Zia Carmela Merolla

Born in Meta di Sorrento (copy of birth certificate obtained from Stato Civile, Meta) Carmela was the sister of my grandfather Gaetano Merolla, aunt to my mother Maria Laura Merolla Bacigalupa. But except for the birthdate and the faded photograph, we have no records and very little information on her. The photo was sent to her brother Gaetano after he'd emigrated to the United States, and later handed down to his daughter, then a granddaughter. On the back of the yellowed print, written by hand, is the simple inscription "Gaetano's sister and her family." No names of the people with her, no date. The cardboard frame on which the photo is mounted credits Raynon Studio, Algiers, with a fragment of a street address (what appears to be "21, Rue Dad'A----") disappearing under the bottom of the print.

I assume that the man standing behind and to Carmela's right is her husband, though he possibly looks younger than she. I do not know if he was Italian or Algerian. The youth to her left is possibly the older son, the smaller children flanking her a younger son and daughter.

So little we know. But a story (fable?) about Carmela told me in early childhood has always intrigued me, and I continue to seek a door, an opening, something which will lead to more knowledge of this mysterious and fascinating woman.

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Carmela was 3 years older than brother Gaetano, no doubt that age difference a prime factor in how he told her story years later. Apparently, Carmela one day informed her parents that she was going to marry a man of her own choosing and would live with him in Algeria. This triggered strong objection and fierce arguments within the family, all distressful to Gaetano, renowned for his gentleness. Verbal exchange was particularly heavy between mother and daughter. I do not know if Carmela eloped or if she departed for Algiers with her husband after marriage in Italy. But she left in anger, her final words to her mother (una maledizione!) : "May the milk in your breasts dry up!"

Years later, my mother related the tale to me with her characteristic flair for dramatic story-telling and insistence -- a la Aesop -- that every denouement contain a moral. "And you know what? When Zia Carmela had her own babies in Algiers, her breasts were dry, she couldn't give milk, and had to hire wetnurses to nurse those babies!" La giustizia.

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If Carmela scandalized her family, she did not me. Rather, I was fascinated by the tale of a young woman (if not girl) who rebelled against the traditional role of arranged marriages for daughters and the presumption that they would remain close to home. And intrigued by the fact that an ancestor had the courage to dream of what, in those days, certainly must have been "faraway places with strange sounding names," had the fearlessness to strike out. Did she, in fact, pave the way for younger brother Gaetano, who was to venture even farther afield, to America.

I yearn to know her marriage name, the key which might open up sources of records in Algiers or Italy. I look at the photo and see a family presumably financially comfortable, notwithstanding the fact that studio portraits of the time undoubtedly prescribed dressing in Sunday-best. I wonder if she fled Italy merely as a rebellious youth or if the exodus was more reasonably pragmatic, a relocation to better employment opportunity or to advance a profession. When did she reconcile with family, when exactly was the photo sent to Gaetano after he'd settled in Baltimore.

Would I like to have known her, bettered from the relationship? Certainly she appears formidable in that photograph, a woman obviously not only the center of her family but of her universe! . I've little doubt that if meeting her, I'd have rated her high among the list of strong, colorful, passionate elders I was eventually privileged to know in the Old Country. If Zia Carmela was only half as tempestuous as my grandfather and mother painted her, such a meeting may well have proved challenging. But I'd love to have tested the waters.

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Is there someone out there in cyberspace -- in Sorrento, Algiers, the US or elsewhere, cruising the Web, stirred by memory -- with even a scrap of information about this lost aunt and her nameless husband and children? The indomitable woman won't let me rest.

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ROOTS LINKS
Grandfather Louis Leo Bacigalupo
Bacigalupa Lineage
Grandfather Gaetano Merolla

Return to Searching My Roots
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