Ticket to Ride

OCTOBER 30, 1911
Great-Grandmother Angelina purchased a ticket for a trip from Italy to America on the SS Madonna. The ticket was purchased in October but the ship didn't sail for another two months. The second class fare for Angelina and her three daughters was $115.33. The youngest girls, Carmena and Giuseppina ("Josephine"), occupied "half-spaces".

Did you catch that date? This receipt is 100 years old today! Stay tuned - the big blog-a-bration will be in a couple of months when the ship comes in.

PLAY ALONG AT HOME:
Immigrant Ships Trancribers Guild
Ship lists transcribed by volunteers

Ellis Island
Search passenger records online for free

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Search ship lists on Ancestry

Lady Liberty

OCTOBER 28, 1886
125 years ago today the Statue of Liberty was dedicated.

If you look closely at the bottom of this blurry picture, taken by an unknown relative, you can see the Statue in the background. At the bottom of the picture are choppy waves.

I love to read personal accounts and interviews of immigrants who passed through Ellis Island. My all-time favorite is Pauline Notkoff, a Polish Russian immigrant in 1917, who describes her experience in the Great Hall:

"They asked us questions. 'How much is two and one? How much is two and two?' But the next young girl, also from our city, went and they asked her, 'How do you wash stairs, from the top or from the bottom?' She says, 'I don't come to America to wash stairs.'" Atta girl.

Statue of Liberty 3D Puzzle Daron

Statue of Liberty National Monument

In Their Own Words: Reliving the Ellis Island Experience
by Juliana Smith

Clan McKay

Scottish genealogy is not my usual flavor, but when a bonny little lass like Lucy struts around for a whole day in a kilt of Clan McKay tartan you take notice. And notes.

The occasion was Heritage Day at the school where I work - special assemblies, native dress, and truckloads of food from around the world prepared by the parents. (I hit the middle Eastern table pretty hard.)

A little informal research on the interwebs disproves almost everything I thought I knew about the tartan. For example, they aren't as ancient as I thought. There was no uniformity (pardon the pun) in pattern until the late 17th or early 18th century, and at that time the pattern was used to identify a region, not a clan. In 1822 highland chiefs were asked to wear their tartans to the festivities celebrating King George IV's visit to Edinburgh. Tartan popularity took off from there, leading to a book which featured clan tartans, the Vestiarium Scoticum, published in 1842.

There is an etiquette to wearing tartan - very confusing, but I'll boil it down for you: Since clan membership passes through the surname, Scots wear the tartan of the father only. If your family does not have a tartan there are several patterns which anyone can wear called universal or free tartans. The Balmoral pattern is reserved for the British Royal Family only. Of course, these are conventions or guidelines only. Technically there is nothing preventing one from wearing the Balmoral pattern except the disapproval of haughty "authorities." It's not nearly as criminal as wearing white after Labor Day.


Scottish Clan and Family Names: Their Arms, Origins and Tartans
by Roderick Martine

Scottish Census
Various censuses for 1851 and 1881

David P. Demarest Jr., 1931 - 2011

Farewell to David Demarest, retired CMU English professor and immigrant history super-hero. His name may not be immediately recognized, but his work certainly is:

Out Of This Furnace: A Novel of Immigrant Labor in America, by Thomas Bell
Written in 1941, Mr. Demarest rediscovered this novel in 1976 about 3 generations of an immigrant family who worked in the steel mills of Homestead.

The Millvale Murals of Maxo Vanko
Mr. Demarest's fundraising helped raise money for the restoration of Maxo Vanko's murals in St. Nicholas Croatian Catholic Church. The stunning murals, 22 in all, tell the Slovak immigrant story of religion and poverty. Think Sistine Chapel, but with mill hunkies.

Braddock Carnegie Library
He was instrumental in the rescue of Braddock Carnegie Library and then founder and editor of the Braddock Fields Historical Society newsletter.

Obituary, Pittsburgh Post-Gazette

S.S. Presidente Wilson

OCTOBER 5, 1919
92 years ago today my grandfather arrived in America on the Presidente Wilson (passenger #21). But not until he put up a little bit of a stink about it.

As the story was told to me by my grandfather himself, he was just 5 when he and his mother left Arnara, Italy to join his father in Pennsylvania. And the little tyke just didn't want to go. He didn't want to leave his nonna or his little dog. He didn't want to travel to Roma and get on the big ship. According to him he was cranky and disagreeable for most of the trip, picking a fight with his mother as the ship passed through the Strait of Gibraltar. While his mother admired the Rock my grandfather tore the little cap from his head and threw it overboard.

Things went from bad to worse after the incident at Gibraltar. At some point, either during the journey or at Ellis Island, my grandfather was served oatmeal - for the first and last time.

Ask my grandfather anything about this voyage to his new home and he always managed to circle back to that frightening gray blob of oatmeal - very little about the sights he saw, absolutely nothing about meeting his father for the first time. It was always about the food.

Search Ship Lists on the Ellis Island site

Italian Americans: The Immigrant Experience
Leslie Caron Carola

Grannie Annie

If I hadn't been goofing off on Facebook this morning (instead of, you know, my job) I might have missed a post by my friend Kathleen about her 101-year old grandmother.

Kathleen's grandmother, Anne Zimmer, the daughter of a saloon-keeper, grew up on the North Side of Pittsburgh. Do the math: this grandma has tales to tell about Prohibition.

We here at Real Housewives Industries have a real soft spot for grandmas, especially when they become media darlings at 101 (you can read the article below). Mrs. Zimmer is the first nominee for the coveted RHo19 Grammy Award, details to follow.


Prohibition Made for a Dry Climate
Anne Zimmer is interviewed for the Observer-Reporter  

Prohibition: Thirteen Years That Changed America
Edward Behr 

The Music Of Prohibition
Various Artists