This website provides information about some of the people who came from Italy to the United States in the early 20th century — and about their families.
Most of the Italian ancestors described in this website first arrived in the USA between 1880 and 1920. They were part of an emigration wave that you can learn more about from the Wikipedia article Italian diaspora. While this article discusses the general reasons for emigration from Italy, they do not necessarily explain the decisions of individual people. In some cases, we have family stories about such decisions, while in other cases we can only guess.
The articles below are in chronological order of their posting, with most recent first. In addition, links to these articles are included in pages for specific families (identified by surname) and for topics related to Italian ancestry. To help you navigate the site, there are menus and a search box. For example, to find a specific person, start by looking under surnames in the menu or use the search feature.
Once you’ve gotten to a specific page, you may find links on it to other people and related topics. In addition, if there are separate articles relevant to that page, you will see excerpts which you can click on to expand. This allows you to find articles of interest without having to go through the chronological posts.
In the Abruzzo region, spaghetti was made traditionally by cutting fresh pasta dough using a tool known as a chitarra (pronouced kee-TAHR-rah). The word “chitarra” translates into English as “guitar,” a word that can mean either a musical instrument or a wired frame used in the kitchen for cutting soft things like dough or jelly candy. In the Abruzzo region the wires of the chitarra are close together, producing a noodle that is thinner than similarly produced pasta of other regions.
You can watch the video, provided by Experience BellaVita, to see how a rolling pin is used to push the pasta dough through the wires of the chitarra.
The square-cut edges of pasta made this way contrast with the cylindrical shape of extruded spaghetti. The resulting geometry allows chitarra spaghetti to hold more sauce. This same geometry can be achieved using a more modern pasta machine with a narrow-spaced spaghetti cutter built-in or as an attachment. However the cut is achieved, this traditional fresh pasta is often served with a tomato sauce and tiny meatballs called pallottine. Alternatively, another traditional sauce for spaghetti alla chitarra is a mixed-meat ragù that often contained lamb, since the Abruzzo region had a long tradition of sheep herding.
Scrippelle
These very thin pancakes are made from flour, eggs and water. When rolled up, sprinkled with grated cheese and served in a bath of chicken broth, they are known as scrippelle ’mbusse. Alternatively, they can be layered with cheese, sauce and various other ingredients (meat, vegetables, chopped hard-boiled egg, rice) then baked to create a dish known timballo, which resembles lasagna. They also can be rolled around a filling and baked liked cannelloni to create a dish sometimes referred to as scrippelle ripiene. All these variations, along with the pancakes themselves, originate from the area around Teramo, so you may see them referred to as “Teramana.” Finally, the word “scrippelle” is sometimes used to describe a sweet treat made by frying batter or dough and then finishing it with sugar. Confusion can be avoided by appending “fritte” or “dolce” after “scrippelle” — or by choosing a variant name such as “crispelle ” or “screppelle.”
Gnocchi di Patate
The traditional gnocchi of Abruzzo are made with potatoes, flour and egg. After the ingredients are mixed, the dough is shaped into long thin ropes and cut into small pieces (about 3/4 inch). These are then rolled on a gnocchi board, as shown in the photo, to create surfaces that will hold a sauce. In the old dialect of the Teramo area these are called “li surgitt.”
Gnocchi Roller-Ridger Paddle available for purchase from Destination Abruzzo
This website provides a listing of people who came from Giulianova to the USA between 1902 and 1930. The index provides links to subpages which contain lists of names, alphabetized by surname.
This website with Brooklyn Genealogy Information is a great help for researching immigrant ancestors who lived in Brooklyn. For example, because the census enumeration district maps for Brooklyn are very difficult to navigate and read, the page on the 1900 Federal Census Enumeration Districts is very helpful.
FamilySearch.com currently provides access to census enumeration district maps for 1900 – 1940. This can be very useful if you want to find the census record for a particular location.
While various website for genealogical research provide a search feature to help you census records for a particular person, there is no comparable way to search by location. If you want to find the record for a particular address, you need to narrow the search geographically to a set of records small enough work with. Sometimes this is easy. For example, the 1880 census record for Dennison, Ohio comprises 25 pages, making it feasible to read through the entire record to look for a particular address.
For larger places, such as Columbus, Ohio, this approach becomes considerably more labor intensive. In 1850, for example, Columbus was divided into five wards, and the census records for Ward 1 alone comprises 92 pages. By 1860, the census records for Ward 1 had grown to 127 pages. For 1880 and on, census records for Ohio are organized into sets by enumeration district. This makes it a bit easier to search for a particular address, provided you know the enumeration district for that address. That is difficult to determine for 1880 (and Ohio census records for 1890 were destroyed by fire), but for 1900 and beyond, the enumeration district maps are a great help. Even so, the process can be difficult. The maps cited above are broken into sections that often are not labeled, so it takes a while to find the relevant map for a specific area in a given census year.
When doing research on ancestors, you may find different spellings of their name in various documents. It is only in recent times that the spelling of surnames has become standardized, so the spelling you see in documents often reflects an imperfect phonetic rendering. In addition, immigrants sometimes decided to modify their names after coming to the USA.
One way to deal with variations is to look for a standardized spelling that’s used in Italy today. If you find several possibilities, it can be helpful to look at geographical distribution and frequency. There are several websites that provide such information.
There are two sites that can display maps showing the frequency of a surname in each region of Italy: The Italian Last Names Map has an interactive map with English instructions and information. The GENS cognomi search page is written in Italian, but it’s easy to use and has several nice features, including maps showing surname distribution in the USA as well as in Italy. The GENS search also seems to use a more comprehensive database of surnames.
The Italia.InDettaglio surname search provides an interactive form that can be used to get detailed information about the distribution of surnames within the various regions of Italy. (NOTE: This web page can be very slow to load, so give it some time.)
In the early 20th century, there were four brothers of surname De Matteis who came from Giulianova, Italy to the USA: Domenico, Antonio, Cesare and Alfredo. Their parents were Guiseppe De Matteis and Splendora Brancioroli.
Antonio lived for a number of years in the USA and Canada, but ultimately returned to Italy. Domenico, Cesare and Alfredo all remained in the USA and raised families in Columbus, Ohio. From the 1920s through the early 1940s, they lived in a neighborhood near St. Dominic’s church. That neighborhood has since been redeveloped, so their houses are gone and the streets have changed. Starting in the mid-1940s, the families began to move to other parts of town, generally staying north of the downtown area.
On May 24, 1899 the ship Aller arrived at the port of New York, having departed from Haples on May 12. It’s passengers included three men from Parenti1 who appear to have been travelling together. which is a comune (town) in the province of Cosenza in the Calabria region of southern Italy.
One of those men was Carmine Bianco. Although the handwriting on ths ship’s record is difficult to make out, the other two appear to have been Carmine Agnotti and Serafino Sorianini. All three men gave their final destination as Brooklyn, and all indicate that this is not their first visit to the USA. In this record, Carmine Bianco reports that he previously lived in Brooklyn from 1893-1896 and other records indicate that he first came to the USA in 1890. Thus Carmine is probably the first person from the Dominico Bianco family tree to immigrate to the USA.
Parenti is a comune (town) in the province of Cosenza in the Calabria region of southern Italy. ↩︎
