What’s Your Heritage?

“What kind of Italian are you?!” My father would always ask me that question after I would refuse to eat spaghetti for dinner. He always dwelled on the fact that we’re a bunch of Greeks, raised in Italy, and brought to the United States. My dad would always tell us the story as he remembered it about his own father’s history, but imagine the shock our family felt when my uncle Bob’s new wife, Gerry, did her research only to find we were actually born Italian.
The story my dad held on to was that his father was born in Greece with the last name of Camprelli. His family moved to Italy when he was just a young boy, and aquired most of his memories as a child there. When he was a teenager, his parents passed away and his sister, who had married an American man, had him and his other siblings brought over to the United States to live with her. Upon reaching Ellis Island, apparently they couldn’t either pronounce or spell his last name, so they shortened it to Camp. He then met my grandmother while fighting one of the World Wars, they married, and began their family together. My aunt Gerry found that most of this history is accurate while she searched our family tree, with a slight mistake; turns out, my grandfather was actually born in Italy, raised in Greece, and then brought over to the United States.
My father still embraces his Italian heritage just as much as he had before, but his Greek heritage now shows just as much. He has filled our house’s landscape with Greek statues for decoration, and loves to have Italian food served for dinner. We always knew that we had both of those nationalities in our history, but it was interesting to know that my blood was more Italian than it was Greek.

Julie Camp
Section 289-012