My Family (Part 1 of ?)

I really am not sure how to get this ball rolling. I suppose I'll start from the beginning (at least from my perspective).

We've always known our family - that is, my father's paternal family - had the wrong last name. Now, like many immigrants' descendants, we ascribed this misnomer to Ellis Island. After all, there were thousands of immigrants pouring into America & not everyone can get their name printed correctly. However, I recently had a revelation by way of my father's research.

Our name IS incorrect. The revelation is we now know the original name AND how it was changed:

My Dad's paternal grandfather changed it because he thought it would be easier to pronounce.

OK, that's fair enough. The original name, Murolo, doesn't exactly roll off the tongue. I'll bet it's infinitely tougher if you're drunk. My issue is how you essentially abandon a name for the purpose of pronunciation. Why do that? It's not like our name is "Smith" or "Jones". There aren't a million Murolo's running around this planet. Unfortunately, we'll never know. The last actual knowledge of our family coming over passed with my paternal grandfather.

That's not where the story ends, though! Dad actually discovered where our ancestors originated in Italy and I plan on sharing more about those places in upcoming posts. This has me pretty excited because you can put a place on the map & say, "Here! That's where I came from". Fortunately, it's not the dung heap of Italy.