Sometimes, the best-laid plans lead to miracles. And sometimes, there is no plan, and miracles happen anyway.
That was the case for Geri Guinn and her son, Grant, when they traveled to Italy in 2022 to meet relatives they were certain were there—if only they could find them.
Finding Geri’s Family
Geri and Grant, Latter-day Saints from Spokane, Washington, began looking into Geri’s Italian heritage in 2021.
Her paternal grandparents, Crocifissa and Pietro Congiu, immigrated to America from Italy in the early 1900s. Even though Geri spent time with them as a young girl growing up in Chicago, Illinois, she knew very little about her family tree.
Grant and Geri were not exactly family history experts, so they didn’t know where to begin. Geri had a great-aunt’s letter from the 1980s that contained information on their family history, but some details were incorrect. US census records weren’t much help either since they always listed Pietro’s country of origin as France, even though Geri was fairly certain he’d never lived there.
And with any records they did manage to find, there was always the language barrier.
“We can’t read Italian, we can’t speak Italian, so ... we didn’t know how to do any of this,” Grant says.
For Geri’s Christmas gift that year, Grant secretly hired an Italian genealogist to piece together the family tree. They learned her grandmother was from Sicily and her grandfather was from Sardinia, facts neither of them had ever known.
With the correct information in hand, new doors opened to discovering their ancestors.
The First Miraculous Meeting in Italy
From there, the fire was lit. Geri and Grant, no longer content to know their newfound family on paper only, decided to take a trip to Sicily and Sardinia to meet as many relatives as possible.
Geri sent letters to anyone whose contact information she could find, informing them of their upcoming trip and asking if they could meet. She didn’t hear back from any of them. Undeterred, she and Grant boarded a plane in May 2022 and headed to Italy.
That’s when the miracles started happening.
In Sicily, Grant and Geri showed up in the tiny village of Montemaggiore Belsito and met their Airbnb host, who greeted them in broken English. They used a translation app to tell her they were there to look for relatives.
“Immediately, she took us across the street, around the corner, directly to the house that my great-grandmother grew up in,” Grant says. The Airbnb host then started introducing them to people in the village.
“From then on, for the next 10 days, we were at somebody’s house for lunch or dinner every day,” Grant says.
One night, Grant pulled up FamilySearch to show a newly found cousin a section of the family tree that had them stumped. The cousin, not a member of The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, pulled out his laptop and showed Grant that he, too, had been working in FamilySearch—something he had begun during the COVID-19 lockdown.
“As soon as I plugged his stuff in, boom, it filled in the whole tree,” Grant says.
The Second Miraculous Meeting
From Sicily, Geri and Grant traveled to the small village of Dolianova in Sardinia, where, again, they knew no one.
Hungry and unsure where to go, they sat on a park bench in the middle of the village to take a break. A man walked by and jokingly asked them what they were doing sitting on “his bench.” Grant used the translation app to explain that they were looking for anyone with Geri’s maiden name, Congiu.
“He looks at us and says, ‘Ah, one moment,’” Grant remembers. The man called his son, who informed Grant and Geri that his best friend when he was growing up was a Congiu. Within 10 minutes, the man’s son came and drove them to his friend’s house on the other side of the village.
There, they met Angela Congiu, whom they discovered was Geri’s second cousin. She was also the first Congiu Geri had ever met outside of her immediate family—and the first of many to come.
A Picture in Common
After chatting for a while (all through hand gestures, translation apps, and broken English), Geri pulled out a picture she had brought of Pietro, Crocifissa, and their five children sometime in the 1920s or ’30s.
To her and Grant’s surprise, Angela immediately went to her back room and brought out a matching picture. “All of these people in Sardinia had this picture,” Grant explains.
“In a few hours, everyone knew of their arrival,” says Silvana Congiu, another of Geri’s second cousins in Dolianova. “I often wondered if anyone in this American family was aware of our existence. I dreamed of being able to meet one of them one day. And when that day came, for me, it was an indescribable and immense joy.”
Geri felt the same. Her lifelong dream had been to find her Italian family and share a meal with them. And now that was happening in abundance.
“It meant the world to her,” says Genera Smith, one of Geri’s daughters. “She just felt whole.”
Family Across the Veil (And the Ocean)
Shortly after returning home, Geri was diagnosed with stage four pancreatic cancer. She died in January 2024. About 50 of her Italian relatives joined the funeral service over Zoom, which was translated into Italian by the Guinns’ family friend.
Grant and 22 members of his extended family plan to visit Sicily and Sardinia this spring so that everyone can meet their beloved Italian family across the ocean.
And although they’ve done the temple work for hundreds of their newly found Italian ancestors, it’s become about even more than that. It’s also about the miracle of connecting with new loved ones in the here and now.
“I know that she’s going to be right along there with us,” says Geri’s daughter Genae Millar. “This is all she could have ever hoped for.”
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