Grandfather, We Never Knew You

My sister Rachelle does not impress easily, but I could hear a genuine note of admiration in her voice.

“I didn’t know that,” she said. “That is interesting—I never knew that about our grandfather. ‘Bird of passage,'” she repeated. She had just read my blog “Bird of Passage”—Where is Your Home?”

Rachelle and I and our brother Tom thought we knew all that there was to know about our grandfather Concezio after listening to the story our father would repeat when we were growing up. Our grandfather Concezio had served in the Italian Army’s Calvary, and he could read and write English, too, but the only job he could get when he arrived in America was digging track for Central Jersey Railroad for a dollar a day. Despite working hard at two dirty, and often dangerous, jobs, our grandfather failed to achieve the success he dreamed of after Parkinson’s disease forced him to stop working.

But that wasn’t the end of his story, I discovered, when I sat down to write about my search to find the rest of Concezio’s story. I unearthed the bits and pieces of research I had begun jotting down as a teenager and began adding new information. There was a lot I didn’t know, I realized, after finding a second arrival record in the database on Ellis Island.

Concezio made the first of two trips to America in 1906 when he was only 16 years old. An online search led me in circles until I stumbled upon the PBS special about “birds of passage” that had been produced a year earlier. Thanks to Dr. Henry Louis Gates Jr., the host of “Finding Your Roots,” I learned that my grandfather was one of the more than three million temporary or migrant workers who flooded into America from South Italy in the first two decades of the twentieth century.

The term “bird of passage” was first “used to describe temporary migrants who move so they can fill jobs that are often viewed as beneath native-born laborers,” according to encylclopedia.com. The words can be traced back to the early decades of industrialization in America, but remained in use through the late twentieth century to refer to Asian, European, and Latin American immigrants. “Birds of passage” became a very valuable commodity after 1900, Dr. Gates noted, as American industries began to mechanize their operations and needed cheap labor.

That information surprised me and uncovered a very different picture of my grandfather than the one my father had showed me. My grandfather hadn’t failed to find his American dream after all: his hard work had made it possible for me and my six siblings to live his American dream and have a future.

What information about your immigrant ancestor surprised you? Would you share that information with me?