Digging Up Family Roots in Sicily

As a writer I’ve always tended to seek out origins. My first book, about the search for the historical Jesus, was an attempt to get at the ​“real” story behind my Catholic upbringing. After living in Manhattan for several years, I wrote ​“The Island at the Center of the World,” a book about the Dutch settlement of New Amsterdam, the seed from which New York City grew.

Recently I began considering my family. Among its manifold curiosities is our last name. People always ask me about the derivation of ​“Shorto.” The story I’d heard as a child was that after my illiterate Sicilian great-grandparents settled in my hometown of Johnstown, Pa., they enrolled their children in school and said the name aloud: Sciotto. And the administrator wrote it as he or she heard it.