A big thank you to the Mancini family in Wilmington, Ohio for fastidiously detailing your family’s heartrending and inspiring story of emigrating from Italy to the United States. Thank you Simple Mom for your blog on unique family traditions. Thank you Google for indexing 650,071 recipes called “Grandma’s Lasagna.” Thank you Library of Congress for your American Memory Project and your many pictures of immigrants, especially that one where the man and his five daughters have cheekbones and almond-shape eyes that resemble my daughter’s.
With a little piece of family history from this URL and a little piece of family history from that URL, my daughter has an interesting, thorough, and earnest family history that fulfills the requirements for her third-grade assignment. Sure, not a word of it is true. But, isn’t that the American way? Immigrants came here to rewrite their pasts and to create new stories for future generations—exactly what I did with the help of Google. Since my ancestors squandered their American Dreams and didn’t do much other than drink and breed, I took it upon myself to re-imagine my heritage in relation to a four-point rubric that would get my daughter the highest grade possible. With my innovativeness, I prevented my daughter from telling her classmates: “Our strongest family traditions include: Watching grandma drink too many Bellini’s while she tosses the Christmas ham into the garbage disposal because no one appreciates how much she does for the family as well as driving to Harrisburg, the capital of Pennsylvania, each summer, not to learn about history, but to spend all day at the horse races striving for upward mobility.
Silly birthday hats, the preparation of seven fish on Christmas Eve, family charade nights and multigenerational scrapbooking play well to an audience of eight-year-olds. Plus, her information comes from a trusted source—the most trusted source, her own mother. Her project is interesting and based on facts as they were told to her—completely worthy of stellar grade. And, really shouldn’t I be praised for my creativity, ingenuity, resourcefulness, and meticulous research?
