Quest for Ancestry: Zinnia Barrero’s Journey

Zinnia Barrero, one of the IRC's volunteer attorneys, has been working on a quest of her own to help her relatives in Ecuador obtain Italian citizenship by descent.  The recent violence in the country of Zinnia's birth has caused a job shortage leaving many to go hungry.  Some are looking to emigrate to countries other than the U.S. Italy offers citizenship by descent if proven with appropriate birth records of an emigre ancestor and everyone in the descendancy line to the present.    In Zinnia's relatives' case the immigrant who crossed the Atlantic was her great great grandmother born in 1854 in Piemonte, Italy.  Documenting this case has proved a formidable task which has been going on for 14 years.  Many records have been lost (both in Ecuador and in Italy)  to fires, wars, or simply just nonexistent.   She has joined several genealogy websites such as Ancestry DNA, Family Search, My Heritage, and others to try to fill in gaps.  Zinnia's Ecuadorian relatives help by finding as much information as they can in Ecuador while Zinnia does the online research. She has been inspired by TV shows such as "Finding Your Roots", PBS series with Professor Henry Louis Gates, Jr., from whom she gets many research tips.  This fall Zinnia hopes to visit Italy in search of some answers and hopefully will return with solid documentation of her ancestors for her Ecuadorian family. We wish her well in her endeavors!