Jan. 21, 2001

A LOST FAMILY REDISCOVERED

I went to a garden-variety academic conference in New York City last weekend, and came home with a family story of memory and forgetting. My sister-in-law Pamela calls it "Robbie and the dead Perissis."

Pam is married to my brother Richard Perissi. They live in Nassau County, Long Island, and seeing as how I was going to be right in the neighborhood, I stayed with them the day before the conference.

On a visit to Long Island, Pam said during dinner, her son Rob had gone with his girlfriend Kerry and her family and friends to visit Kerry's grandparents' grave in Calvary Cemetery in Queens.

Queens has enormous cemeteries; when I was growing up, I used to hear people say that there were 6 million dead people in Queens, and 4 million live ones. Calvary is one of the largest.

As Pam tells it, while Kerry's family was paying its respects, Rob and a friend named Ginger strolled down the road a little way. Then Ginger said, "Rob, here's your name."

Perissis are used to this. "It's spelled differently," he said.

No, Ginger insisted, it's just like yours. "P-E-R-I-S-S-I."

Rob looked, and was amazed to see given names familiar from family reminiscences.

He called Pam on his cell phone.

"Mom," he said, "there are Perissis here, the way we spell it. Ferdinand, and Harry."

"Is there a Florence?" Pam asked.

"Yes, there's a Florence," Rob said. "She died in 1912."

"Robbie, you've found the dead Perissis!"

None of us had any idea there was a Perissi monument in Calvary. My father, who must have known about it - his parents are buried there - never went there, that we know of, or even mentioned it to me or to Richard.

On Sunday, Pam picked me up at the conference in Manhattan and we took flowers to the gravesite. The cemetery staff had told her there are 15 people buried there, but not who they all are; I've written away for a list of interments. But there are only 13 names carved on the monument, and we're not even certain who all of them are.

First are my great-grandfather, Ferdinand, who came to America from Italy, and his wife Catherine, who was Irish.

Then there are four names - Ferdinand Jr., Lilla, Walter and Helen, all of whom died before 1900. They must be Ferdinand and Catherine's young children.

I have a picture of Ferdinand and Catherine, with their grown children Harry, my grandfather, and his sisters Jessie and Belle. From the women's clothes, it must have been taken around 1900. Who knew they were three of seven?

Next is Harry's wife Florence, who was 26 when she died. Her eldest child, my father Ferdinand (Buster), was 6, his sister Kate 4 and Harry, the youngest, was 2.

Here's a mystery: for as long as I can remember, I've believed that my grandmother died in the 1918 flu epidemic. Not so, since she died in 1912. Where could I have gotten that idea?

Another puzzle: My father never forgave the woman who took his mother's place, nor his father for marrying again. I don't remember meeting either of them, though I was only 4 when my grandfather died. But his second wife was still alive then. Where did she live? When did she die? Where is she buried? We don't even remember her name.

My father didn't get on with his siblings either, and I'd lost track of my Perissi cousins, Uncle Harry's children, until a couple of years ago, when John Perissi called me out of the blue. A lovely surprise.

This time, I got to do the calling. Neither John nor I had known where to find our other cousins, Kate's two children. And locating people named Drake is a lot harder than finding people named Perissi. But I knew they had graduated from high school in Massapequa, N.Y., and with the help of people on Massapequa's alumni list I found an address for my cousin Robert, and I talked to him and his wife this past week.

Aunt Kate died last year, Robert said, but her husband is still alive and Robert and his sister Susan will be visiting him later this month to celebrate his 91st birthday. Perhaps he knows something about Kate's and my father's stepmother.

Robert and Susan didn't know about the dead Perissis either. But I'm so pleased we've managed to reconnect the live ones.

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