Margaret Walker - War in the Balkans: ClementinaCerocchi

Me in Belgrade 1985

I’m not English. I am Yugoslav, Irish and German. Let’s get that straight before we begin. Because I was adopted at birth, identity is my issue. This is what this article is about.

According to the zeitgeist, you have a baby because you love them. You’re gay, or trans, or cis, or whatever you are, but love is what matters.

Okay. The zeitgeist is BS. I am 63 and I have struggled with identity my whole life. You need to know where you come from and you need photos. No child should be conceived without access to photos of their relatives. I didn’t see photos of my relatives until I was 50, but they absolutely opened my world. Here was my hair, my height, my eyes, my whole belonging.

So you might say, my child is happy without photos. But life is long. You don’t give birth to a baby, you give birth to a person and it is that person who will ultimately decide the rights or wrongs of the matter, not you. Unfortunately, when I was born in 1960, the government made the choice that you were a new person without access to your old family. No photos. It was a social experiment and it failed.

I am an example of why.

I was adopted into a colonial Australian family of English origins, although I’m not English. (About three sixteenths and even two sixteenths of that, my aunt told me, considered themselves Irish. So, we’re down to one sixteenth.)

I cannot be what anyone wants me to be. I have to be myself.

When you’re a child, you do as you’re told. I grew up on English literature, English history, English war stories, English politics, English movies. When I was in kindergarten, we celebrated Empire Day. I read the English novels and poems my mother gave me.

When I was 29, my adoptive father died. My adoptive Mum died when I was 42. The day after her funeral, I met my biological sisters, having met my brother earlier that year.

From that day, everything changed.

As the years went on, I discovered that I no longer enjoyed the English authors Mum had enjoyed. I discovered the truth about English history and English war stories, not the sanitised versions. After marriage to my half Italian husband when I was 31, my tastes began to alter radically.

Now, I really loved my Mum. I loved her family history in the Southern Highlands of New South Wales. Once she died and my new family began talking about their European roots (which were my roots because we had the same parents) the tug-of-war between the old and the new nearly tore me apart. With a husband and two small children to look after, daily I had this nasty little voice in my head telling me that Mum’s family, which I had loved, was no longer mine because now I had a Real Family. I was one of the Lucky Adoptees who had actually Found Out Where They’d Come From.

This insidious chatterer tortured me. Without mercy it went on and on, week after week until one night three months after Mum died I was in the kitchen washing up while my husband and daughters were watching TV. Suddenly in the dark, Mum was behind me. Suddenly I started to cry. I said, ‘Hi, Mum.’ And then she was gone.

In an instant I was healed. From that brief encounter I knew that Mum’s family and my new family both belonged to me. The Lord had allowed Mum to come and reassure me of that.

People may think I’m crazy being so interested in Yugoslavia, a country that no longer exists, but I look like them. When I got off the train in Belgrade in 1985 and for the first time in my life met people as big as I was, I thought, ‘What is this wonderful place?’ I thought Belgrade was the best city in the whole world. I loved the story of the Yugoslav Partisans in World War 2. When I was only twelve Mum had told me about the women who fought alongside the men.

These Partisans were fighting for the country where I felt I belonged, where half of me had come from. Who I looked like. They impressed the Germans, they impressed the British, they were the only country to stand up to Stalin. I am old enough to remember watching Soviet tanks roll into Prague in 1968 on the TV, merely because Czechoslovakia longed to be free of Moscow. Russia never attempted that stunt in Yugoslavia. Why? One name: Tito. Not a perfect man, but a very interesting one. I loved Yugoslavia because it was wild and mysterious and brave. What did Tito say about it? ‘Yugoslavs are a proud people.’

War is a terrible thing, but I have often wondered, with envy I am ashamed to say, what it would be like to fight passionately for the country where your roots had been for a thousand years or maybe more. How I envy the Australian Aborigines because they belong to the land.

So this is my little piece of history. I like to write about Yugoslavia because I think it’s a great story.

Post Script: It was with some trepidation that I finally took the plunge in April 2024 and had my DNA tested. Below is what awaited me when I opened the email:

My German great grandfather Frank Neimann, who was born in Barth in 1851, has disappeared as has my Italian great grandmother Clementina Cerocchi , born and died in Trieste 1856 - 1916. The 69.4% French was the real surprise. That's from Clementina's husband, Giovanni Tonon. My birth mother knew little about him except that he was an artist and ran a hat store in Trieste with his brother Gastone. She described his origins as 'mysterious' and speculated that he might have been French.

Well, now we know, although 69.4% does seem an awful lot to get from a great grandfather.

...three weeks have passed and I have decided that it is impossible to get 69.4% from a great grandfather, so it must be coming from somewhere else. The problem with this theory is that I am in possession of virtually all the births, marriages and nationalization certificates that would disprove it, unless we have serious incest going on and an awful lot of lying.

Have a look at this new table below. This is what happened when I changed the confidence levels on the 23andMe website. (The old results were only 50% confident.) Look at the French when it's 90% confident. Our 69.4% has fallen to 16.9% . Now 16.9% can come from a great grandfather, who is 12.5% plus or minus. (The plus can be pushed up to 22%.) The rest of the WEST section is accounted for by births and marriage records and the naturalization certificate of my German great grandfather.

The EAST section can mostly be accounted for by birth records, with two exceptions. My Slovenian great grandmother we know from the birth records of my grandmother and the testimony of my birth mother. She said she came from a village 100 miles of Istria on the border of Austria. The other exception is my Italian great grandmother Clementina Cerocchi. However, as I got hold of her vital dates from the registry office in Trieste (I walked in off the street), I am reasonably confident.

By looking at the 90% confidence level instead of the 50%, I am left with 38.5% NW Europe whose records I have (except for the Frenchman), and broadly European 35.5%, the records of which I discussed above.

This makes a great deal more sense.

Regarding 'broadly European' 23andMe has this to say: 'Much of Europe was buried under miles of ice ten thousand years ago. As the glaciers receded over millennia, Neolithic farmers from western Asia joined Paleolithic hunter-gatherers to settle Europe. Some European DNA is difficult to assign confidently to one population and receives a “Broadly European” designation.'