Bill Cellini Jr. is a true blue expert in Italian ancestry. For about thirty years, he has been holding seminars and workshops across the United States, to teach Italian-Americans how to trace back to their roots. Between 1876 and 1930, out of the 5 million migrants who embarked from Italy to the U.S., 80 % came from Southern Italy, mainly from Calabria, Campania, Abruzzo, Molise, and Sicily. Their perilous journey towards a land that promised a better future was motivated by sheer necessity.

Once they landed on the new continent, Italians became the largest segment of immigrant population to work in the mines. Cellini’s grandparents were no exception. In the early 1900s, they emigrated from Abruzzo to the U.S and, eventually, ended up working as coalminers in Illinois. Bill Cellini Jr. has taken it upon himself to give everyone who feels the intellectual and emotional necessity to reconnect with their Italian origins, the necessary tools to navigate among a deluge of immigration records, ship manifests, Italian civil and church documents.