Earthquakes, the Big Ones

Now that both my parents are gone, there is an opportunity to gain perspective on their lives and legacies.  My mother's family forms the basis of most of my memories, because I was born and raised in proximity to them.  But it is my father's family history that fascinates me, because it is more mysterious and unusual, at least by today's standards. 
With the tragedies playing out in Japan right now, precipitated by an earthquake that has killed in the neighborhood of 10,000 people, my thoughts have turned to the earthquake that forever shifted the course of my family's history. 
On January 13, 1915, an earthquake with its epicenter in Avezzano, Italy killed an estimated 30,000 people.  Wrap your arms around that for a minute.  This was before CNN, the Red Cross, the ability to text dollars to help, cell phones, airplanes and all the modern means that get mobilized in a time of horrific crisis today.  Two of my father's brothers were killed when their house in Corfinio collapsed.  My father was in the next town over about 3 km away, Raiano, and escaped harm.  The exact reasons why he was in the next town over had to do with the fact that he was not raised by his natural mother but by a stepmother, or really a wet nurse, because in those days there was no grocery store where one could buy infant formula.  You had to find a source.  But it is still not clear to me exactly why he was sent there in the first place.  I also know that my father's father died sometime in 1915 of a ruptured appendix, but I always thought it was after the earthquake, not before, so the mystery deepens.   
However, my grandmother's heart was broken; she lost two children and a husband in the same year.  That was also a time before things like the Italian version of 'social security', so what's a widow to do?   There appears to have been a network of Italian immigrants who communicated these types of circumstances and 'placed' widows like my grandmother with widowers.   And somehow my grandmother ended up coming to McKeesport, Pennsylvania to become the new wife of a man she had never met before, because his first wife had died. 
I have always been fascinated by things Italian, but recall my mother and father both telling me that my grandmother had no such fascination.  She did not yearn for the homeland.  "She never wanted to see Italy again", my mom said. 
So, when I think I am having a bad day, I would do well to think of her hardships and see if mine in any way remotely match up to what she had to deal with.    The photo with this post is not a family one, but one that I found in the public domain that records the devastation of the earthquake.  The Gran Sasso d'Abruzzo, the mountain in the background, is one I recognize from a trip I took with my dad to his hometown in 1980.