cesena of italy possibly jewish
I have been doing research on the town of cesena in Italy (not far from France) the ancient town was called Caesena pronounced (se'-ze-ne) this town predates Rome according to the Princeton Encyclopedia of Classical Sites, the name means Cae "happy" sena "town" this in Latin. Jews were taken all over Rome when Israel fell in A.D. 70 and some ended up in Caesena, they would use the name (ie.. Michael ben Daniel or michael son of Daniel)Later on the kings made them pick a family name and stick with it because it was getting hard to keep track of them (go to www.sephardim.com for a better explanation)many chosea name like goldberg, goldsmith, cohen, some would take names of plants, or other things, sometimes they would take the name of the city they were from. At sephardim there is an ancient marriage which took place I believe in the 1400's in portugal involving the Cezana name, this name of course kept track of as a Jewish name,(you can see the similarity) I have spoken with Cesana's living in Israel that were related to the Wealthy Corfu regions in Greece. There is a Famous Jewish painter by the name Cesana, the cesanas' know that they are from Caesena, The man I spoke with said his mothers people were Cesana's that were Italian but spoke French.There is debate about our relation to the Cesanas(from house of Cesana 1935) but I believe that Howard believed that we were related at least in antiquity, The cesanas were also most likely royalty increasing the odds of our family connection. A secondary consideration would be the high number of Lawyers and judges bearing our family name in one form or another.This is all presented as the results of my search thus far, I am by no means 100% convinced of our coming from Cesena but you can obtain an online map which shows the migration of the cesana's(http//gens.labo.net) which shows their migration to France. I have checked the online phonebooks for France and found Cesana still in France. There is a memorial to French Jews deported to Germany in WWII that has the name Cesana on it. I present these things to members of the family for the purpose of discussion and discovery. All of this information has been aquired online so perhaps the cyber-highway will provide us with more information than was available to our predecessors.Mike Cissna