Our roots run deep.  I was born in Waterbury, Connecticut on September 10, 1973.  We left to move our family to Colorado in the summer of 1978, I don’t know every reason my parents had for doing so.  Opportunity, perhaps.  I don’t know.  What I do know, you can always come home. It’s July 4th weekend and my family and I are back home, Waterbury, Connecticut, USA.

62 Hamden Avenue, Waterbury, CT both my grandmother Carolina and my father Vito’s childhood home.

Facebook is powerful.  It is because of Facebook that we’re here.  What an amazing thing to connect my family some 37 years post move.  Of course I had a few trips back to Connecticut after we moved.  My dad and stepmom brought us back when I was about 14 ish?  And my brother and I traveled back twice in preparing my Grandmother for her move from her home, the place of her birth some 80 years before. And of course a trip home at the death of my grandfather, a man I hardly knew, for the damage WWII created in his life, rendering him incapable of returning home to his family.

We’re here for the DeLeo family reunion.  An idea born of Facebook is now here.  My dad Vito and Carolyn (parents) have made the trip as well.  My other siblings are not here and the reasons eh, they’re reasons and all important, another family reunion, work commitments, life commitments.

My great great grandfather’s 1910 census record. I think.

I am looking forward to reconnecting to my family, people I share history with, pretty deep history.  My great grandfather immigrated in the late 1890s seeing perhaps the same opportunity my parents were seeking in moving us to Colorado, 1978. I am looking forward to a conversation with my Aunt Helen, our remaining matriarch of the greatest generation, filling in the gaps I have in my family’s story.  I am so grateful and so blessed that you can always come home.