WORKS IN PROGRESS

There she was on the ship’s manifest. My grandmother, Filomena DeSantis, six years old, traveling from Italy to the United States in June of 1899. The line below hers listed a thirty-five-year-old man with a name unfamiliar to me. I moved my cursor along both lines, searching for any bits of information that might help me sort out the truth about Grandma’s immigration. I was a teenager when she shared the distressing story of how she came to the United States. The conversation started when I asked Grandma how old she was when she came to America.

“I think about five or six,” she replied.
“Did you come with your mom and dad?”
“No.”
Her response was so quiet that I asked her to repeat it.
“No. I came by myself. Well, with a man I didn’t know. I was kidnapped.”

None of my relatives seemed to know about Grandma’s shocking claim, and for many years, the immigration story settled in the back of my mind. It wasn’t until I began researching family history that my interest resurfaced. I joined the Ancestry website and began to build a family tree. I also began searching the Ellis Island website, where I found the ship’s manifest carrying Filomena to the United States. Still, I hungered for more family history, especially for information about Filomena’s mother—my great-grandmother, Anna Pompa. I couldn’t imagine what Anna would have gone through if her child had been stolen. I wondered if maybe little Filomena was not kidnapped but given up. Perhaps Anna was sick and couldn’t take care of her daughter, or perhaps she died. I realized that unraveling my family mystery was tied to learning about my great-grandmother’s life.

I made the decision to go to Italy—to the small village of Castelluccio Valmaggiore, where my grandmother and her mother were born, where generations of their ancestors were born, lived, and died. I needed to walk through this town, to feel its earth beneath me, to visit the old churches, to discover what happened to Anna Pompa.