Fun with Genealogy

Or, Why I Was Mad at a Dead Ancestor and Now I’m Not

My Ossola grandparents, Antonio and Mary, on their honeymoon in 1921.

Cari amici,

Have you ever reacted to something with outrage, made some snap judgments, then did enough fact-finding to realize you might be dead wrong? Yeah, me too. In this case, I’ve been pointing an accusatory finger at my paternal grandfather, Antonio, thinking he lied about something that has made my (and my kids’) path to Italian citizenship a living hell.

So what, exactly, did my long-deceased nonno do? He lied (or so I thought) when he told a judge, in a citizenship petition, that his father had naturalized when Antonio was a minor, which resulted in his petition being tossed on the grounds that he was already an American citizen. Chop! End of Ossola Italian blood line.

A little context is needed. Without going into all the mind-numbing details of Italian citizenship law, let’s just say that a jure sanguinis line is essential to being recognized as an Italian citizen; otherwise you’re looking at filing suit against one of several laws, including a misogynistic one that prevents women from passing down Italian citizenship to children born during a particular period. Unlike people who are born American by virtue of their mom giving birth on U.S. soil (jus soli, or “right of the soil”), Italians are Italian by blood, meaning the line—and by that Italy means the male line, prior to 1948—of someone petitioning for citizenship must be unbroken. How does it get broken? When an Italian ancestor naturalizes before a descendant’s birth.

So for my sons and me, the easiest path to Italian citizenship would have been via one of my two grandfathers, either Antonio or my mother’s father, Andrea. Alas, Andrea naturalized six months before my mother’s birth, damn him. Chop! Another Italian blood line bites the dust. Cavolo! Mannaggia! Many redacted offensive expletives! Couldn’t Andrea have procrastinated a little longer?

That leaves us with Antonio. But his line was (supposedly) cut too, in a mode I’ve always thought questionable, even furbo in a not-admirable way. And then I thought I’d found proof (or something that looked suspiciously like it) that it wasn’t merely furbo, it was fraudulent.

I’ve known for years that Antonio petitioned for citizenship in 1920. In his petition he stated that his father had naturalized when Antonio was a minor (which would mean he’d naturalized too) but that the documents had been lost in a fire. Sounds sketchy, right? But actually fires did happen in government archives, more often than you might think. So in this case, it’s possible that Carlo did naturalize. But there is no proof. Trust me, I’ve searched all possible archives and received a Certificate of Non-Existence from USCIS.

Now, if you think having such an official-sounding certificate is definitive proof, you are incorrect. It’s actually harder to prove someone didn’t naturalize than to prove he/she did. That’s why having ZERO PROOF didn’t stop the judge who reviewed Antonio’s petition from taking him at his word. And he denied that petition on the grounds that Antonio was already a U.S. citizen because he had naturalized along with his father. Because Antonio said so.

The document that made me mad. Oh, btw, note Antonio’s middle name here. Yep, it’s Daniel. Except it isn’t. He was born Luigi Antonio. His grandfather was named Daniele, though, for what that’s worth.

I suppose the judge was being kind and trusting to give Antonio the benefit of the doubt, thus helping an immigrant—and a veteran who fought in the U.S. Army’s American Expeditionary Forces in France during World War I—become an American. Good for Antonio. Not good for his descendants. For years, I’ve held that judge in silent contempt. How dare he recognize a petitioner as already a citizen solely on his word? If he’d made Antonio go through the normal recognition process, it’s possible, even probable, that my father would have been born Italian and so would I. And so would my sons.

Then I came across a document I’d overlooked until recently—a Declaration of Intent that Antonio submitted in 1912, when he was 21 (the age of majority at that time), plus evidence that he later filed a petition. Why would he petition the minute he was of legal age? There it was, proof (well, maybe) that he’d lied to the judge in 1920! Un sacco di expletives of the explicit variety, unfortunately redacted.

My accusatory brain was now spewing more reasons for outrage. Imagine this scenario: in 1912, Antonio filed his intent in January; six months later he accompanied Carlo to New York City to see him off to Italy for an extended stay—very extended, as it turned out, because he died there—and in those intervening six months, or at the moment of their farewell before an ocean between them would make communication difficult, did it not occur to Antonio to tell Carlo he’d filed (thus giving his father the opportunity to say, “Oh, by the way, you’re already a citizen”)? Did they never talk about this rather important stuff?

But then I asked myself exactly how transparent this process was, this exercise in bureaucracy that took place more than a hundred years ago, especially for people whose grasp of English was limited. So I did a little googling and discovered that, according to archives.gov, there’s a good chance Antonio wasn’t a liar:

“[I]f these events [naturalization of a parent] occurred prior to September 27, 1906, it is doubtful any of the children actually appear in what is, technically, their naturalization record. The lack of any record for those children's naturalization might cause some of them, after reaching the age of majority, to go to naturalization court and become citizens again.”

Hoo boy. That hissing sound is my self-righteous anger fizzling. Should there be any doubt, another source confirms that if Carlo had naturalized before 1906, Antonio would have had good reason to be uncertain about his own naturalization status:

• 1790 to 1906: Immigrant children under the age of 21 are automatically naturalized when their fathers are naturalized, but they are almost never listed by name on the father's paperwork.

• September 1906 to 1922: New rules standardizing naturalization forms and processes are instituted by the federal government.  Under these new rules, children are still automatically naturalized when their fathers are naturalized, but now they should be listed by name on their father's papers. [Me: “should be” isn’t a guarantee.]

Exit fizzling outrage; enter aching remorse. There could have been reasons—plausible, justified, understandable reasons—for Antonio’s actions. Probably there were. Possibly Carlo had naturalized but never told his son he was an American citizen too. Or maybe Carlo didn’t realize Antonio had naturalized along with him, which would mean Antonio didn’t know either. Or maybe Antonio knew his father had naturalized but assumed he had to go through the same process. He might have misunderstood how the process worked or gotten incorrect information. All of which is to say that Antonio likely didn’t know he was a U.S. citizen when he filed those petitions. He likely filed them in good faith, doing what he thought was necessary.

Mea culpa. I had no right to judge Antonio. There’s so much I don’t know, so much I’ll never know, about him and the rest of my immigrant family. Who am I to judge the actions of people in my past, especially when my view of those long-ago times is clouded by the assumptions I make in the present? Because the more I dig into the lives of my ancestors, the more I realize how little I understand about the difficulties they encountered as immigrants. It’s on me to learn more, to understand the complexities of the world they left and the one they adopted, to recognize the struggles they endured. It’s on me to have compassion and empathy. Antonio probably never imagined that his descendants would desire or need Italian citizenship. I’m sure it never occurred to him, not even for a minute, that a future granddaughter would leave America to live in Italy. He had problems of his own, far greater than mine.

My grandfather was 10 years old when he and his mother and siblings joined Carlo in America, which means emigrating wasn’t a choice he made. I’ll never know whether he thought of it as a grand adventure or an unfair hardship. He learned a new language, went to school, worked hard in the granite industry even as a child, was drafted—into the army of a country that he thought wasn’t yet his—to fight on the continent he’d left behind. He tried to make a place for himself, a life, a home. He left Barre, Vermont, for a short stay in Butte, Montana; after the war he went to Portland, Oregon, then northern California, then Barre again, and finally Los Angeles. He married at age 31, two years after his military service ended. His first son (my father) was born when he was 33; his second two years later. And when that second son was two months old, Antonio killed himself.

He was 35 years old. He left no note.

My grandfather Antonio with my father, 1924.

It’s tragic that my dad had to grow up without a father, that he never knew much about him, that he had to accept a difficult, more tragic truth—that for Antonio, even knowing he would leave behind a wife and two young children wasn’t enough to let him go on living.

My grandfather struggled and suffered and, I choose to believe, did the best he could. So what if his actions have caused me hardship? He was an Italian in America, and in making a life there he wanted to be an American in America. I can’t fault him for that. I should honor his memory, not disparage him. After all, there’s something of him in me, good traits or bad. Good blood or bad.

Tante belle cose. Alla prossima—

Cheryl

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Book of the week:

• The Invisible History of the Human Race: How DNA and History Shape Our Identities and Our Futures by Christine Kenneally

P.S. My book! Which you can buy here or on the usual sites, or, better yet, order it from your local bookstore. Another fab option is to ask your library to stock it. If you read it and like it, please tell your friends and/or leave a few lines of praise on any bookish site. You’d be surprised how much a rating or review helps authors. Baci!