As the days became weeks, my initial excitement subsided.  I had already focused my attention on a different branch of my family tree when I received a message on the genealogy site requesting my email address.  One of my benefactor’s friends who lived in Trapani had obtained a copy of the birth record for me and he wanted to send the copies as attachments as well as mail paper documents to my home address.  Of course, I was more than happy to comply.   I had obtained some information from a birth extract that I had requested from Trapani previosuly; however, the photocopy of the record contained additional information that was not included with the extract.  As pleased as I was with the birth record, the receipt of a totally unanticipated record, a transcription of my ancestor’s marriage back in the United States, and, its subsequent translation, surpassed the initial excitement that the contents of the birth record had generated!

None of my blood relatives immigrated from Trapani; but, they were Sicilians who hailed instead from Belmonte Mezzagno, San Giuseppe Jato, and Palermo.  My efforts involving ancestors in Trapani were on behalf of my first cousin into whose keeping the majority of the correspondence between my grandfather and his brother had been entrusted–I regarded my intervention as a small way to acknowledge his generosity and cooperation.  Neither my cousin nor I knew very much about the grandparents we did not have in common.  Over time I accumulated bits and pieces of information that eventually helped me to put together a working scenario.  New data contributed to a more systematic  and fruitful investigation allowing a clearer picture of my cousin’s ancestors to appear.

While I was very happy to receive a copy of Leonarda Inzerillo’s  atti di nascita, the transcription of her marriage (atti di matrimonio) in Chester, Pennsylvania was tantamount to finding a buried treasure!. It seems that Leonarda was a devoted Sicilian woman who dutifully wrote her mother a detailed letter following her marriage to Stefano LaSpada.  Not only was Leonarda her mother’s daughter, her mother was a typical Sicilian matriarch who hurried to the civil authorities to have the transcription of her daughter’s wedding entered in to the official local records. What are the odds that 87 years later a marriage in the United States would be made known and elaborated upon through documents recorded in Sicily?  The transcription was so thorough that the volume and page number where the wedding was recorded in the church’s records were noted!  It also named Leonarda’s grandparents, which was indeed quite a bonus.

Internet searches for St Anthony of Padua Church in Chester, PA. returned a variety of hits that variously indicated the church itself was no longer operational.  St Anthony’s records had been transferred to St Katherine of Drexel Catholic Church in Chester, PA. along with the records from four other churches.  A couple of different telephone numbers were listed for St Anthony’s, but it was my call to St Katherine’s that paid dividends.  I was greeted by a very helpful person who listened patiently to my tale, wrote down the information that I supplied her, including the exact volume and page number where the marriage had been recorded, and then cheerfully volunteered to mail me a copy of the marriage certificate.  I didn’t want to impose on her good will but I found it impossible not to request that she also send me copies of any other documents involving the family if they were available.

A few days later I received a copy of the marriage certificate and the baptismal record of the couple’s first child.  When I asked that any other family records be included, it was more reflex on my part than an action based on any evidence I had that other church records existed.  I also had no reason to expect that the marriage certificate would contain the additional information that it did:  dates and churches where the couple were baptized in their native Sicily–Stefano in S. Filippo in San Filippo del Mela and Leonarda in S. Piero in Trapani.

A friend of mine who found himself alone and lost one night in the Sonoran Desert in Arizona offered this line in the concluding stanza of a poem he wrote recounting his experience during that night of introspection:  I never question gifts.

While I reflect on and lament the loss of my dear friend and his premature passing, I am equally saddened that so many will never have the opportunity to know him personally.  James has been memorialized and celebrated by family and friends from the Yankee north in Maine to the sweeping southern landscape of North Carolina, and sometime this year as well, in his beloved Rift Valley in Kenya–his ashes will enrich the soil on two continents as his living did our lives.  His wife, Chris, provided me with this link that honors Jim’s commitment to conservation on the George River in Maine.

One question persists as one reflects on one’s life and it remains as steadfastly haunting as it is common among us humans: What will become of me? All religions have their own peculiar reply, but I find comfort in the reassurances of the human heart, the self contained metaphor of love, and the immortality that memory guarantees despite the inescapable mortality of its only source.

It is difficult to exercise the golden mean once one experiences that first thrill of success upon revealing what was heretofore unknown about one’s ancestors, especially when those discoveries clothe names with flesh and breathe life into the dust of personal history; dates are transformed from numeric symbols to guideposts to a family’s extended conversation.  Even the most obscure clue elevates one’s pulse, which, in turn, results in one’s relatives running for cover.  A genealogist has to face the sober reality that there are many people, including family and friends, who are immune to what appears to them to be a pathological fascination with census reports, immigrant passenger lists, family trees, birth, death, and marriage certificates, cemeteries, obituaries, old photos, letters, and any shred of paper or document that is remotely connected to family.  Some may regard the future as liberation from the past and view the past as a fait accompli wherein what was is immutable.  While my own personal experiences do not purport to advance a novel hypothesis that supersedes the current laws of physics, I have been forced to revise my notion that all contents of the past, or fact, for that matter, are completely known and fixed; which is to say, that what we know of the past often has the quality of tacit acceptance, and by extension, results in our complicity in coloring those “objects” with subjectivity.   With genealogy research one learns that the past is not only cumulative but dynamic:  it grows and matures with the skillful retrieval of cogent evidence:  truth and existence are not equivalents–trace the evolution of a surname, for example, and compare that to the lineage of the human being of which it is ostensibly representative.  My ancestors continue to march into the present, changing, growing in some cases, declining in other instances, becoming increasingly familiar, fallible, but always more accessible, in the sense that one’s kin should always embrace one, warts and all.

For those who traversed the ocean from Europe to America to seek a rebirth in an often unkind environment, who were our antecedents, I marvel at their courage, their willingness to forsake the known in hopes that they might have the providence to mold the unknown with their hopes and dreams.  The past for those immigrant voyagers was a life line to the future.  I don’t know if my grandfather’s wildest imaginings could ever have envisioned the number and personalities of his progeny, or, if the barrier of his own language, would prompt a journey into the past that has metaphorically, at least, allowed me to return him to the homeland he left a century ago, but I’d like to think that it ameliorated the alienation he endured in this new land.  I believe we are all immigrants, whose travails refine the precious essence with which we are all endowed; I am content to be a part of that story, and prize my role as a weaver in a more magnificent myth: we are one family.

While several gaps in my family history exist, the circumstances surrounding my grandmother’s (my father’s mother) stay in an orphanage when she was a child remained shrouded in the bits and pieces of stories she related to me when I was a child.  No living family member recalls the name or the location of the orphanage and there are no documents or papers which exist that might provide clues to solve this mystery.  My grandmother said that she and her siblings were placed in the orphanage because her father was unable to take care of them; she spoke fondly of the Mother Superior who, by my grandmother’s account, treated her special, so much so the other nuns acted coldly and cruelly toward her in retribution for the favoritism she seemed to cull from the head nun.  It was difficult to reconcile my grandmother’s proud description of her father as a strong man who stood six feet tall in his stocking feet and the man who deposited his four children in orphanage.

The devil often frolics in the details; my research verified the adage was a truism as it pertained to the Coady family in the Frankford borough of Philadelphia, Pennsylvania in 1903.  Over time I have chipped away at the obdurate façade of the unknown until a form began to take shape, a living history emerged like the sculptures Michelangelo freed from his blocks of marble.  Lawrence Coady was born in 1859 to Thomas and Mary Coady who emigrated from Ireland probably around 1852.  If Irish naming convention holds true, somewhere in Ireland there remained another Lawrence Coady, my great grandfather’s namesake.

The northeast section of Philadelphia, the borough Frankford, was a German-Irish stronghold in the middle half of the 19th century as the neighborhoods in South Philadelphia around Christian St. and South Seventh St were for my Italian ancestors who gathered together there from Sicily.  Once established, the Coady clan remained in Frankford.  Around 1894 Lawrence married Ella Free or Freeh from Bucks County; seven children would follow, two would die in infancy.  Ella Coady died of pneumonia in May one month after the birth of her son Vincent.  When I discovered her death certificate in Philadelphia’s records I speculated that this tragic incident preceded the decision to place the children in an orphanage; however, I still had no evidence to support my hypothesis.

Since I knew that the family lived in Philadelphia I made a concerted effort to locate and, if necessary, contact all orphanages in the city of brotherly love.  Searches on the internet can be moveable feasts, producing variable results but one of my queries retrieved a telephone number for St Vincent’s Orphanage in Philadelphia, which proved to be current when I tapped it into my cell phone.  These days nothing is accomplished with a single phone call; after several attempts, I received a call back from a gentleman who was almost in a state of ecstasy because he was able to find my grandmother with the information I had left him previously on his voice mail.  Unfortunately, most of the records kept by the orphanage had been destroyed; however, he had in his care the original ledger in which the data regarding the orphans who were admitted and discharged were recorded.  One day later I received photocopies of the ledger page which contained the entries for my grandmother and her siblings.  That ledger page provided several missing pieces of a genealogical puzzle:  my great grandmother’s maiden name, the church where the children were baptized, cross references of street addresses, names of contacts, and the exact admittance and discharge dates.  Before, we ended our conversation, I managed to glean one more telephone number from my caller, which led to the eventual discovery of St Joachim’s Catholic Church where all of the Coady children were baptized!  Unlike many of the churches where my ancestors were members, St Joachim was still active so I didn’t have the added task of determining where the old records had been transferred or how I should go about obtaining copies of those in which I was interested.

The ledger page from St Vincent’s revealed that in September of 1903 my grandmother with three of her siblings was placed in St Vincent’s Orphanage by her father Lawrence Coady and her mother, Ella, who was noted as deceased with a symbol of a cross drawn next to her name.  The orphanage was founded in 1855 by five German, Roman Catholic parishes and was run very strictly with the treatment of the children entrusted to its care often being severe.  In 1909, all four children were discharged to their aunt–I believe the wife of Lawrence Coady’s brother Thomas.  Meanwhile I await copies of church records from St Joachim’s so graciously offered me by the parish office manager with whom I spoke immediately after my conversation with the gentleman from St. Vincent.

While I have been fortunate enough to make considerable progress in tracing my ancestors, many questions persist:  What happened in the lost the years from 1909 to 1915 during which my grandmother disappeared while her siblings were either adopted or lived with relatives? What became of Lawrence Coady from 1910 until his death in 1928? What happened to the baby Vincent when his siblings were placed in the orphanage?  There are days when I share the anxiety of Beckett’s characters in Waiting For Godot restlessly anticipating the character of the unknown, but not today.

We finished off our evening at the Blue Ridge Music Center on Parkway Mile Post 213.  This wasn’t our first time picniking in the open air of the Blue Ridge and enjoying the music provided through out the summer.  The first group came from nearby Galax (BRMC is actually in Virginia) while the second act, Linda and Robin Williams had to travel a bit farther from near Staunton (that’s pronounced STANTON for those who are wise in the way of Virginia phonetics).  The Williams’ are frequent guest musicians on A Prairie Home Companion and were actually in the movie too, and performed one of their original songs.  I would have expected a bigger crowd considering the quality of the performers.  The sky threatened rain earlier in the day but not a drop fell to dampen the spirits of those in attendance.

Mile Post 213 represents a completely different view of the National Park System, and, one worth experiencing.

Hypotheticals generally dominate a discussion of civic responsibility and intimate the existence of moral imperatives that are available to everyone as guide and arbiter of ethical uncertainties.  The challenges which frequently confront the average person are not abstractions that are extrapolated for philosophical investigations: class, religious belief, ethnic origins, and indeed, real human faces etched with or masking the complexity of personal emotional content, are the realities with which a community or neighborhood must contend.  Interactions with one’s neighbors offer a wealth of opportunities to test both word and deed.  Engagement is a fundamental tender of citizenship.

Incidents that may be sharply defined for some may be technical lacunae to others to which they retreat to practice an absurd casuistry that affords them the appearance of trying to be good stewards.  What is one to do for example when one is charged at by a large snarling, dog weighing nearly ninety pounds from a neighbor’s property as one is walking down one’s driveway to retrieve mail from the postman, especially when the neighbor subdues the animal as it is about to launch its attack in earnest, disclaiming ownership and declaring that the dog is a stray?  What does one do when it happens a second time?  When the neighbor is in law enforcement and should be conversant in the statutes that govern such things?  One would assume that reasoned discussion would result in a swift, equitable, and sensible solution.  It seems that there is an inevitable vacuum created in both public and private discourse regardless of the best intentions of the communicants.  What may be obvious to a professional in her application of law in the course of her official duties somehow devolves into a landscape marred by gray areas and excuses when the same standard which has brought penalty to others is carelessly ignored when it should be applied in one’s private life.

History has documented the necessity for vigilance in protecting against unjust laws which result from the distortions of prejudice and the aberration of reason poisoned by fear, ignorance, and hatred.  Civil disobedience has its place in a reflective and open society as that society refines itself toward achieving its goal as an appropriate and secure instrument guaranteeing justice for all of its members as well as those who may in any way fall under its care and protection.  Lethargy should not be confused with civil disobedience–foibles and personal peccadilloes fail as litmus tests to challenge the enforcement of laws enacted for communal health.  Stray dog attacks launched from a neighbor’s property onto one’s own property are not the sort of activities whereby one chooses to make a stand to defy the law in an act of civil disobedience, unless, of course, one has not the slightest regard for the rights and safety of one’s neighbor, which, coincidentally, are mandated to be upheld in one’s professional capacity!

The horns of dilemma can be unforgiving and particularly punishing if one’s balance falters.  What the law allows often challenges the realities of communal dynamics: law can be sterile and distant but neighbors reside in close proximity with each other in their own domains, which are often delineated by the irons that mark the corners of their property lines.  The potentially painful or distasteful outcome of choices defines a dilemma.  If one does nothing about an aggressive stray dog, for example, one may avoid ill feelings with one’s neighbor only to be bitten later.  However, if one acts according to the legal statutes to have the stray apprehended, one may remove the danger of physical injury but incur the ill-will of one’s neighbor.  When the dilemma is made even more acute because prior discussions have failed to yield a spirit of cooperation, psychological pressures exact an additional toll on those involved.  As poignant and significant as our own personal affairs may be to us, they pale in comparison to the dangers so many must face, often alone, throughout the world.  A stray dog and a recalcitrant neighbor in the midst of prosperity in the US amounts to a minor absurdity when juxtaposed with the emaciated faces of dying children in Sudan, women and young girls raped, sometimes by those who have betrayed the trust that they pledged to uphold in the first place, or young boys robbed of their innocence when they are kidnapped, brainwashed, and trained to become killers.  Despite the disparity of scale, the personal dilemmas that may plague us from time to time should not be dismissed out of hand.  Indifference can be a one way path to nowhere, a destination in which the horror we decry in the world today, may not only exist but flourish.

However one defines a good citizen one should never devalue courage and integrity.  If we are content to talk about citizenship in the abstract and are reluctant to risk our own comfort in exchange for a confinement that is neither safe or healthy, what have we really achieved?  As we marginalize ourselves and our values, we jeopardize the foundational piers of an open democratic society.  We cannot assume that membership in any organization or group suffixed with an “ism” exempts us from evaluating the principles upon which both public and private segments of our society are based.  Some of us may find ourselves so preoccupied with our own lives and so certain of our own beliefs that we fail to comprehend the damage we might cause others by our inflexible moral rectitude.  Rules as well as rights are generally only accorded to members of a specific group: our dark past with slavery should be a reminder that law without justice is at best, a tragedy deferred.

Enjolas entreats his comrades in the musical Les Miserable to consider their choices, the perilous consequences of their dilemma.  We may only find ourselves at the barricades metaphorically; however, it is both relevant and necessary for us to ponder our own responsibility in determining our common destiny and the contract to be established between the people and the government.

It is time for us all
To decide who we are
Do we fight for the right
To a night at the opera now?
Have you asked of yourselves
What’s the price you might pay?
Is it simply a game
For rich young boys to play?
The color of the world
Is changing day by day…
Red and Black
Les Miserables

Our weather forecasts tend to be more wishful thinking than they accurate predictions.  There have been rain dances in Atlanta conducted by shamans from various Native American tribes but I’m going with the Temptations, at least after the fireworks are over.

Sunshine, blue sky, please go away…
I wish it would rain (oh how i wish that it would rain)
Oh let it rain, rain, rain, rain (oh how i wish that it would rain)
The Temptations — I Wish It Would Rain

Last Saturday night we caught the final performance of Godspell at the Open Space Cafe Theater in Greensboro.  A good friend had recommended this particular production to us with glowing terms; she found the musical very entertaining even though she admitted that she was a bit weak on the finer points of the New Testament and the Gospel of Matthew–she’s Jewish.  She also sings and is a musician.  Her enthusiasm for the show was justified.

The performance was indeed entertaining, which I felt owed its greatest debt to the actors who engaged the audience in just the way the original stage direction seemed to indicate was necessary for the play to be successful–if the play appears too polished or too slick, its message runs the risk of being considered glib or even trite.  I vaguely recall when Godspell was first introduced in 1970 or 1971.  At the time, I remember that I considered it a kind of fundamentalist retort to Jesus Christ Superstar, which I much preferred to Godspell and liked well enough to purchase a recording of the soundtrack–I think I still have that old vinyl around here somewhere.  Sifting through the few memories I could recall from that time period, Day By Day, seemed to be the only notable song from Godspell whereas almost every song from Jesus Christ Superstar was instantly recognizable.  Day by Day lilted wistfully, and, in some ways, predictably while most of the songs featured in JCSS contained the elemental tension people face in lives that are challenged through matters of faith (I Don’t Know How To Love Him,for example), they are also more memorable since their foundation is rock music and not a church hymnal as was the case with Godspell.

Sometimes too much information can be as limiting as too little; consequently, I often do more in depth research on a play after I’ve seen it performed rather than before.  My method is probably counter intuitive to most; however, my penchant for over thinking is less likely to impede my ability to view the performance without preconceptions or unrealistic expectations if I come prepared more as a noble savage than as, well, a member of the pontificating array of philosophers/thinkers with which Godspell begins.  Post performance research reinforced my general attitude toward the actors, the staging, and the dynamics of the former and latter within the context of the play itself.  My investigations also reinforced my initial reservations formed decades ago about Godspell as a vehicle for the cargo it meant to transport.  I think the play itself fails in that regard; however, that is a matter of my own personal preference rather than a commentary on the skill and talent of the actors who labor in the variously articulated roles.  I just did not see how the concept of community was defined and solidified through the principal character, Jesus, the people, and his disciples as the original director’s notes indicate should be the case.  I have difficulty believing that this can be accomplished regardless of the actors selected for the various roles.  While the archaic spelling of Gospel suggests novelty and, perhaps, intimates that a revision or reinterpretation of the gospel’s meaning in light of current events will follow, it falls short despite references to foreclosures and sky-rocketing fuel prices.  OSCT’s performance of Godspell didn’t devolve into a vaudevillian band of merry pranksters bent on one-upmanship; however, the nature of play tends to teeter toward that precipice, nonetheless.

On balance Joe Nierle, the actors, and all of the OSCT crew did a commendable job and we were rewarded with an evening of great entertainment.  OSCT offers a different kind of live theater experience without sacrificing quality in either material or actors.  The informal nature of the venue promotes a more  communal atmosphere and helps to remove the barriers which tend to isolate the actors from the audience:  in a very real sense, and certainly with regard to Godspell, the audience becomes part of the performance.

The remainder of OSCT’s 2008 season promises a rich range of plays: Crowns; Blood Brothers; Blithe Spirit; Sander’s Family Christmas.  Based on past experience, there isn’t a bad choice in the lot, so why not make a point to see all of them?

I had tested several genealogy programs for Mac: Reunion 9, MacFamilyTree 5, Heredis, Genealogy Pro, PAWriterX, and a few more whose names elude me at present before I finally demoed iFamily for Tiger. For starters, $100 was way too steep a price to shell out for Reunion 9–it just didn’t seem worth it to me despite its apparent dominance in its category for Mac software; and, I also found that its crippled demo was incredibly short-sighted considering the cost of the product. MacFamilyTree was better but the glowing reports regarding the software that I had encountered were for the old version, 4.5.  I visited the support forum of the latest version where the user comments and the company’s responses read like a script to a modern day soap opera or perhaps a mystery miniseries which revolved around the on-going, suspense-filled question: Will they ever get it right? To be frank, I liked iFamily from the start but it lacked a feature of being able to generate an HTML file, which could be published on a web site. That capability was already built into Reunion and MacFamilyTree and it seemed as if I would have to resort to other means to accomplish HTML generation with the data maintained in iFamily. As requests for this feature increased on iFamily’s support forum, Keith responded by implementing it in style–the resulting file looks so good that it is fun just to generate an HTML file and burn it to a CD or DVD for family members to view on their own computers, PC’s or Macs. iFamily has continued to mature with the addition of features and enhancements, which, in many cases, are a collaborative effort involving specific requests submitted by forum members and the developer. Equally as important as the maturation of the software is the restraint Keith has shown by not sacrificing quality for unnecessary bells and whistles and performance degrading bloat. iFamily for Tiger, Leopard, or Snow Leopard, this cat just purrs!

While we may have to suspend disbelief to enter into the world of live theater, once we accede to that premise we should be able to discern some internal logic or structure or pattern by which to observe and participate in the thesis of the imaginary world which has been created for us. The cliched use of piratic alliteration pointed the play in the direction of a quasi-Disney movie interspersed with comedic interludes; however, the simulated gang rape near the end of the play is not something one generally associates with comedy; although, I actually observed many in the audience laughing, perhaps, that was one way of expressing either their discomfort or their disbelief. Those familiar with internet abbreviations might consider WTF! a more apt response. I have no puritanical ax to grind with regard to specific content of a play; in fact, the subject of rape was handled with artistic realism in From The Mississippi Delta but it mattered to the telling of the story whereas in Blackbeard it was an embarrassingly awkward appendage, or perhaps more metaphorically correct, it was a shameful display of dead low tide sensationalism. Cliches notwithstanding, the staccato delivery of lines which footnoted the action with bits of information (I suppose to maintain some semblance of historical accuracy or legend consistency–who cares, it’s a play!), were largely incomprehensible so that what was supposed to inform us turned into complete gibberish.

Beyond the bizarre introduction of gang rape into a production, which has seemingly been promoted as a family fun play, aping but failing to achieve the campy élan of Johnny Depp in Pirates of the Caribbean, I found I really didn’t care about the subject matter at all. Blackbeard as a central figure as written in this particular play was simply boring. I found it impossible to believe that the sea exerted some mysterious, almost supernatural power over the young Edward Teach, nor was I able to parlay that notion, even if I accepted it for arguments sake, into a soul lost to the powers of evil, an incarnation of Satan itself. And, really, who in the world can believe the scenes with the wholesome, innocent girl who attempted to redeem and reform Teach, as she forlornly sings of her betrayed love following her gang rape by Teach’s crew, which was instigated by the infamous pirate himself? Come on, Preston!! This isn’t the Emperor’s New Clothes where the audience is appropriately duped into believing they are witnessing the finery of high art when in fact they are the true spectacle, naked and adoring in their ignorance.

Two things: This doesn’t bode well for next season’s production of Ghost; and, Open Space Cafe Theater is looking more and more promising as an option to continuing as as season ticket holder at Triad Stage.