I Reconnected With a Long-Lost Cousin Across the Atlantic Thanks to MyHeritage

I’ve always been interested in family history. I joined MyHeritage when I was 20, not because I was searching for someone specific, but because I wanted to understand where we came from.

Daniele Serena, currently based in Galway, Ireland, originally from Vicenza, Italy

Over time, I started building our family tree little by little, especially on my maternal grandparents’ side, whose roots are in the Salerno area of southern Italy.

Daniele with his mother and grandparents

During the pandemic, I decided to have my grandmother Anna take a DNA test. At the same time, winter arrived, and I spent long nights indoors scrolling through thousands of scanned pages from the State Archives of Salerno, available online for my grandparents’ hometowns. Every time I found someone connected to the family, I added them to the tree — you never know. Slowly, leaf by leaf, the tree began to grow.

A strange match from Florida

As the tree expanded, I started paying closer attention to my grandmother’s DNA matches. One of them immediately caught my attention: a man from the United States named Ralph. He had already passed away, but soon afterward I received a message through MyHeritage from his sister, Elizabeth, an older American woman living in Florida.

In her family tree was the surname Amato — a surname that also existed in mine. But we had no idea how the two families connected.

MyHeritage estimated that Elizabeth’s family and my grandmother shared ancestors several generations back, around the level of great-great-grandparents. In practical terms, their grandfathers had likely been first cousins. It was enough to make us curious.

We started writing through the MyHeritage inbox. Then we exchanged phone numbers. Over the following months, we spoke often, sharing every small discovery and every new clue. Sometimes one of her findings helped me understand where to dig deeper in the archives. Other times, my research helped her.

It felt strange at first, spending hours on the phone with someone on the other side of the ocean whom I had never met. But the excitement kept growing. Every little detail fed it.

Neither of us wanted to give up.

Finding the missing link

One night, while searching through the archives, I found the record that connected our families.

I still remember the feeling.

There, in front of me, was the missing link. We had finally identified the direct ancestor we shared in both of our family trees. The grandfather of their grandfathers.

The history had been reconstructed.

The relationship diagram between Elizabeth and Daniele’s grandmother, Anna Vaccaro

I immediately called Elizabeth. We were overjoyed. We weren’t just people with matching surnames anymore — we were relatives, and now we knew exactly why.

Elizabeth’s grandparents, Luigi Campanile and Maria Amato, had emigrated from southern Italy to the United States in 1900, eventually settling in New Jersey. My grandmother’s grandfather, Antonio Alfonso Vaccaro, was Maria’s first cousin. Though my grandmother never met him, she had always felt a strong connection to him.

Elizabeth’s grandparents with their children. Back row, left to right: Maria, Luigi, Frank (Elizabeth’s father); front row, left to right: younger children Rose, Jeanne, Mille, and Domenic

What amazed me most was how quickly strangers could begin to feel familiar. We had started as two people trying to solve a mystery, and somewhere along the way, we became friends.

A Christmas trip to the ancestral homeland

Then Elizabeth told me something incredible.

She and her son Brian had booked a Christmas trip to Italy to visit the land their family came from. It would be Elizabeth’s first time in Italy.

At the time, I was visiting my grandparents in Fondi (Latina) for Christmas, which is northwest of the Avellino area where Elizabeth’s maternal family had originated. I gave her the address, and she and Brian drove there to meet us.

It was unbelievable.

Daniele with Elizabeth and Brian

We spent a couple of hours together at my grandparents’ house. My grandparents didn’t speak English, but somehow it didn’t matter very much. We communicated through photos, gestures, smiles, and stories translated back and forth.

Elizabeth and Brian with Daniele’s grandparents

Elizabeth arrived carrying a booklet full of old family pictures. My grandmother brought out her own photographs in return.

Elizabeth shows Anna the family photo of her grandparents with their children

At one point, we even joked about whether we resembled each other.

And honestly, there really was a little resemblance.

It was strange finding parts of yourself in the face of a stranger.

My grandfather played the accordion during lunch. We laughed constantly. Elizabeth was lighthearted and warm. From the very beginning, it felt as if we had known each other for much longer than a single afternoon.

A family story restored

Later, Brian decided to remain in Italy permanently. Today, he lives in the medieval village of Montemiletto in the province of Avellino, not far from where his ancestors once lived before crossing the Atlantic. He works remotely and has built a life there, even growing olives with distant cousins on land that has belonged to the family for generations.

Sometimes I think about Maria Amato arriving in New York in June 1900 with her two young sons, carrying only $20 in her pocket while her husband waited for them in America. I wonder if she could ever have imagined that 121 years later, her descendants would reunite in Italy because of a DNA match.

Immigration record of Maria Amato, Elizabeth’s grandmother, with her two sons in June 1900

Sadly, Elizabeth passed away in October 2024, a little more than a year after that unforgettable meeting. We only met in person once, but we stayed in contact until the end of her life.

I will always be grateful that I had the chance to know her. It wouldn’t have happened without MyHeritage.

Many thanks to Daniele Serena for sharing his incredible story with us. If you have also made an amazing discovery with MyHeritage, we’d love to hear about it! Please send it to us via this form or email it to us at stories@myheritage.com.