The Beginning.............

For nearly 2 years Linda (Parrella) and Stan Mozden have planned for a trip of a lifetime. ................................ ----Linda is Italian. Both sets of her grandparents came from Italy during the first few years of the 20th Century. Eventually they settled in Rumford, Maine, where they worked for Canadian entrepreneur Hugh Chisholm who provided the vision and finances to transform Rumford into a world-class working-class mill town. Thus, Oxford Paper Mill was built. Italian immigrants supplied the skills and workers needed to build one of the best and largest paper mills ever. Linda's ancesters were amongst the very first Italians to make Rumford their permanet homes in the US. ................................ ----Our initial attempt to book the trip in summer 2012 gave us an education about when to travel and to book trips like ours to Italy: 1)To get the best deals book 5-6 months ahead. 2)The best time to go is during the harvest season, September/October. 3)We needed to tell those helping to prepare the trip and set the itinerary precisely what we wanted to accomplish. 4)No canned tour would satisfy our trip desires. 5)We needed much more information about Linda's family. 6)If carefully planned it could be done within a reasonable budget. 7)We were not ready and too late for Fall 2012. ................................ ----We spent the next year hounding all of Linda's relatives for family history and documents. Many of the family were surprised with what was gradually pieced together. Some of the family common wisdom was found to be incomplete and/or misunderstood. We found that some of the most valuable documents about the Italian connections were those in the State of Maine archives: service records, birth and baptism certificates, city directories, newspaper articles, town property tax records, etc. Learning detailed history of Italian-Americans in the US and, especially, Maine was essential to establishing who was in Linda's family and their relationship to each other (the family tree). ................................ ----We discovered that one set of Linda's relatives, the Bussoloris, were defense witnesses in one of the most famous immigration law cases in American history: Sacco & Vanzetti in 1920. ................................ ----The most valuable find was that both sets of grandparents homes in Italy had been long misidentified. Linda's mother's parents (Sassi & Bussolori) were from a Catholic parish named San Matteo della Decima (St Matthew the 10th) in San Giovanni in Persecito in the Provence of Bologna. Learning that shortly before Linda's grandparents left Italy there had been an armed conflict between the Catholic Church and the peasants over taxes collected as parish donations went a long way to explaining why the Sassis became Methodists shortly after coming to Rumford. Linda's father's family (Cavuoto & Parrella) came from two different hamlets (Cassano and Roccabascerana) in the town of Roccabascerana in Avellino Provence in Campania Region outside of Naples. This was discovered by finding Linda's grandmother's record of crossing, the Passenger List of the boat she came to the US on. Without this information and subsequent findings we would have been going to the wrong towns and hamlets. The planned genealogical search in Italy would have been interesting, but fruitless. ................................. ----Besides tracing Linda's family and seeking cousins, the trip has been planned for us to experience the culture of those sections of Italy from which the Italians of Rumford, Maine, came with a stop in Rome. This Blog is intended to be a record of our experiences and observations as we do the trip. Each day we will be posting something of our trip. Come each day to see how we are doing.