Antonina Mariana Liuzza

My great-grandmother Antonina was born in Salemi, Sicily, on July 9, 1894.

Her parents died young, and she was raised by an older sister, Catherine. She married Natale Genna, a boy from the village. A year later she gave birth to a son, Giuseppe. Her husband was drafted in World War I but said, “I’ve fought in war before and I’m not going to fight again.” He decided to be a draft dodger and leave Sicily for America. After he was in Boston for a year, he wrote to his wife telling her, “Come to America or I will find a new wife!”

Antonina left her son Giuseppe (Joseph in English) in Sicily with her sister. On June 11, 1917, Antonina and Natale were married a second time at Sacred Heart Catholic Church in Boston. On August 18, 1917, she gave birth to a baby girl, Giovanna Natalina Genna.

Thirteen days later, a policeman knocked on her door. “Non capisco,” she said in Italian. I don’t understand. The policeman then gave her Natale’s wallet. When she saw the wallet, she knew something terrible had happened. Natale Genna was a construction worker in a trench at the intersection of Atlantic and Northern Avenues in Boston. The timber shoring up the trench walls collapsed and Natale was buried alive.

At 23, she was a widow with a two-week-old baby, a son in Italy, and all alone in America. Because her husband was killed on a government project, she was given a widow’s welfare payment of $7 a week. She married another Sicilian, Matthew DeMarco. Her son Joseph came to America when he was nine years old with a relative of Matthew DeMarco. Her first child with Matthew was my grandmother Anna DeMarco.

When Anna was twelve years old, she asked her landlady if she could go out on the fire escape and water her flowers. Walking along the fire escape, she accidentally stepped into the hole where the ladder was and fell onto the street below. Anna spent eighteen months in the hospital.

While Anna was in the hospital, her mother met the Ambrosino family in front of 365 Elm Street in Cambridge, Mass. Pasqualina Ambrosino was leaning on the front gate silently praying to God to help her find a tenant for their third-floor unit. Antonina looked up at the third floor and saw no curtains in the window and asked if the apartment was for rent. The Ambrosino’s rented their apartment to the Demarco’s thinking they had three children. They were shocked to find out there were six children...and then learned of a seventh child in the hospital. Pasqualina and her daughter Caroline invited the DeMarco’s to their church, Boston Christian Assembly.

When Anna came home, she was still very sick. Relenting, my great-grandmother told them, “If your God can heal, take my daughter Anna to your church.”

In 1934, at 14 years of age, Anna attended church. She experienced a miraculous healing and was filled with the Holy Spirit. Soon, her entire family came to faith in Jesus Christ. In 1935, through God’s providence, the DeMarco family was able to buy a four-family apartment building in Cambridge at a foreclosure price of $5,000. My great-grandmother had 14 pregnancies, seven children, two husbands, and lived in her home in Cambridge until she passed away on Sept. 18, 1981, at the age of 87. ~George DeTellis, Jr.