Although I've never written about it on OnMilwaukee.com, I've spent a fair amount of time and travel over the past 20-odd years digging up my family's past. A lot of people have done this and always with varying degrees of success.
There are genealogists out there that are amazing. They know all the Soundex codes by heart and they can navigate Ancestry.com like your kid can navigate "Grand Theft Auto." I'm not a club genealogist, although I certainly respect what they do. In fact, I'm not even really a genealogist, I think. I'm just more of a solitary researcher. And an obsessive / compulsive one at that.
I think maybe because I'm from a family of cops and am a journalist and historian, I have something of a detective's eye when it comes to this kind of work. But sometimes even the simplest concepts elude me when I'm digging. It's that whole not seeing the forest for the trees business.
Digging in New York City, I assembled birth, marriage and other records and looked at the 1910 and 1920 censuses to come to the conclusion that my family never left Manhattan from the day my great-grandparents arrived in 1907 and 1909. Besides, no one in the family ever talked about any place but Manhattan.
But, for some reason, I couldn't ever find a birth certificate for my grandmother, born in 1915. But that's not necessarily odd in and of itself. I'd often run across name misspellings, incorrect dates and similar things that could hinder a successful search.
But between the broad lines of the 1910 and 1920 census a lot can happen, right? Well, I found a World War I draft card for my great-grandfather and he lived in New Kensington, Penn.! Who knew? Checking a map, I saw that New Ken (as it's called by those in the Pittsburgh area, apparently), is pretty close to Leechburg, a town with many emigrants from the same small town as us in the Old World. Suddenly, I thought I might know where to find my grandma's birth certificate.
Eighteen dollars and a few days later, I learned that not only is it true she was born in Pennsylvania, she was born in Armstrong County, where Leechburg (but not New Ken) is located.
The thing that never fails to surprise me is how often coincidences pop up, reminding me what a small world we live in. The coincidence here is that while researching a book on Piemontese emigration to the U.S., I learned about Leechburg and started corresponding with an elderly gentleman from there whose father was from our village.
Today, I got to tell him that it seems pretty likely that his dad and my great-grandfather knew each other. If not at home in Zanco, then certainly in the small, tight-knit Zanchese community in Leechburg. Ninety or so years later, our paths have again crossed.
Stories like this have turned my history for that side of the family from a two-paragraph document into one that now runs just under 200 pages.
Born in Brooklyn, N.Y., where he lived until he was 17, Bobby received his BA-Mass Communications from UWM in 1989 and has lived in Walker's Point, Bay View, Enderis Park, South Milwaukee and on the East Side.
He has published three non-fiction books in Italy – including one about an event in Milwaukee history, which was published in the U.S. in autumn 2010. Four more books, all about Milwaukee, have been published by The History Press.
With his most recent band, The Yell Leaders, Bobby released four LPs and had a songs featured in episodes of TV's "Party of Five" and "Dawson's Creek," and films in Japan, South America and the U.S. The Yell Leaders were named the best unsigned band in their region by VH-1 as part of its Rock Across America 1998 Tour. Most recently, the band contributed tracks to a UK vinyl/CD tribute to the Redskins and collaborated on a track with Italian novelist Enrico Remmert.
He's produced three installments of the "OMCD" series of local music compilations for OnMilwaukee.com and in 2007 produced a CD of Italian music and poetry.
In 2005, he was awarded the City of Asti's (Italy) Journalism Prize for his work focusing on that area. He has also won awards from the Milwaukee Press Club.
He has be heard on 88Nine Radio Milwaukee talking about his "Urban Spelunking" series of stories, in that station's most popular podcast.
