A brother‑in‑law in New York

ITwo Sundays in November

Giuseppe and Maria Grazia began with two towns a few miles apart. He came from Muro Lucano; she was from Bella. In the autumn of 1873, they went to Bella’s town hall to arrange their marriage banns.

For two Sundays in November, their intended marriage was announced in both places. They married in the world of the Basilicata hill towns, where much of the work meant hiring out by the day on somebody else’s land.

By the time their children were setting up homes of their own, a family address might be an ocean away.

IIThe same ship, nine months apart

Giuseppe went to New York ahead of his wife. In October 1902, their eldest daughter sailed from Naples on the Perugia, taking her little girl and her younger brother. Her husband was already in America; the three were going to join him.

Nine months later, Maria Grazia boarded the same ship. With her were a ten-year-old son and twin girls of five. Another daughter had married in Bella three weeks before her mother sailed, and stayed there.

By the summer of 1903, most of the family was on Manhattan’s West Side. Giuseppe became an iceman, work he would do for fifteen years. Before electric refrigerators, kitchens had iceboxes, and keeping them cold meant getting heavy blocks of ice up the tenement stairs. The family from the hill towns was making a living in a city of staircases.

IIISomeone to go to

Maria Grazia had a younger brother, also called Giuseppe. In February 1906, he sailed on the Brasile. When asked whom he would join in New York, he named his brother-in-law: Maria Grazia’s husband.

There were two Giuseppes now: one arriving from Bella, one already earning his living in Manhattan. The first had a sister’s family to join; the second had his wife’s brother coming across the Atlantic.

The family remembers the younger Giuseppe making six crossings, returning to Bella each time and buying land with his earnings. While his sister’s household made its home in New York, his life continued to lead him back to Italy.

IVThe relatives on 100th Street

Later generations remembered relatives “on 100th Street”. Two of Maria Grazia’s daughters were living there when they married, in 1914 and 1916. Over the following years, the family continued to live on that street or the next.

Bella remained part of the story, too: the daughter who stayed, the brother who kept returning, the land bought with money earned abroad. An ocean divided the addresses, but there was still a brother, a sister or a daughter at the other end.