When my grandfather passed in 2019, I hadn’t been home in two years. For the last decade I have lived abroad and gone to great lengths to disconnect myself from my personal history—and the small town I came from—in order to pursue my graduate studies, and to live openly and happily as a queer person in a big city. My grandfather was a well-loved man: a football coach and high school teacher whose students, friends, and former colleagues turned up all day long to pay their respects. Kindly older neighbors I hadn’t seen in twenty years affectionately squeezed my arm and said, “I’m sorry about your father,” mistaking me for my mother. They’d forgotten that she is grown, and that she has children who are also grown. It doesn’t matter how many years I’ve been away. Here, I belong to the Precopio family.
Since then, I have been thinking about the ways we tell our own stories—as part of our families, part of our communities, and with our work in the world. In my professional life I’ve spent a good deal of time telling other peoples’ stories, rooting around in libraries and archives searching for the details of some medieval someone or other. So, mid-pandemic, when one of those ads for a trial of Ancestry.com popped up, it niggled around in my brain for a few days. Why have I never tried something like that before? I am, after all, a professionally trained historian, aren’t I? Shouldn’t I know something about my own history? The question came weighted with guilt for having stayed away from home for so long, coupled with the knowledge that it would have been easier to ask my grandfather—and I missed my chance.
Family history, something so close to the story of ourselves, can be a difficult and sobering endeavor for many communities. Often for queer people, the very act of living as ourselves has meant a kind of generational rupture which involves a retelling of personal history, a new sense of self. When we think about our “ancestry,” we often situate ourselves within our community: in a long history of activism, scholarship, and performance that has shaped the way we interact with the world today. We have chosen family and found family. We have community elders who hold our stories for us, who make room for us where our birth families couldn’t. “Family” is an expansive definition for queer people.
Still, I was curious about the people who brought our family—the Precopios—to America. Locating and accessing materials for this kind of family history research can be challenging, even more so when you’re trying to do that work from another country in the middle of a pandemic lockdown. Ancestry is a family history service that gives its users access to a number of digitized collections: federal and state census records, birth, marriage and death certificates, school and church histories, city directories, U.S. military records, and immigration collections.1 From my home in London, their Worldwide Membership option afforded me access to collections in the United States I wouldn’t be visiting in person any time soon. With Ancestry, and the knowledge of family history that had been passed down to me, however scant, I had a place to begin.
My family arrived in the United States during the great wave of twentieth-century European immigration, the height of which saw two million Italians arrive in the century’s first decade alone. My great-great grandfather Giuseppe was the first to arrive, with my great-great grandmother Philipa Malita coming a few years later. There are dozens of arrival records for Giuseppe Procopio/a in the latter part of that decade. Procopia/o is a common southern Italian surname, and my great-great grandfather most likely came from part of Calabria, the “toe” of Italy’s boot.2
Map of Calabria from L’Italia geografica illustrata, Palmiro Premoli 1891. The British Library, via Wikimedia Commons.
In every iteration of the federal and state census from 1920 – 1940, their birth and immigration years vary slightly, and their surname changes from Procopia to Procopio, which finally became Precopio in the next generation. My great-great-grandmother’s name changes from Philipa to Philippine, and then finally to an anglicized Phyllis. The use of “Ph” rather than a phonetic “F” is unusual for an Italian name, she might have changed it from Filippa, or a diminutive Filippina. Perhaps she stubbornly held onto some iteration of her birth name until she became Phyllis.
Although my great-great grandparents reported their arrival years as being sometime between 1900 and 1910, the record of their early years is patchy. A marriage record puts them in Syracuse, NY in 1910. Syracuse is also the birthplace of their first three children: Angeline, Peter (my great-grandfather), and Tony. This information doesn’t come from contemporary sources, however; it is Tony and Peter’s WWII draft registration cards and their obituaries that list Syracuse as their place of birth. In fact, the 1920 census is the first place I can find the Precopios recorded as a household; the census indicates they’d recently had another little girl named Philippina who, sadly, only lived to be nine years old. But they weren’t in Syracuse anymore. They were in eastern Pennsylvania, in a town called Frackville.
Bird’s-eye view of Frackville, Pennsylvania in 1889 by T.M. Fowler. Library of Congress, via Wikimedia Commons
They lived there for a short time between stints in upstate New York, where they settled permanently sometime between 1920 and 1925. I really can’t account for why they went to Pennsylvania for 4 or 5 years or what they were doing there. It’s lost lore, I’m afraid, without someone in my family knowing why. As valuable as the census is, it’s decennial, taking snapshots every ten years. In the 1910 census, there was no Precopio family—at least not the Precopios I was looking for. But in 1920, there was a Precopio family: a couple with four children living 200 miles away from where they’d been married a decade before.
By 1925 the family had settled in what would later be my hometown: Johnstown, New York, a small city in the foothills of Adirondack Park. Johnstown and its neighboring city Gloversville—together known as the Glove Cities—were built upon the leather industry of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. Men usually worked in the tanneries, the grittier and smellier side of things, while women sewed gloves in their homes. An 1888 elevation map of Johnstown shows us its important landmarks: 9 churches, 3 public schools, the courthouse and county offices, a coal yard, two lumber mills (tree bark was historically used to create the tannic acids used to strip down hides during the tanning process), a grist mill, and 15 different glove factories.
Johnstown, NY, 1888. Lucien R. Burleigh, Public domain, via Wikimedia Commons
I wish I’d asked my grandfather more questions, the kinds the census can’t answer. I don’t know much about his parents or if he remembered his grandparents. Still, there are traces left in other sources that provide more than census records can. My great-great-grandfather’s draft registration card for the First World War (1917-18) listed him as “tall” and “slender” with gray eyes and dark hair. His occupation was listed as “Shoemaker.” He signed it “Giuseppe” still, although the registrar put “Joseph” on the top of the card.
Giuseppe/Joseph and Philipa/Phyllis would have arrived in Johnstown to an aggressive campaign of Americanization, including regular English lessons for all foreign-born workers. Lilian Horton, a state teacher organizer in the 1920s, reported on the city’s students: “The Italians, quick to learn and very appreciative, make rapid progress but are not quite so regular in attendance.”3 To solve this problem up in Syracuse, the Americanization League implemented the straightforward solution of Factory Schools, incorporated directly into the work day: “…the factory was the natural place for a school. There is no break in going from the factory to the factory school as there is in going from the home to the night school.”4
Twentieth century census lists are organized by city and then by street, with each household number accounted for. The occupants are listed by heads of household with all subsequent members nested below and recorded by their relationship to the head. By 1940, Joseph repaired shoes out of the bottom level of their home while Phyllis worked a few hours a week at a glove factory. While Tony had moved into his own household with his wife, nine people were still registered to the same house at 11 South Market Street in Johnstown, including Angeline’s husband and Peter’s wife and children:
Head of household: Joseph Procopio, my great-great-grandfather.
Age: 56, Place of birth: Italy, Year of arrival: 1906, Citizenship: Naturalized
Occupation: Cobbler proprietor
Phyllis (Wife)
Age: 57, Place of birth: Italy, Year of arrival: 1908, Citizenship: Naturalized
Occupation: Gauge maker at a glove factory (for 8 hours a week)
Sam di Fabio (Son-in-Law), 27 years old, a glove cutter at a glove factory.
Angeline (Daughter of the head of the household, but still nestled safely under her husband’s name) – 29 years old, she also works at a glove factory.
Peter (Son), my great-grandfather, 28 years old, a truck driver (later he works for a tannery).
Helen (Daughter-in-Law), my great-grandmother , 26 years old, she works for the knitting mill.
Foster (Grandchild), my grandfather, 5 years old, who is named for his Spanish grandfather Fausto Emmanuel.
Joseph (Grandson), 1 year old.
Joseph Jr (Son), 17 years old, student (the only living child born in the Pennsylvania years).5
Of course, census records at this time were handwritten. Their accuracy depended upon factors such as which household member answered the questions and how well they were understood and recorded by the census taker. In this case, Angeline (their oldest child) answered the 1940 census questions, meaning she might not have known what year her parents immigrated or exactly what year they were born.
The family lived in a predominately white, working-class community made up of other Europeans who mainly worked at one of Johnstown’s many glove factories, with a few of their neighbors listed as household servants or cooks. The census is an echo of Walt Whitman’s America: everyone singing their song.
We rarely think of our grandparents as young people, although they obviously were. My grandfather lived in this multi-generational home presumably from birth until the middle of his childhood; never once did I ask him what that was like. I know my grandfather was the first person in his family to go to college, and then to have such a white-collar job as teaching. And now, me, with all these fancy letters to my name. I’ve never stitched a thing a day in my life.
I am not a Precopio; I bear my father’s last name—a man I’ve been estranged from since I was a teenager. In 72 years I’ll appear on a federal census in a Thomas household, and then disappear because, like my ancestors, I left my home country in search of opportunity. But I know that whenever I go home, I am recognized as my mother’s daughter, my grandfather’s brood. Here in London, I’m unidentifiable as anything other than the story I’ve given myself, the person I’ve grown to be.
There is something bittersweet in telling their story. I often wonder if they would be annoyed that I crossed the ocean again in the opposite direction, swimming against the tide of their dreams. Or, perhaps, they would be proud that I sang a different song.
- It’s worth checking whether your local library has a subscription to Ancestry.com. More than likely, they will have the Library Edition that can be used for free on their premises. In addition to public records, countless family historians and hobbyists have given so much of their time to public family trees—populating them with oral histories, photos, and newspaper clippings.
- Birth places for the various Giuseppes include Davoli, Catanzaro, Oppido, and Napoli (which is not part of Calabria, but also a common place of origin).
- Lillian Horton, “Brief Account of Women’s Classes in Johnstown, New York, 1920-1921” in Report on Elementary Education of Non-English Speaking Adults: Survey and Tendencies of Work, 1919-1921, ed. Elizabeth A. Woodward (1922), 63.
- Americanization league, “Brief Survey of Factory Classes in Syracuse, Solvay and Vicinity” in Report on Elementary Education of Non-English Speaking Adults: Survey and Tendencies of Work, 1919-1921, ed. Elizabeth A. Woodward (1922), 48.
- “Procopio, Joseph”. 1940 United States Federal Census. United States of America, Bureau of the Census. Available at: http://www.ancestry.com (Last accessed: 14 August 2021).
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