The Best Thing I Ever Did, part 2

In 1962 Jimmy and Mary moved the family from Joliet, Illinois, to Chicago Heights, Illinois, now only a five minute drive from his barbershop. And soon I was born. Many times over the next decades Jimmy told, in bits and pieces, the story of the two Italian girls in Differdange, Luxembourg, and how he came to be loved by their family. (Click on any image to see it larger.)


Damn, I was a cute kid! What the heck
happened? February-ish, 1965.

Flash forward to the year 2000. Jimmy and Mary’s children had all grown up and flown the coop. Mary had died suddenly in 1993, and Jimmy lived alone. His youngest child had been hit with the genealogy bug. In preparation for a huge family reunion we were planning, I was putting together the first issue of our family newsletter which was to feature a brief biography of Jimmy. In a visit with him at his home, I asked him about his war experiences. I had heard little snippets of his "two girls in Differdange" story, but he had never explained the whole thing. He told me of the nearly 20-year correspondence with Tresi. He told me that she had mentioned her illness. He showed me the last letter he had received from her, still accompanied by the envelope in which it had arrived 39 years before. Then he broke down in tears of grief over the loss as, certainly, she was dead by now; tears of guilt that he had never written back to her to offer words of comfort or wishes of good luck.

I was at a loss for what to say to comfort him, so I managed to say that maybe she wasn't dead. He said that he doubted it. After all, she never wrote again. I wrote in my research notebook the last known address of Teresa Civitareale Arrigoni.

I was in the middle of genealogy fever. My research gears were already greased and spinning. I had the power and the reach of the internet at my fingertips. I felt that anything was possible, so what the hell?

The first thing I did was post a message at The Genealogy Forum, which is where I had made the most meaningful connections in my family research. In the Italy, France, Luxembourg, Ohio, and Massachusetts forums I asked if anyone had ever known of anybody named Civitareale who had lived in Differdange during the war. I also briefly mentioned the 20-year correspondence that Jimmy had with a Civitareale from there.

Then I went to Yahoo.com's people search and did a white pages phone directory search on Civitareale and Arrigoni in Differdange. Then I did the same in the village of Hussigny-Godbrange, France. That time I came up with the name, address and phone number of Egidio Arrigoni, and it matched the address on the envelope that Jimmy had shown me! I immediately wrote a brief letter telling who I was, who my father was, and with whom he had corresponded for 20 years. I humbly asked if this was the same person that Jimmy knew. I leaned on one of my contacts from the forums - my newly discovered fifth cousin - in Altoona, Pennsylvania, for help. He is a high school teacher of foreign languages. He is fluent in Spanish, German (I think), French and Italian, so I e-mailed him the letter I had just written and asked him to translate it into Italian and into French. I transcribed all three versions to paper and sent it off, crossing my fingers for a response.

The first edition of the family newsletter went out, and then the second three months later. Jimmy’s sister, Mary – the eldest of Concetta’s children – and his younger brother, Ray, died within months of each other. Time slipped into 2001. I started a new job with a heavy travel schedule. The family reunion weekend came and went. The world cried on 9/11. I lost steam and the family newsletter went into limbo; 2002 slid into 2003. I never received a response to my letter to Egidio Arrigoni.

Sometime in the middle of 2003 I had begun to think about using my frequent flyer miles to take my father to Italy to visit Castel di Sangro, the Abruzzo town from where his parents had emigrated. It took some convincing, as he was unsure that his failing hands and feet could carry him through all the walking. One of his friends convinced him to go by telling him that, if he never went, he would spend the rest of his life regretting it. My two brothers, upon hearing of my plans, signed on to make the trip as well. The itinerary was firmed up: four days in Rome, four days in Castel di Sangro. The travel dates were agreed on between my two brothers and me for summer of 2004.

In December of 2003 I got an itch and I opened the genealogy research notebook for the first time in over a year. My Altoona, Pennsylvania, cousin had disappeared from the forums, his e-mail address now defunct. I felt like I was starting from scratch again. So I started over. On December 9 I searched on my own name in The Genealogy Forum. There's a page where it offers a link to "see all of this member's posts." I clicked on it and saw a list of every message I had posted to the website, and all of the follow-ups that people had posted in response to my posts.

And there, at the bottom of the page, was a response link to "Civitareale in Differdange!" It was exactly one year old, written two years after my original query. After leaping out of my chest, my heart sank. There was no way this person is still at the same e-mail. Against my better judgment I opened the message. The author claimed that he knew a Civitareale when he lived in Differdange; he had gone to school with him.

I replied personally to the posting, and discovered a .lu domain name; he still lived in Luxembourg. A few days later I received two e-mail messages from him asking why I don't respond to his e-mails. His name is Marc. I wrote to him, copy-pasting the only e-mails I got from him and explained that there must be a problem with the connections.

In subsequent e-mails Marc told me that he knew how to get in touch with the Civitareale that he grew up with, and that he would ask him about "our" Civitareale. The holidays came and went, and I figured that Marc had struck out and didn't bother to write back.

Then, on January 10, 2004 I received another message. Marc wanted to know if Jimmy stayed in Differdange. He wanted to know dates. Did my father know any other families or soldiers from the same period? I answered all of his questions to the best of my knowledge.

On January 11, 2004 he wrote again to say that he will contact the Civitareale schoolmate, and that he will also check in Hussigny, which is only about thirty miles or less from Differdange(!). At this point I was giving him every bit of information I could think of, to include the address in Hussigny that I had confirmed from Jimmy's envelope.

On January 12, 2004 Marc wrote to tell me that the Civitareale family he knows is not the one Jimmy knew. However, the father of his schoolmate knew of Tresi in Hussigny, and thought that she was still alive! By this point I was almost on fire with excitement! Then I read the next message, sent on the 13th, and he told me that he had just spoken with Tresi's daughter, Sylvaine!! She was VERY delighted to hear about my efforts to track down her mother, who was by then 83 and living in a senior center in Nancy, France. Tresi's husband, Egidio, had died in 1997, three years before I had sent the letter to him.

Then on January 14, 2004, Marc sent me a copy-pasted e-mail exchange he had with Sylvaine - all in French - where he basically told her that he had been in contact with "le fils de Jimmy," or the son of Jimmy. I couldn't tell from their exchange if she had heard of Jimmy, or that her mother had ever told of the American soldier who had helped her family. But what I could make out - and Marc told me as well - was that she was going to visit her mother the next morning, and that she would write to me directly!

A few days later Sylvaine wrote to me. She is a medical researcher and teacher in a university, and her written English is only what she’s picked up from studying medical journals, but it was enough for me to understand, and much better than my French. She told me that, indeed, her mother, Tresi, had told them the story of Jimmy, the American soldier who had gotten a letter through to her mother’s cousin in Massachusetts, and how Tresi’s parents so desperately tried to win him into their family!

Sylvaine also told me of her mother’s frailty since Egidio’s death. Tresi had never quite accepted that her husband was gone, and, seven years later, still asked her daughters where their father was.

In a subsequent e-mail Sylvaine told me that she had informed Tresi that Jimmy’s son had found her, and she told me that Tresi was thrilled to hear that Jimmy was still alive. I asked Sylvaine if Tresi was well enough to receive visitors, should my father feel up to visiting. A few days later Sylvaine informed me that not only was Tresi well enough, but she was telling everyone that Jimmy was coming to visit her! Tresi had memory problems, but she remembered Jimmy vividly!

During all of the positive correspondence to this point, I had kept quiet to Jimmy about it. I made a phone inquiry to United Airlines about scheduling a stopover. I compiled all of the e-mail correspondence between Marc and me, and between Sylvaine Arrigoni and me, and all of the JPEG files she sent to me, printed them out and bound them in a folder, and brought it to my father. The look on his face was priceless when I told him that not only was Tresi Civitareale still alive, but that I had been in direct contact with her daughter. He kept reading the pages over and over, running his fingers down the pages, looking at the photo images printed on the pages of Tresi from 1944, with her then-new husband in 1946, and shortly before Egidio’s death in 1997. Jimmy kept shaking his head in disbelief, and kicking himself for ceasing correspondence.


Tresi and Egidio, circa 1946


Fifty years later, Tresi, center, and Egidio, far right,
with her sister, Erna and her husband, far left,
and a few grandchildren.

Then I said to Jimmy, “We can easily alter our trip to Italy to make a stopover in France.” He looked at me expectantly, yet not sure what to expect. “Would you like to make a side-trip to Nancy, France, to visit Tresi?”

“Yes.” His answer came without pause or hesitation.

I notified my brothers and my wife of the altered plans. Whether they wanted to go or they didn’t, I was not going to let my father miss this opportunity.


In part 3: Reunion and Rekindling.