Greetings!

I'm still working, thank God! I'm trying to pick up, again, some of my personal life activities that I so enjoyed during my break. Got to find that work-life balance. I just reworked a story some of you are familiar with for submission to Ancestry.com's online magazine. I thought it might make a good holiday message. I hope you enjoy it. 

Little 'Nina: And the Lowest Shall be Exalted 

As the child of the two youngest children in large Italian American families, there were so many relations that I didn't even have a solid fix on my 35 first cousins, some of whom had children older than me! I tried to draw family trees on pieces of cardboard taped together. It helped, but it was beyond my childish capacity to understand all the complexities of the intergenerational relationships. Additionally, there was the issue of linking the stories to the individuals. 

During my recent extended unemployment, I decided to use my professional talents as an IT analyst and project manager to chase down those fading stories of the immigrant branches of my family. Armed with a genealogical database, my project began with the barest fragments of stories. One story that seemed must be irretrievably lost was the life story of my father's great-aunt in Sicily, a nun who was "worked to death" according to her sister, my father's grandmother, Mama Julia. I remember hearing that Mama Julia would visit her little sister with baskets of food and tried to convince her to leave the convent. But why? Why beg her to leave? Why stay? Why did she die? 

As I started chipping away at tangential stories, more and more came into focus. My dad's 80 year cousins in the female line provided me with a few clues. One cousin remembered hearing Nina was "only 45" when she died. Several cousins remembered hearing that although the younger brother was adopted when orphaned, little Nina was sent to the orphanage because she was cross-eyed and therefor considered unadoptable and unmarriageable. Mama Julia had been sent to work as a maid in Palermo, and another brother left to his own devices became a shepherd. Each child had a story, but without descendants and a short cloistered life span beginning in the 1860s, I despaired at finding Nina's story, of uncovering the source of that bitter accusation from my great-grandmother that her baby sister had been "worked to death." 

I researched Sicilian orphanages and I networked online. Ultimately, I found her diocesan record with names, places and exact dates. I also found out that she was part of the well documented piece of history of a man on his way to sainthood. 

In 1876, Nina LoChirco was sent to the Palermo orphanage/poorhouse at San Marco begun in 1873 by the Blessed Father Giacomo Cusmano. San Marco was run by an association Father Cusmano founded in 1867 and commonly known as “Boccone del Povero.” The association was closely aligned with the St. Vincent de Paul Society. San Marco was a crumbling edifice that the dioceses gave to Father Cusmano to appease his clamoring demands for charity. It housed 80 people in those early years, mostly orphans and elderly women. Yet, as Sicilian orphanages go, the San Marco poorhouse was a good one. Overseen by Father Cusmano, an altruistic, upper class medical doctor, the volunteer laity and religious treated their charges much more fairly than was typical. The elderly wove textiles and made rosaries for sale. The girls were taught needlework skills, with the poorhouse banking some of the income from their work in accounts available to the children when they aged out of the facility.   

Father Cusmano was also quite busy during Nina's childhood with multiple visitations from the Virgin Mary. During those years, Father Cusmano founded a religious order, Servants of the Poor, and established more convent orphanage / poorhouses in Palermo and Agrigento. It was a period fraught with religious fervor and frenetic endless work. Nina did not take her final vows as a Sister Servant of the Poor until Christmas Day 1903 at age 35; however, she likely had been ministering to the sick and poor as one of the laity since her adolescence - a decade punctuated by several devastating cholera epidemics. The Sister Servants were street ministers, daily walking the worst city neighborhoods to offer food and medical care to those in need. 

 

Whether Nina, Sr. Maria Girolama, was lucky or unlucky to have lived where she did when she did, I cannot say. However, the story of how the little orphan girl found a way to prove her worth through devotion and service is preserved. 

"She that humbleth herself, shall be exalted." Luke 14:11

Happy Holidays~