Overview
- The BBC’s Who Do You Think You Are? episode follows Joe Swash as researchers trace his paternal line to Senerchia, a mountain town near Naples where his five-times-great-grandfather Donato was born in 1762.
- Civil records including a 1921 marriage certificate place his great-great-grandfather Giuseppe Raimo and his family in Lox Gardens, London, confirming the family’s Italian origin and settlement in Islington/Clerkenwell.
- Historians and published sources show Giuseppe worked as a street piano player and craftsman in London and that he spoke at a 1923 meeting alongside suffragette-linked activists, with letters in The Worker’s Dreadnought opposing fascism.
- Swash says the findings have left him feeling “galvanised” and closer to his late father Ricky, whose early death shaped Joe’s childhood, and he filmed emotional visits to London sites and Bar Raimo in Senerchia.
- The episode is due to air on BBC One on Tuesday, June 9, and the programme uses civil records, historian testimony, and site visits to connect documentary evidence with Swash’s personal story.