Wednesday, October 31, 2001
I believe I've found Laura's great-grandmother Franceschina de Rosa on the Ellis Island site, as well as her sister Mariantonietta and parents (this is new), Giovanni de Rosa and Lucia Nannarielo. I started on the Calitri Connections web site, in their "They Came By Ship" section. They've got a number of transcriptions of ships' manifests that had people from Calitri on them (well, just the Calitriani, not the whole ships), and they've got many of them indexed alphabetically. When I looked at the page for surnames beginning with D, I found an entry for Maria Antonia de Rosa on the SS Lahn, leaving Naples on 16 Oct 1902, arriving in New York later that month. She was listed as going to Paterson, NJ. Right above her was an entry for Lucia Nannariello, also going to Paterson. Rosie had said that Mariantonietta's mother's name was Lucia, or "Mama 'Cia", as they called her. This page says Lucia was going to join her aunt, Giovanna de Rosa. That's a mistranscription from the ship's manifest.
I didn't have any luck finding this record through the Ellis Island search interface, so I went to Stephen Morse's excellent alternate interface for the site. There I was able to enter the name "de Rosa", the year, and, importantly, the ship name. In the results of that search was an entry for one Ma/Antonia De Rosa Mannascella of Calitri. Looking at the scan of the manifest reveals that Ma Antonia De Rosa is shown as the daughter of Lucia Mannascella, which is their mistranscription of Nannariello. It's always an adventure finding people on the Ellis Island site.... In fairness, the entry on the manifest is pretty difficult to read, and it would probably take someone familiar with the surnames of Calitri to get it right.
Among the information on the manifest was the fact that Lucia and Maria Antonia were going to join their husband and father, respectively, Gio. De Rosa on Market Street in Paterson. So that gave me Maria Antonia and Franceschina's father's name, as well as a clue that he came to America before 16 Oct 1902. So I went back to Stephen Morse's search form and looked for Giovanni de Rosa, coming to America between 1892 and 1902. At number 6 in the search results, there was Giovanni de Rosa of Calitri, age 41, arriving in America on 19 June 1900 on the Karamania from Naples. When I looked at the manifest itself, I found to my joy that accompanying him on this trip was his 19 year old daughter, Maria Francesca, and that they were going to join their son and brother, respectively, Raffaele, at 39 Cross Street, Paterson, NJ.
I still haven't singled out Raffaele. There are eight possibilities in 1900 or before. One of the towns looks like Calitri, but that Raffaele's destination is Mt. Vernon, New York. There's one from D'Avellino, and Avellino is the province that Calitri is in. His profession is given as watchmaker, but his destination is Montclair. I know there was a Raffaele de Rosa in Paterson later on who was a watchmaker, but I don't know if that was the right Raffaele. So this bears further searching.
I figure finding the parents' names and when they came was pretty good, though, for one evening's work.
Incidentally, you can ignore the links to Ellis Island from the entry of October 24, below. It's pretty clear now that those are wrong, and that these are the correct people.
Posted at 7:11:31 PM
