Celebrate Your History: Share Your Immigrant Ancestor’s Story

As I stepped up to the stage, I wished I had said no to the invitation to speak about my family history at the 2022 Columbus Day celebration in Scotch Plains, New Jersey (Searching for Concezio - YouTube). My voice cracked as I began talking about my grandfather, Concezio Perrucci, whose story I grew up listening to my father tell.

My grandfather served in the Italian Army’s Calvary, and he could read and write English, but the only job he could get when he arrived was digging track for Central Jersey Railroad for a dollar a day. When my father got to that part of his story, he would reach for his handkerchief to hide his tears. Was he embarrassed because his father never achieved the success he worked so hard for?

The question made me cry as I stood in front of my hometown audience. Concezio worked two jobs to build the house in Scotch Plains where I grew up with my six siblings, but soon after he finished, Parkinson’s disease derailed his dreams. By the world’s standards, he wasn’t successful at all. That’s the story I believed until I discovered that he was one of millions of migrant workers from Italy known as “birds of passage.”

He made the first of two grueling ten-day trips in steerage in 1906, when he was only 16 years old to reach America, then returned in 1913, after sizing up the lack of opportunity in his beloved homeland. Both times he walked 112 miles from Montazzoli, in Central-South Italy’s rugged Abruzzo region, to the port at Naples. Then he stood on his feet in steerage—the dirty and dangerous part of the boat below deck—for much of the ten-day trip to reach America. Yes, he got sick with Parkinson’s, but he lived with the debilitating degenerative condition for 24 years without any medication to relieve his symptoms. Before he died, he saw three of his seven grandchildren born in America and handed us the future. He never gave up fighting.

Courage. Sacrifice. Honor. Devotion. Loyalty. Those qualities defined his life and redefined my own definition of success. I glanced at the front row, where four of my siblings, two nieces, and my brother John’s wife, Melissa, were sitting. They had tears in their eyes—but they weren’t the only ones. Many in the audience, whose father or grandfather or great-grandfather immigrated from Montazzoli, had tears in their eyes, too.

That day I realized that Concezio’s story is more than my family’s story or even an “Italian American” story. The qualities that defined my grandfather’s life defines the lives that all first and second generation families in America lived by and those enduring qualities, I believe, offer answers to the challenges we face in America today. In June 2023, I finished writing “Searching for Concezio: The Courage and Endurance of South Italy’s “Birds of Passage” and started my search for an agent and publisher.

Would you share your story here about the immigrant ancestor who started your family’s story in America? Subscribe to my email newsletter here if you would like to keep up with my quest to find a publisher.