The Lost Family by Libby Copeland

Author:Libby Copeland
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Abrams
Published: 2020-03-03T00:00:00+00:00

Rosario Castronovo grew up without much in the way of cultural identity, but he clung to his mother’s story that she had Sicilian heritage. At twenty-one, when he decided to legally change his name to distance himself from a father he describes as abusive, he chose Italian first and last names in a nod to his mother’s culture. He’d heard “Castronovo” meant “new castle,” and that’s what he believed he was building—a new life, a new identity. Nobody in his family stopped him, though he’d later learn that many of them knew this was a fable.

Come to think of it, a lot of the decisions Rosario made as a younger man were nods to a heritage he’d later learn he could not claim. He joined the Catholic church as an adult and was baptized. He studied and began singing opera. He proposed to his Italian American girlfriend after flying her to Italy for the millennium. He was “trying to define who I was.” Many of us have family stories, memories, holidays, habits, and language to assist in the constructions of our ethnic identities. Rosario filled in the blank parts with what he thought it meant to be Italian. He was “searching,” he’d say later. “What was going to make me me?”

It was when he was about to be married, in the early 2000s, that he decided to find out more about the background of his mother, an orphan raised in foster care. Rosario wanted children, and he imagined that one day they’d ask where they came from, just as he’d asked his own parents. He wanted to be able to give them an answer.

In the town hall in the small town in Vermont where his mother had grown up, Rosario found not one but three birth certificates for her, and they were rife with redactions. Strange. One listed the race of his mother’s father as “negro.” Rosario was mystified. Perhaps his grandfather had been a dark-skinned Sicilian mistaken for a black man. But more likely, he thought, putting the information together with old census reports that sometimes named his mom’s paternal side as black and sometimes as white, the birth certificate was right, and there were important, fundamental facts he did not know about himself and his mother. He did not go to his mother yet because he wanted more evidence before he rocked her world. Maybe she doesn’t know, he thought.

Over the next few years, Rosario used genealogy skills to research his mom’s side, but there were details he could not fill in from the paper trail alone. So, he embarked on genetic testing. He would eventually learn that he is about 18 percent sub-Saharan African, as well as smaller amounts Native American and Asian, all through his mother’s side. His elderly mother was uneasy when he went to her with the results of an early autosomal DNA test he’d persuaded her to take.

“I said, ‘Did you know?’ and she said, ‘Yes,’” Rosario says. She said, “I didn’t tell you because I didn’t want you to go through what I went through.

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