For most of his life, my dad thought that he was 100% Polish. However, some years back, when my grandfather died, his brother, (my dad's uncle and my great uncle) came out for the funeral; while out here, he mentioned to my mom that in fact the family, at least on the paternal side, was actually Italian, more specifically they were Sicilian. He went on to say that he didn't know much about the family's history, mainly because it wasn't that important to anybody, but what he could say was that originally, the family left Sicily sometime in during the 19th century, went to Poland, and changed their last name. The only other thing he said was he thought that the original last name was similar to the Polish one, and that the family ran either a tea house or a series of tea houses in Sicily.
Unfortunately, this was some years back; I was too young to really understand or care. My great uncle died back in 2000 so I never even got the chance to ask him if he knew anything more.
In the past couple of years, I've become pretty interested in my family's ancestry, both on my paternal and maternal sides. Thus far, my maternal side has been pretty easy, since my mom's family is from England and Scotland where ancestral records are far superior to those of eastern or southern Europe; futhermore, she has spent considerable time researching her family over the years so that's been a big help. Unfortunately, my paternal side is a different story; most of my dad's paternal relatives are long gone so there is no hope of asking any of them, furthermore, like other families, nobody ever really seemed to care about their ancestors.
I've tried to do a little bit of research on my own but at this point I'm not sure where I would turn to. I found one guy in Poland, actually a physicist, with the same last name as me, who looks really Italian (at least in the one picture I found of him.) I contacted him last year and got a response; he didn't really seem to know a whole lot about his immediate family or the name either. Unfortunately, he never got back to me on my second email. I have a bit of a hunch that I may be related to this guy, not so much because of his picture or last name necessarily, but because he and one of my great uncles have the same first name; I've heard that in many families, first names are often reoccurring. So this is about as far as I have gotten from my research into the whole Polish connection. The problem for me begins when my family was still in Europe.
As far as the whole tea house thing goes, does anybody happen to have any knowledge about this or tea houses in general in Sicily?
Third, I was curious if anybody happened to know where I could possibly find the the family tree of Giuseppe Garabaldi? This is kind of a long shot but my dad looks eerily like him and since Garabaldi was such a womanizer, it wouldn't surprise me if I was at all related to him, if what my great uncle said about us being Sicilian was true?
Fourth, how would I go about getting records of any kind from that time period from Sicily? Would the Catholic church in Sicily have them?
Finally, the last name is Kapuscik; are there any Italian last names similar to this common in Sicily? I know this is all kind of a stretch since there is not a whole lot to go on, but I want to see what else I can get to work with.
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