Ready, Set...

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What a roller coaster ride the last few days have been. Not a good idea to lose your wallet a few days before you depart for overseas... grrrr

However, it has been found. Thanks mainly to the power of trust and a good friend to help you look for it. Thanks Jan for caring enough to know how I would be feeling and puting in every effort to help me. Thanks too to Mum and Pete.

Anyway, all good now. Just one more thing; always have a spare set of prescription lens glasses if you need them for reading. This morning just before spending the day pouring over documents at college, I broke my specs. No time now to get some new ones made up before I leave tomorrow, so a quick trip to the pharmacy for some magnifiers. Really not good enough, but they'll have to do.

Now, enough of that rot... on with the excitement of my trip to Italy. This trip has turned out to be more than 'just for pleasure'. For the last month I've been devoting all my spare time to finding Mum's family. It's not like here in Australia where our vital (birth, death and marriage) records are available on a national database... in most parts of Italy records are kept at the community level in each town where the events took place. These records are only accessable by physically walking into the building and searching for the records yourself. It's still a paper trail, although moves are being made to computerise these documents, there are only limited areas that have done this... mainly in southern Italy. Mum's family came from Milan, so as soon as I land and have had a catch-up sleep I will be spending the day in Comune di Milano to find anything I can on our branch of the Sanna family.

Wonder how those magnifying specs will be when I'm trying to decifer family documents in Milan! Be helpful to be able to read Italian too I suspect... hahaha!

Time to go finish the packing. Just 24 hours before I head out the door for the airport. Catch you when I next update. That will probably be when I'm in Milan on Friday 25 May.

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