The man who can tell you if your South Philly ancestors were butchers — or mercenaries

If James Trovarello were to tell a story about South Philadelphia, it would stretch back far beyond the colorful characters who lend the neighborhood its authentic charms. It would span farther than even the waves of tempest-tossed Italian immigrants who first filled the neighborhood more than a century and a half ago. The tale Trovarello can tell begins with the distant descendants of those bygone South Philadelphians — the peasants, tradesmen, and swordsmen of centuries past, whose dramas played out in an Old World an ocean away from Ninth Street.

Trovarello is the South Philly genealogist. That unofficial appellation is one that Trovarello, 74, dignified and reserved, a fan of jazz and homemade Montepulciano d’Abruzzo red wine, modestly shakes off. But it is a title that Trovarello has earned by meticulously researching the ancestries of hundreds of his fellow South Philadelphians over the last 35 years.

This is no mere ancestry.com operation he’s running. A retired federal law enforcement agent and private investigator, who lives with his wife, Patricia, in Girard Estates, Trovarello reads and speaks Italian, can translate genealogical information in Latin, Spanish, and French, and has fueled his genealogy research with about 30 trips to Italy.

It’s a passion that has placed the Temple alum in a unique position around South Philly, a famously tight-knit locale where everybody prides themselves on knowing at least a few crumbs of everyone else’s business, and where information reigns as its own kind of currency.

If Trovarello were the sort of man to entertain gossip, it would likely lean medieval. If he bumps into Good Guy Bobby at the Acme, sure, he could tell you whether Bobby’s pop-pop was a neighborhood butcher or barber back in the day. But he may also be able to tell you if Bobby’s great-great-great-great-great-grandfather was a marauding mercenary in the Kingdom of Naples in the 15th century.

On a recent day, Trovarello, tall and fit, with graying black hair and black reading glasses perched on his nose, pored over century-old ship manifests and birth, marriage, and death records in his living room. Italian classical music quietly played over the speakers, while he researched a South Philly client’s old country ancestors.

“I make the jump back across the pond for them,” Trovarello said.

The son and grandson of Italian immigrants, Trovarello’s South Philly bona fides are unimpeachable (his son, Tony, is cofounder of the South Philly T-shirt shop South Fellini). Growing up around 11th and Wolf, Trovarello shined shoes at the old Bomb Bomb Bar. Everyone knew everyone.

“Everyone in the immediate neighborhood was overwhelmingly Italian and Sicilian and our family knew all these people and we knew where they came from because we knew the dialect,” he said. “And we knew if they were a bricklayer back there, they were a bricklayer here. It’s knowing a deep history.”

His genealogy journey began around 1990, when some of his relatives, including his father, died, and he inherited family papers. Busy starting new lives in a new world, his parents and grandparents had never talked much about hard times in the old country, he said.

“None of the family ever talked much about previous generations,” he said. “They didn’t know anything about those people at all. They wanted to escape the difficult times, and come here — they wanted to forget Italy. That was an old world.”

Back then, Trovarello set out with a modest genealogy goal: he wanted to learn his great-grandfather’s name.

Digging into Philly Mormon Church genealogy microfiche archives — with missionaries who travel all over the world, the Mormon Church has long maintained vast birth, death, marriage, ship manifest, and land records from all over, even for nonchurch members — Trovarello began to reveal the more recent branches of his family tree. (His great-grandfather, Aldemario Trovarello, for example, drove a delivery cart back in Abruzzo.)

Seeking more, his research quickly took him on the first of many research trips across the pond to his family’s hometown of Bucchianico, a small hill town overlooking the Adriatic Sea, where the priest at the local church gave him carte blanche to records dating back to the 1600s.

“I literally went through everything they have,” he said, adding that he was soon a regular visitor to the provincial archive in Chieti, where records were even more extensive.

Soon, a story of his family began to emerge: How his 14th great-grandfather, Claudio Trovarello, an abandoned child born in 1385 (the name Trovarello literally means foundling), grew to be a soldier of fortune who fought for dukes and counts.

“He had 400 troops he paid and they did sieges and fought wars,” he said.

Claudio Trovarello’s sons earned their keep as swordsmiths and by training war horses. His ancestor Dominico Trovarello was shot to death by Napoleon’s troops during his army’s invasion of Naples in 1799. Another ancestor, a young boy at the time, was said to have witnessed the miracle of a sainted statue crying tears of blood.

Enough of Trovarello’s friends put him to work that he eventually created a business, ItalianFamilyResearch.com.

Anthony DeFino, 71, asked Trovarello to research his family tree after his father, retired South Philly judge Anthony DeFino, died in 2013. Trovarello traced the DeFino family tree back to 1750 in Southern Italy, where the family men worked as bricklayers and fishermen.

“I wanted to do something for my family,” DeFino said. “To find out the struggles they went through and what happened to make us who we are.”

After meeting Mario Gellman at a small South Jersey Italian gathering a few years ago, Trovarello uncovered a long-lost love story from the Gellman family tree: Back in the old country Gellman’s great-grandmother Maria Francesca abandoned her family fortune to marry a peasant farmer named Leonardo.

“In some ways you feel almost immortal when you realize that some part of that succession and linkage remains in perpetuity,” said Gellman.

In true South Philly fashion, Trovarello even picks up new genealogy assignments at his weekly bocce games.

“Someone told someone else in the bocce hall that I do this, and off that short conversation, I had like four new assignments,” he said.

He works mostly from his basement desk surrounded by cresting mountains of Italian history and geography books, Latin dictionaries, and printouts of centuries-old records. That morning, after days of striking out, he had located the correct town of origin for a Montgomery County client’s ancestors, who hailed from Faggiano, a small town in Southeast Italy.

“It’s detective work,” he said.

He recently learned that his great-great-grandfather on his mother’s side served in the Italian revolutionary army led by Giuseppe Garibaldi after uncovering a 1924 death notice in an Allentown newspaper.

Mostly, he learned that many of his ancestors — and the ancestors of his clients — shared the same hardscrabble immigration stories as countless others who came to make new lives in South Philadelphia with just a few bucks in their pockets. The types of stories that still help define the area, even if the newest arrivals set out from different ports.

“It gives me a tremendous feeling of pride,” he said.