43
Molly Sergi, KSU history professor, specializes in WWI research
NILES
To her core, Molly Sergi is a historian whose particular passion is World War I.
Sergi, of McKinley Heights, is a full-time assistant professor of history at Kent State University’s Geauga Campus and head of its history department, of which – she said with a laugh – has a staff of one: herself. She also teaches history online.
Teaching and researching history are part of what she does, but Sergi said she most likes to “live and experience history.”
To that end, Sergi and her husband, Vincent, who owns Sergi Construction Co., and daughter, Isabella, 13, a student at Niles Middle School, have traveled all over the world.
Sergi, 50, was born in Youngstown, a daughter of Dennis and Christine McNamara of Niles, moved to California as a child and came back to the area in the early 1980s. She graduated in 1982 from Niles McKinley High School.
She received a bachelor’s degree in anthropology and a master’s degree in history, both from Youngstown State University, and a doctorate in history from Kent State University.
Sergi teaches at KSU because “it has a fantastic history program” and it enables her to “focus on things that particularly interest me,” such as World War I.
“My family has always been interested in history. Our daughter has been traveling with us since she was 5,” she said.
Also, Sergi has a very personal reason for her fascination with WWI, known as the “War to End All Wars.”
Born in 1899, her maternal grandfather, Raphael Sapio, served in the Italian army during WWI. He was in the 63rd regiment of the Bersaglieri, a mounted calvary.
Sapio came to the United States in 1921 through Ellis Island and settled in Brier Hill on Dearborn Avenue. He later lived in Struthers. They didn’t speak a word of English upon arrival.
“He worked 38 years at U.S. Steel and walked to work every day. Neither he nor my grandmother, Antionette Giuliano (Julian), ever owned a car or learned to drive. My grandfather died in 1983 and my grandmother in 1989. My mother is one of their five children,” she said.
Sergi said she has had difficulty finding additional information about her grandfather’s WWI military service.
“No one ever asked him about his military experience. We know he got very sick in Europe, maybe with malaria or yellow fever, but beyond that, I don’t know much even after going to Italy several times looking for information. There is not much there,” she said.
Though Sergi’s interest about the soldiers who fought in WWI was primarily because of her grandfather, it took an intervention of sorts by her friend Celesta Dennison of Austintown to move her research forward.
Dennison rescued a number of postcards and WWI photographs taken by her grandfather, Herbert Riley Fogle, a Marine Corps veteran, from the trash while they were cleaning out her mother’s home after she moved into a nursing home.
“I’m so thrilled she thought of me. She could have given them to a family member,” Sergi said.
Fogle fought in the battles of Chateau-Thierry and Belleau Wood in 1918, which stopped the German offensive, kept Paris from being captured and swung the momentum of the war.
Sergi said the large number of pictures, with dates and places denoted on the front and back, and several letters have given her additional insight into the war in which her own grandfather fought, albeit it for the Axis forces.
“I thought, I need to see this place,” Sergi said.
And when she did, she was overcome.
“I can’t tell you how emotional I became seeing these places where our U.S. soldiers and Marines fought so heroically, and so many died,” she said.
Fogle’s pictures give a personal, firsthand view of the life of an American soldier during WWI.
Sergi’s uncles served in World War II in the U.S. armed forces: Sam Sapio in Mississippi, Army Air Corps; and Charles Zaluski of Poland, Army. Zaluski participated in the Normandy Invasion, landing on Omaha Beach on D-Day-plus-three, and also fought in the Battle of the Bulge.
“I see that gap of people in the United States forgetting WWI and WWII. In Europe, where the wars were fought, people remember,” Sergi said.
Sergi uses the WWI information she has gathered to present at academic conferences, discuss at community events, and in the classroom.
“History is something to learn from. There is still a tendency for people to say history isn’t relevant,” she said.
Sergi asked that anyone who wants to share information about someone in WWI to email it to her at msergi@kent.edu.