Victoria Gatopoulos is half Italian. Her great-grandparents immigrated from Italy. Her mother grew up in an Italian-American family in Brooklyn. Though Gatopoulos grew up in East Rutherford, in one of New Jersey’s most-Italian areas, the 17-year-old said she didn’t really feel that connected to her ethnicity. Her great-grandparents and the stories...

It is a special year for L’Italo Americano, which celebrates its 110th anniversary. One hundred and ten years dedicated to keeping the Italian American community on the West Coast united, to inform people about its achievements and its history and, to maintain alive the Italian heritage of thousands of families, throughout many a generation. Indeed...

Growing up in Connecticut, Deborah always felt something was missing, a sensation that stayed with her even when, as an adult, she moved to New York with her husband. One day at work, following a playful exchange with a colleague, she googled the name of her great-grandfather’s hometown, Fumone, and, upon seeing photos of it, was immediately won ov...

Although most families hold reunions to coincide with various milestones in each member’s life, the Spremulli’s, who have long-time ties to Johnston, Cranston and Providence, have always taken a much different route. On a recent sunny afternoon, the Spremulli brothers – John, Tony and Joe – held their annual family reunion-luncheon inside famed Twi...

This summer in late July the members of Tony and Pauline Oropallo’s family will gather for their "Big Six" family reunion. The tradition began in the late 1970s and there has been at least one reunion every decade since. The name "Big Six" is in honor of the six Oropallo children: Harry, Eugene, Mary, Louis, Teresa and Anthony. Family members will...

When: Saturday, May 19, 2018 From 10:00 am To 1:30 pm - Where: Italian Cultural Institute of Los angeles - Organized by: IIC & Lingua Viva - Entrance: Fee $105 *To register please call (310) 824-7408 or email [email protected] Back by Popular Demand! Millions of Americans identify themselves as having Italian ancestry. If you’re one of them,...

Childhood is, or should be, a time of innocence, and for a while that is the way it was for brothers Michael Jr. and Jeffrey Gentile. And then a pistol fell out of a coat. “We were taking the coats from people who had come over to visit our parents and this gun just dropped on the floor,” says Michael. “For us it wasn’t a matter of, ‘Oh my God, loo...

Researchers of Sicilian and Italian genealogy are blessed by the wealth of original records of birth, baptism, marriage and death that may be found for many ancestral towns, on microfilm or on line. Often those original records may have misspellings, or valid variations of given names or surnames.  In many cases, misspellings by English-speaking cl...

When your ancestors settled in America, many of the important events that happened in their lives and their families’ lives were recorded in U.S. vital records. The main types of records that may yield valuable information about your ancestors are marriage, birth and death records. Each of these types of records has a distinct advantage in discover...

I grew up, as I’m sure many of you did, with a lot of Italian relatives who married into your family line, but some were a little different. There might be a godmother who doesn’t quite connect to the tree or folks who we call our “uncles” and “aunts,” but were they really related? “Who was Cooma Micheline? Is she a cousin of Nonna?” Nobody seemed...