Blog: Searching for Concezio

How I wish Henry Louis Gates Jr., the host of “Finding Your Roots” on PBS, had invited me to be on his show when I began researching my family history. That would have helped me prepare for my trip to Montazzoli, Italy in the summer of 1974, but Dr. Gates didn’t launch his show until 2012. I started my research for my book, Searching for Concezio, the old-fashioned way that I learned as a reporter: by going directly to the primary source. In a very real sense, I didn’t have a choice: most Italian immigrants who arrived in America during the third “wave” of migration from 1880 to 1920 carried a suitcase in one case and the name of their sponsor in the other. I had only three records to rely on when I began my search, as I described in my blog, “Finding the Facts in Your Family Story.” That’s why I decided to visit the small isolated village deep in Italy’s rugged Abruzzo region in 1974, a few years after graduating from college. “Thank goodness your grandfather left,” said Great-Aunt Erminia, my grandfather’s sole surviving sister, as we stood on the balcony of her small stone house. I…

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…

Every year on October 23rd, I think about my grandmother Rachel. I knew that she arrived on Ellis Island on October 23, 1920, but I never wondered why she took a ship from Le Havre, France instead of Naples, Italy. My grandfather Concezio had to walk or share a ride in a donkey cart for 112 miles from their isolated mountain village in the rugged hills of Italy’s  Abruzzo region to reach the post in Naples. I learned that information after speaking with one of my Aunt Josephine’s cousins, Laura (DiFrancesco) Swidersky. In the early 1990s, Laura heard the details firsthand from dozens of young men who were part of the first “wave” of Italian immigrants to arrive in Scotch Plains, New Jersey in the early twentieth century When I visited my grandparents’ birthplace in 1974, I traveled by car around hairpin turns to reach Montazzoli, which is located two and a half hours from Rome. Nearly half a century later, it is still difficult to reach our ancestral village, my friend, Fiorinda, told me after she returned from visiting family there in August. Her comment prompted to start an online search to figure out the steps my grandmother had…

Like today’s event, the invitation to celebrate Columbus Day at the White House with First Lady Jill Biden on October 12th “was all about heritage,” said Ralph A. Contini, national president of the Italian American service organization UNICO, told his audience in Scotch Plains, New Jersey. The October 14th event held in my hometown, which has an Italian American community from Montazzoli, Italy dating back to the 1870s, was sponsored by the Scotch Plains-Fanwood UNICO chapter, the Italian American Club, and the Knights of Columbus. You can listen to the program here, which included stories from several Italian American residents, presentations on winemaking and Italian cooking, and essays read by two middle-school students who won UNICO’s Italian Heritage Essay Contest this year. Like many others, I didn’t know that our First Lady was Italian American. Her great-grandparents, Gaetano and Concetta Giacoppa, from Messina, Sicily, “left everything they knew to chase the hope of this country’s unlimited promise,” said Mrs. Biden. “It wasn’t easy, but they had faith that if they worked hard, they could create a good life in America.” You can listen to her presentation here, which drew over 5 million views. I was impressed when Dr. Biden brought…

If more Americans knew about the origins of Columbus Day, they wouldn’t be rushing to remove his statues from our public spaces or to erase him from our history books. That’s why I’ve decided to celebrate Columbus Day, not only on October 9th, the day set aside on the calendar this year-but for the entire month. Most Americans-including Italian Americans-don’t know the backstory about Columbus Day, which became a national holiday in 1937. On October 13, 1892, President Benjamin Harrison intended Columbus Day as a one-time celebration to appease the Italian government, which threatened to break off diplomatic ties with us and go to war after the brutal lynchings of 11 Italian Americans in New Orleans on March 14, 1891. Read about the history here. At the time, anti-immigrant sentiment was rising, and some in Congress wanted to oust Harrison for his decision. For the first time, the American press also introduced the word “mafia” into the American vocabulary, which colored the views of many Americans, who began to see all Italian immigrants as mafiosi. That, in turn, set off a chain reaction of prejudice that persisted for decades. In the early 1980s, the first question one of my new…

The horrifying supernatural scenes in “The Exorcist,” which releases a sequel this Halloween, pale in comparison to the shocking, real-life scenes Richard Gambino described in his 1977 book, Vendetta: The True Story of the Largest Lynching in American History. On March 14, 1891, a mob of angry citizens, led by those described by The New York Times as the city’s “finest citizens,” broke into Parish Prison in New Orleans. Holding torches, rifles, and ropes, in a grisly scene all too familiar to African Americans, the crowd of 5,000 shot 11 Italian Americans, and then pulled them out into the street and lynched them. The day before, six of the 11 had been acquitted of charges for the murder of police chief David Hennessey, but that didn’t stop the vigilantes. The police, overwhelmed by the size of the crowd, were forced to step back as the crowd surged forward. They shot and stabbed most of the victims inside the prison, then pulled them out into the street, and ripped apart their bodies for souvenirs before hanging them. “It was the worst of more than 40 lynchings carried out against Italian Americans between the late-19th and early-20th centuries,” noted Basil Russo, the National…

I thought I had verified the information on the three family records I had, but there was a backstory to each one that raised new questions and uncovered more information. The first record concerned the date of my grandfather’s arrival in America. In 2002, while searching the database at the immigration center on Ellis Island, the arrival record my niece Kristyn found showed that her great-grandfather had arrived on June 8, 1913. But in 2016, after reading that the immigration center on Ellis Island had added more records, I searched again and uncovered an earlier entry. My grandfather made his first trip to America in 1906 seven years earlier, when he was only 16 years old. What did that mean? I began wondering. The answer led to my discovery that he was a “bird of passage,” a migrant worker who intended to return to his homeland after working in America. To clear up the mystery about the second record, showing that my grandfather’s cousin had deeded him the land for one dollar, I turned to one of my father’s and aunt’s first cousins, who had interviewed dozens of our town’s first Italian immigrants in the 1990s. My grandfather would have…

There weren’t any letters or diaries for me to consult when I started my search for family records. My grandfather Concezio was too busy working two jobs to record his thoughts and observations. I had only three pieces of information to rely on when I started writing my book, Searching for Concezio:         the ship manifest documenting my grandfather’s arrival on June 8, 1913;         the deed to the land where he built our house on March 21, 1921;         the papers he signed on the day he became a U.S. citizen, June 28, 1929. Yet those three records were a lot harder to verify than I expected. My father told me that my grandfather had arrived “sometime before World War I,” but he didn’t know the exact date. During a visit to Ellis Island in 2002, my niece Kristyn located the date of her great-grandfather’s arrival on June 8, 1913. Her eyes lit up, which made the trip to Ellis Island—nine months after 9/11—worth it for me that day. The second record, the deed to the house, was puzzling. My grandfather’s cousin, Nicola Perrucci, deeded the land where my grandfather built…