Mamma Mia

Luana has had the strangest mission call situation I have ever heard of. It stressed all of us out, not to mention her for sure! First the Stake president (who it takes a 2 hour train ride to get to) interviewed her for 2 straight hours. Which made her miss her train home and have to stay in the train station in Rome until 3 am for the next train home. 

Then he just didn't hit the submit button for like a solid month. We called him, the bishop called him, all he had to say was "RELAX- I'll put it in"  

Then once he did, it went speedily through the rest of the assignment process as we watched it on line through Dan's LDS account. Then it had been mailed and we waited.

2 weeks, 3 weeks, we called and they said it will be there, just wait. 4 weeks......

Thats when the bishop got a phone call from the mission president of Luana's mission. They were not aware she hadn't received the call yet. We waited longer and received phone calls from the church transportation office wanting to book tickets, but no call has been received, we do not know where she is going...

Well, the bishop does and he knows her report date....

OCTOBER 4th 

(It was mid September when we got this info. - NO stress)

Finally everyone from SLC to the offices in the location of this mission were worried that she had not received her call information and finally agreed to send it via E-mail and we printed it out and stuck it in an envelope for her to open in the normal ceremonious way. 

Friends came from the ward, and Luana was excited and emotional. We had to stop and give her some hugs. She stumbled a bit on her english in reading it because of nerves and because of all the people watching her, both in the living room and on the internet.

But she better get better with that english because.....

Here is our RM and our current missionary. (Tori gave her the jacket she wore on her mission)

Sister Mastroianni will be serving a mission for The Church of Jesus Christ Of LDS in the England Manchester Mission for a period of 18 month.

My Katie

 My Katie came to visit and there are no pictures of beach visits, or hiking to waterfalls, or amazing food (although we did eat some pretty yum food)
We have a lot of pictures of old books an random people at records offices that helped us track down our family roots.


This is Katie's passion and it was fun to see her get excited about finding a new link. She had done as much research as she felt she could from the united states and so she came here to find more and she did.

She now has 13 generations back from our generation and wants to come back for more.

At our first stop (Avelino) we signed in to look at lots of books with names and baptism certificates that were written back in the 1800's and the pages were frail and brittle and all of us turned pages and questioned if the names we were trying to make out were related to us. We took pictures of everyone in question, but it wasn't really getting us very far. After about 2 hours of that, Luana asked for a phone book and looked up some living names to see if we could contact them for perhaps more information. That also seemed to be a dead end.

Then we moved on to Benevento where the hall of records only went back to 1825 and while it helped clear up some incorrect information, it was a little disappointing because Katie had already gotten most of the information up to that date. There was one clue that did get her excited. There was a narrative written in the records of a birth and because it was annotative and not just a birth certificate, it mentioned the new mothers fathers name. This was new information and gave her another piece in her puzzle.

They sent us on to our next stop which had already been on Katie's list of places to stop. (She had been receiving help from an Italian friend in Arizona) This was the town of San Leuico. She believed that our grandfathers family (Severino) originated here - how far back we were not sure.

We entered the town and She and Bryan and Luana wandered around the town a little frustrated about the city hall being closed, the cemetery being closed,  the church was also closed, and a home with a placard of "Severino" not being interested in talking to them. Tori and the little girls played at the park and I snoozed in the car for a bit.

When it started to feel like we should be heading back, I got out and walked around. It was a cute little town at the top of a hill and it was fresh air and clean streets. 

The city building had some monuments to world war 1 and world war 2 fallen soldiers from this town (Which must have been much smaller back then and lost many young men) 

There on the monument was a few names with the sur name of "Severino"

Then the church opened and we decided to walk over and see what we could find. We met the priest and he told us yes he has records. He pulled one out of the cabinet right behind his desk. It was dated int he 1800's ( who keeps that stuff on hand like that???) and we searched for a name or two. We found them and then we asked him how far back his records go. He said the 1600's. Cause you know the 1800's seemed old but.... 

He mentioned many times that his kind of research takes a lot of time and he only had 15 - 20 minutes to offer us at this time. We asked if we could come back later and he agreed and that when Katie and Bryan went back and spent the entire afternoon looking for names and finding old records.

Katie's visit was a totally different kind of visit than another and it was super short, but it was fun seeing her having such a good time doing something she loves and having success at it!

I hope she does come back again soon!