Some Amazing Women Part II

Then there were the women, my ancestors, on my mother’s side. Some of whom also crossed the ocean.

My other grandmother, my mother’s mother, had been shuttled across the ocean as a child but was then brought back to her native land, Germany, to be brought up by an uncle.

When she was old enough, she was promised to an older man, a lawyer, who could offer her a secure future.  Although she didn’t love him and attempted to elope with her true love, they caught up with the couple on the train and she was forced into a future not of her making. When though is a future of one’s own making? Marriages were once based on anything but love or the desires of the woman.  Ask anyone who is doing research on women in the Renaissance, although marriages were arranged from the Greeks up to the present.

By the time my mother met her future husband, things had changed. She was their first-born child and grew up in Wurzburg in a well-to-do middle-class family. She excelled at school and began her university studies where she met a young American of German descent who had come to Germany to finish his studies.

She was among the first group of women to study at the university. They both received their PhDs (I don’t think he ever forgave her for besting him with a vote of cum lode on her thesis) (photo Meta in lab) and when he returned to the US, she followed him as his bride.

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I wonder what memories she and her mother harbored. Those of my mother I was in time to capture, at least in part. and her childhood has come alive in her notes. I also have what is known as the Ahnenpass, a booklet required by the German/Nazi government, documenting your ancestors, when and where they were born and died, who they married, what their professions were.  There was one in particular, Johann George Anton Vergho, employed by Count von Eltzacher in Wurzburg, who had 24 children, I must say with two different wives.

Some of these women had voluntary followed their men, crossing the great ocean as my mother did. Several decades later, I also crossed the great ocean, although in the opposite direction. And like them, by steamer, although later I crossed it more often by air.

Like my mother, I too was a young woman seeking a future elsewhere. I think though that it was not a future I had in mind but was seeking more to find out who I was.   I had no qualms in leaving America although originally, I did not know I was eventually to remain in Italy.

Now in a land that has been my home for over sixty years I wonder what is my land, what is the land of my ancestors.  And what is the land of the ancestors of my children. Surely it is Italy, in particular on their father’s side, but that is only a part of their heritage, and who they are also depends on that of their mother.

Am I American? Or German? Or Italian? Were some of my ancestors then immigrants? Am I then the child of immigrants? Can I myself now be considered an immigrant? We used to tease my mother saying that with her prominent cheekbones and dark complexion one of her ancestors must have passed through in the following of Kubla Khan.

One cannot escape one’s heritage, one’s past.

Perhaps that is why so many are now delving into their past, in genealogy websites, seeking answers as to who they are, where they have come from. In thinking back I realize that one must take each individual case as a tale by itself. Comparisons are useless, and in the end, it matters little to know that we are cousins, eight removed, of someone in Pennsylvania or some other state. Each of us, American, Italian, German, has a unique story to tell that depends as much on our own actions as it does on our distant or not so distant forebears.   

One must take each individual case as a tale by itself, surely interdependent to a degree, and my grandmother’s story and that of my great grandmother are part of an ongoing saga, that includes my mother’s and mine with chapters still being written by those who come after me.