My Father was the second oldest of nine children. The eldest, my Aunt Christie, was born in Italy and came to the United States with her mother, my grandmother, around 1920. My grandfather had made the trip across the pod a few years before in order to get a home established before they came to the States. When my aunt died about 25 years ago, her children had located her marriage license. On the license was her maiden name. It was not Ciribassi. It was Cerbaso.
I had known that we were from somewhere in Southern Italy, and that our name was not Ciribassi, but really had no idea how to find out more about my Father’s side of the family until the passing of my Aunt Christie gave me my first real clue. At the time Elise and I were building a family and a business. Spare time to do a genealogy search was at a premium and it would have been easy to just let it go. But I couldn’t. It seemed like I was embarking on a wild goose chase. Or maybe I was out searching for donkeys, as was Saul in our first reading.
Saul’s Father, Kish, was from the small tribe of Benjamin and from an even more insignificant clan within that tribe. Saul did not see his life amounting to much and when his father told him he needed to go out a find a small group of their farm donkeys that has escaped well, Saul just saw another useless task in a useless life. Saul, and a companion, searched high and low for days on end to no avail. He was ready to call it quits when his friend convinced him to seek out a seer, a prophet, in a nearby town. The prophet’s name was Samuel. Little did Saul know that God had told Samuel a short time before that he would meet Saul shortly and he was to anoint Saul as Israel’s first king. And so, it happened. The search for a group of donkeys led Saul on a journey that would carry him on to being the leader of God’s chosen people.
And what became of my genealogy search? I had managed to find time away from my regular life to send out some emails to families by the name of Cerbaso in Italy. It was like sending out a digital message in a bottle. And as fate would have it, one of the emails was opened by my second cousin who worked in the records office in my aunt’s home town of Agnone, Italy. I received a note from him outlining the family tree of my Father’s side of the family. We began writing back and forth to each other and when my daughters were in their early teens, we all made a trip to Italy for 2 weeks and spent a life changing 24 hours in Agnone.
The trip, besides reconnecting me with my Italian family, opened the eyes of both my daughters to travel abroad and gave them the confidence to explore beyond our borders. Danielle, my eldest, did her college study abroad program in Senegal where she now runs a business and is raising her family. My youngest daughter, Rebekah, did a one-year exchange program in Australia as a high school senior. She is working on her PhD in Anthropology and has spent 4 years in Tanzania doing research. I believe taking the sidetrack activity of family genealogy all those years ago, created opportunities I could never have imagined for our family. I truly believe that God had a hand in giving me the spark to investigate my roots and, as a result, open my daughters’ eyes to what the world had to offer. Like Saul, we all had to just be open to the possibilities.
Are there “donkey searches” out there for you? Is God asking you to take a seemingly mundane side trip in your current life? Are you open to where it might lead you? As George Bailey in “It’s a Wonderful Life” liked to bray when faced with an exciting possibility…”Hee Haw”!
