Rosa D'Ingeo's Immigration Records

For a long time, I'd had immigration records for all the D'Ingeos but one. Vincenzo's was easy to find and Domenico brought his all younger daughters over together, but Rosa's immigration record eluded me. A few weeks ago, I described the process of finding it using the always-helpful Steve Morse One-Step site.

Rosa D'Ingeo is found on line 13 of these pages. She's listed as Rosa D'Inseo, 16. She's listed as a domestic, although it appears to have been written in after the fact by someone with different handwriting than the person recording the other information. Her nearest relative "in country whence alien came" was her father, Domenico from Toritto, and she's going to New York. She had a ticket to her final destination, said she paid for her own passage, and it looks like she had $28 with her. She was being met by her brother Vincenzo, and there's an address given for him, but it's difficult to read. She was 4'8" tall and was born in Toritto, Italy.

Rosa also shows up at the back of the passenger manifest on the Record of Detained Aliens. She is, again, listed as Rosa D'Inseo. She was detained awaiting her brother, Vincenzo, whose address is here given more clearly as 221 W. 19th St.

Learning from other people, OR, GenealogyBank is awesome!

I finally caved and got a subscription to GenealogyBank. I told myself it was mostly for my husband, whose ancestors come from backwards states like Massachusetts and New Jersey, states whose newspapers haven't been made available online en masse by the unbeatable Thomas M. Tryniski of the unmatched FultonHistory website. My ancestors are all New Yorkers - even more, they're (almost) all Brooklynites, up until the last 50 years. What more could I ask than a site that has the Brooklyn Daily Eagle, plus dozens and dozens of other New York papers, just in case?

I should have known better. After all, I read lots of genealogy blogs, right? If you didn't know better, you might assume I pay attention to them, too. I sure thought I did. I remember two posts in the not-too-distant past about making sure you check multiple newspapers for your ancestors. Kerry Scott, of ClueWagon, posted Why You Should Always Check the Second Newspaper. That was literally the title of the post. Why you should always check the second newspaper. And what did I think? "Good thing I don't ever have to check other papers, since everyone in Brooklyn read the Eagle!" Humor me for a moment and take a look at the Brooklyn Public Library's list of Brooklyn newspapers that they have on microfilm. You don't have to read it. Just look at how very long it is. Then you can roll your eyes, if you must. Meanwhile, Liz Haigney Lynch of The Ancestral Archaeologist posted News You Can Use, in which she even mentioned multiple Brooklyn newspapers. And it's true that, somewhere in the back of my mind, I knew that the responsible thing to do would be to one day check out the Brooklyn Daily Standard Union. But the Brooklyn Public Library was so very far away, and reading years of newspapers on microfilm can be so very tedious. I still didn't think I needed a subscription to GenealogyBank. After all, GenealogyBank doesn't have the Brooklyn Daily Standard Union, so what good will it do me? I'll still need to get to Brooklyn to read the Standard Union, and what other newspapers will do me any good?

It turns out that the one newspaper that will do me the most good is one I didn't even know I needed. By the 1910s, the Mulvaneys were publishing their death notices in the Daily Eagle, like all good ancestors do when they know the Eagle will be available free online in a century or so. But a few decades earlier, back in the 1870s and 1880s, it seems that the Mulvaneys were dedicated New York Herald readers.

In less than an hour from the time when we began our GenealogyBank subscription, I had come across the following, from the 10 February 1883 edition of the Herald:

MULVANY - On Thursday, February 8, BRIDGET, beloved wife of James Mulvany, native of Kells, county Meath, Ireland. Friends of the family are invited to attend the funeral, from her late residence, 127 King st., Brooklyn, Sunday, 11th, at two o'clock. 

How long had I been trying to find out where in Ireland these Mulvaneys originated? Oh, only approximately forever. It was the one last family whose Irish hometown I didn't know. And "Kells, county Meath" waited, tucked away in a database I wasn't willing to subscribe to because I was sure that all the newspapers I would ever need the Eagle (free online) and the Standard Union (only on microfilm) (and occasionally the Times, but really not until after consolidation, which wasn't until the immigrant Mulvaneys were long dead).

In sum, pay attention to what you read, listen to people who know more than you do, read lots of newspapers, and don't be as dumb as I am.

Runs in the Family

There's a funny thing about connecting with cousins over the internet - it happens in lots of different ways, but I've begun to notice patterns. Family tendencies, maybe.

The O'Haras and the Gattos appear to have no internet presence at all - they're the branches of my family who I haven't encountered in my research.

The Gillans I've met primarily on surname message boards, though one also landed here after a Google search.

The Mulcahys are extremely fond of Googling their grandparents' names. Several have found my blog by doing so. 

The Mulvaneys, on the other hand, are prone to doing genealogy. I've connected with a number of them through Ancestry family trees, and we have a nice little group of people to share research with as we find it.

The Lanzillottos do genealogy, too, and I've encountered a couple of them through Ancestry.


(As I write this post, though, I think I might be creating some of these tendencies instead of just witnessing them. Have I visited message boards for all my surnames? And I realize that I have one or two posts where I list all the Mulcahys and their spouses  - of course their grandkids can find them by Googling their names! I guess I need to get on that with the rest of my lines - too bad there's no big family picture like the one that was the catalyst for the Mulcahy posts.)

Looking just a little harder to find Rosa D'Ingeo

I have long had the immigration records of my great-grandmother, Maria D'Ingeo Gatto and a portion of her family; she immigrated in 1917 with her father, Domenico, her sisters Angelica and Giovanna, and an unrecognized woman, Maria Lupo. The family said that they were being met by her sister Rosa; I know that she also had a brother, Vicenzo "James" D'Ingeo. I had never been able to find arrival records for Rosa or Vicenzo on Ancestry, but some time ago I searched a little harder and came up with Vicenzo's arrival records on the Ellis Island website. But I never had any luck at all finding Rosa.

Then, last week, Ben bought the Who Do You Think You Are book by Megan Smolenyak, and I read it. In it, she mentions the Steve Morse One-Step webpages. Now, of course I knew about the One-Step site. Of course I had visited the One-Step site. But it occurred to me that I had never really used the One-Step tool to systematically search for and find something that was eluding me.

I didn't even go into it looking for something I couldn't find; I went into it looking for something I knew was there. My Ancestry.com subscription has lapsed, and we're letting it stay that way for a little while longer, and then maybe discussing if it might be more worthwhile to direct our limited genealogical funds towards a different database for a time. So when I needed information about Maria and her father Domenico from their passenger manifest (and this week I'm on a computer that includes neither my saved documents nor my genealogy software), I used Steve Morse's Ellis Island Gold Form to find the passenger manifest I'd already seen, by filling in information I already knew it contained. And I realized that this long-ignored tool might be able to do what it was intended to do and help me find something I had never been able to find. So I tried a little harder, and in 15 minutes or less, I had Rosa's arrival records, dated 6 Dec 1911, where she was recorded as Rosa D'Inseo. She stated that she was meeting her brother Vicenzo and that her closest relative in Italy was her father Domenico, in Toritto. It was really her! I think I'd begun to suspect that she had married before immigrating, and I'd never find her arrival records without knowing her married name. But it turns out that I just wasn't looking hard enough!

Later this week I'll share Rosa's elusive arrival records with you!

(The above post includes Amazon.com affiliate links.)