Those Before Me

Clearly I’m a masochist: I decided to do a November writing project. I was up until 5:00 a.m. last night messing with templates and avatars on all of my various journals and websites, and I spent the most time on this one, so I’d like to actually use it. (I just couldn’t bear that Inigo’s category was getting smaller and smaller in the category cloud with my previous theme, so this theme takes care of that. It’s an old one, Twenty Fifteen, but I don’t need or want a lot of bells and whistles, just a place for words.)

A lot of people on another site where I keep a journal are doing NoJoMo, but as I already do a lot of journaling, I wanted something else to nudge me along and found an old prompt list on History That Never Was, so that’s what I’m using. Hey, I’m a journalist. There needs to be an assignment. I started writing this yesterday, before I got sidetracked in all the design stuff, so I’m backdating it to November 1 and calling it a win.

Today’s word is “ancestors.” Funny that, as my sister and I were just texting about that the other day. I had asked her if she had ever gotten any DNA testing like 23andMe or Ancestry because some of my friends are always joking that despite being of known Italian descent, there must be some Viking blood in me. She hasn’t gotten any testing, so I might go ahead and do so, just for the giggles of it. She did mention that some distant cousins of ours reached out to her from Messina, Italy, so she’s going to go there when she visits Italy. I’m glad of that because we don’t know too much about my father’s side, other than one side of his family came from the mainland (Messina, I guess!) and the other came from Sicily. His grandfather came to the United States fought in the Spanish-American War, but I don’t know anything else about that generation on my father’s side.

As for my mother’s side, most of them are from Italy, some are from Eastern Europe, and they all came over and came over in the early 20^th century. Apparently I’m descended from the Sforzas on my mother’s side, through her father, as one of her paternal grandfather’s had that last name. If you can trace your lineage to a male Sforza, that pretty much guarantees you’re a descendant of the famous Renaissance family, as “Sforza” is a made-up last name. The original last name was Attendolo, and when Muzio Attendolo, an Italian condottieri, founded the family dynasty, he turned his nickname, Sforza, into a last name. Here’s a bit from Britannica about it:

The son of Giovanni Attendolo, a prosperous farmer of the Romagna (in north-central Italy), Muzio left home in 1384 to join a mercenary band, eventually becoming squadron leader and then company commander in the service of different condottieri (mercenary captains), including the famous Alberico da Barbiano, who gave him the nickname Sforza (“Force”). In 1398 Muzio entered the employ of the Visconti, the rulers of Milan, but he soon left to fight first for Florence and then Ferrara.

Sforza’s son Francesco went on to rule Milan for 16 years, and the rest is very much history.

I learned all of this after I left a copy of The Duchess of Milan by Michael Ennis on my parents’ coffee table after a holiday visit in the 90s. It’s the story of the women behind the scenes during the power struggle over the Duchy of Milan in the late 15^th and early 16th centuries, Beatrice d’Este and her cousin Isabella of Aragon. Isabella was married to Gian Galeazzo Sforza, the sixth Duke of Milan. Beatrice was married to Ludovico “Il Moro” Sforza, who had acted as regent when Gian was a child and too young to assume the responsibilities of Duke. As regent, Ludovico basically took over the whole operation, which led to a power struggle when Gian came of age. The book is about the competition between the two women, including who could birth the most sons, and the whole book is very lush and juicy. Plus, there are excerpts from real letters by the women as well as by none other than Leonardo da Vinci.

My mother, a voracious reader who favored whodunits, picked up the book I had left and a few days later she called to tell me that her father’s mother’s father’s last name was Sforza. So basically my great-great grandfather was a descendent of the Sforzas, though I’m not sure which branch of the family.

The best part is that my father was an artist. Da Vinci worked for the Sforzas, so once all of this came to light, it became a running joke between my parents. My mother would say she married beneath her and my father would say “and we artists are still working to keep you happy.” Then when I dug into the Sforza family history a little, I chimed in with “Look, a Sforza’s widow basically told Henry VIII’s people that Henry shouldn’t bother proposing. We women know our worth.” This would be Christina of Denmark, whose first husband was one of Ludovico’s and Beatrice’s sons and a Duke of Milan. According to legend, she said “If I had two heads, one should be at the King of England’s disposal.”

My mother’s mother’s family came from that part of the world that was always changing hands in the 19^th and early 20^th centuries. I have great uncles who were White Russians and escaped during the Russian Revolution and came to the U.S. with nothing but the shirts on their backs. Neither of my mother’s parents spoke English when they came over, and I wish I knew the story of how they met because at the time my grandfather only spoke Italian and my grandmother only spoke Polish, German, Russian, and Yiddish, though we’re not Jewish.

I suppose I should look into the various DNA tests. Critics go on about their accuracy and security risks (especially with the tests that show you your genetic risks for various diseases), but I don’t care. I think it would be fun to learn where the DNA leads. The results often surprise people, and I love a good surprise.