that did survive probably just didn't give her much thought.

But my grandmother grew up not even knowing her mother's birthday, not like her mother was this whole ripped away from her, cuz she was nine, I think, or 11 when she died, when her mother died. And that affected my grandmother in her whole life course. And it really, caused me to look at trauma, which, a bombing and two family members dying from said bombing is definitely trauma, and how that echoes and that reverberates and that ripples in a family even decades after it happened. And my examination of looking at this I could see the ripples in all the different family lines of how that happened. And it was fascinating and sobering and it really makes you think a lot of a bigger picture, not just your own family.

Heather Murphy: How has your perspective of your family and what's been going on in your family changed since you really fully understood more your grandmother's story?

Jacqueline Jannotta: I think it helped me, it gave me a lot more compassion for my grandmother. She was kind of a tough lady, yelled a lot and just kind of said what was on her mind. And I'm guessing she had to, in her family, had to fight to be heard, just being the only daughter. And she loses her mother. Her mother was probably the only one who really paid much attention to her. I'm guessing, just knowing the patriarchal Italian culture as much as I do, I'm guessing she was dismissed more and she probably didn't like that. And that made her more of a tough lady. And I even learned from other family members that are no longer alive now that she wasn't really well liked.

I loved her, and I also could see why she wasn't well liked. So it was interesting and that just, it's that reminder that when you meet people, no matter who they are, there's always the deeper story behind them, even if they don't know that story.

I know my grandmother did not pick apart her roots the way I did. But she lived with her own trauma and it's like, if people knew more of their story, I think there would be a lot more self-understanding and an understanding of the other and understanding of how we operate in communities. And I, I could go on forever, but it

Heather Murphy: Well, I'd like you to talk a little bit about more about that because how learning about your family and having that compassion once you learn some of these stories, how have you seen ways that you can apply it or opportunities to use what we learn to that greater community of people who are not related to us?

Jacqueline Jannotta: Yeah, I guess I have a fundamental belief that we're all related and when you start doing family history, you do see that, like even in my own mutt, like I'm not a hundred percent Italian and my kids are half Jewish. So it's, it's like if you look at it, we all have Nazi and Jew, slave and slave owner, in that symbolic sense, in us. But we like to think, no, no, no, we do not. But I think it's really important to look at the complicated nature of an individual and of a family. And it just goes out end of a community and of a country and a nation and a world like, cuz it's all related. So how do I apply it?

I mean, when I studied my family's trauma ripple effect, it made me think, " Wow, this is just one family branch in one family that I've studied, and how much trauma is that?" and I'm just this little descendant from Italian, whatever, had the privilege of coming over on a boat by choice. And I think of so many families that if you looked at them, there would be trauma, like tenfold of what I discover in almost every branch of their family and even if they don't know it, that absolutely has to affect you move about in the world and how you think of the world and how you think the world sees you and how you see the world. It's all related.

 I guess I just started looking at communities and cultures with that same eye of you don't know their story, even they don't know their story. So you have to give space to understand. I mean, I, the whole reason do genealogy or that I do genealogy is not for that sense of, oh, I wanna find if I have royal ancestors. Cause a lot of people I think, think, oh, it's such a self-indulgent naval gazing hobby. And I beg to disagree and would argue with anyone that it is absolutely not that. But that it really can help you understand your place in the world, literally, figuratively, historically. And you start to see an arc and how you're like a thread in a tapestry of humanity and how you see the past determines how you look at the future.

And you know, I look at my kids now and state of the world now, and we have to start looking towards that future in a more hopeful, positive way with empowerment. One way I think to do that is to really look at the past and where you're coming from with more compassion so that you can be more compassionate about how we collectively move forward in the future.

I don't know. That sounds like a lot of big words, but I'm telling you, there's, there's a sense of reality when you apply it.

Heather Murphy: Yeah, it doesn't, you can't know how real it is until you just do it, until you get into it, and then it, I have the same problem trying to explain to people how it works. I'm like, just try it and then you'll see how it works, because it's unique for every person. Even siblings looking at the same family, they're going to see different stories. They're going to interpret things differently, and that's why everybody needs to know their story. Not just say, oh, somebody in my family researched it and it's done somewhere.

Jacqueline Jannotta: Right. And that's mostly what I get when I talk to people. It's like, oh yeah, I have an aunt, or, it's always something that, like, the history is this thing that you pull out, but no, no, no. It is woven into your DNA, and I do think you have more power over it when you understand it more. And I don't mean power in the sense of control, but you know, inspirational power to a bigger life and a more powerful life, you know?

Heather Murphy: Yeah. Well, anytime you have more knowledge that empowers you, whether it's scientific knowledge or historical knowledge about what your family experienced.

Jacqueline Jannotta: Yeah, and, and I think being in a family or being like just living, I, I think when you family unit, family dynamics is something everyone can understand to some degree. More so than learning a whole thing of science or learning a whole subject. So it applies and connects to so many things.

Heather Murphy: One thing I'd like to ask you, so learning about this Italian family, I mean, that's pretty heavy stuff and it's, is the opposite of what you mentioned about looking for those famous people or those good lines that you can say, yes, I have the same blood as this person. I don't know if it did or not, but how did it affect you? Like learning that part of your story isn't the greatest. I mean, you have just the trauma there, but also people's choices and how they decided to live when they're your ancestors.

Jacqueline Jannotta: I think when you see like a heavy, dark story, it can also empower you towards the light. That sounds so, I mean, I don't know, woo, but it can be a catalyst to "wait, I don't need to be this way." And I'm not saying I, that looking at my great-grandfather that I was tempted to become a mobster and I decided not to. But it can serve as a springboard, you can see it propel you forward.

I think, you know, maybe my dad growing up in blue collar, that kind of neighborhood, he broke away from that. He became a doctor, he got the GI bill. He like, he found a way out of that. And I think maybe a lot of cousins did not. Maybe those other cousins just had a fine life without the big heavy darkness that propelled them out of it. I can draw that connection whether it's true or not. Like you said, it depends on every person and how, how they see it.

 Also for me, if I looked at like my grandmother's trajectory and the women in her family and how much they had to endure, I think in many ways it subconsciously or now very consciously, has made me more of a feminist. Like, wait a minute, women should not be subjected to just follow whatever their husbands tell them. No way. I lead a traditional life. I'm married to a man who what to bring some of the bacon or whatever stupid phrase is. so I'm, I'm not an example of breaking away from that traditional thing, but I think the way I'm raising my daughters to have a sense of a strong core is probably something that would horrify my great-grandmother. " What are you telling your daughters that they don't have to do?" or do So I think understanding the family where people have been oppressed or people have gotten sucked into bad stuff can have its positive effects as well.

Heather Murphy: All right, well, thank you. Now you've written several articles on Medium about your family and other aspects, I'll put a link in the show notes to your Medium profile so people can get that. Are there other ways that people can learn more about you and what you do?

Jacqueline Jannotta: sure. Well, my book, if anyone out there has this notion of, I would like to have extended travel in the land of my ancestors, my book can guide you on how to do it and how to set yourself up for success. And it's called "Let's Leave the Country, A Guide To Your Family Year Abroad."

And um, I have a website at becomingbetterpeople.us, all one word becomingbetterpeople.us and the book is there and links to my Medium is there and other articles. And I've written a lot about Italy and more into family history stuff. And I try to write in terms of, it's not just my family story, but I try to make it a universal thing that other people can hook into as well.

Heather Murphy: Oh, and I've definitely seen that. It's not just a family diary of, it's how your family fits into a bigger story that other people can relate to.

Jacqueline Jannotta: yeah, and everybody, everybody's family does, and I always love hearing other people's family stories too, and making those connections.

Heather Murphy: Well, thank you so much, Jacqueline for joining me today.

Jacqueline Jannotta: Yeah. Well, thank you for having me. It's been a pleasure, Heather.