Giacomo

My father is James. James Jr. His father is James Sr. And my great-grandfather is Giacomo. Giacomo is the Italian version of James. Going back from my great-grandfather, I have several other direct male ancestors named Giacomo.



Giacomo was born in France in 1882 during a period of economic difficulty in Italy. His parents Giovanni Battista and Margharita left their tiny village of Coassolo in northwestern Italy at the foothills of the Alps to seek work in eastern France. My father believes that after a few years in France, the family returned to Italy where Battista, as he was called, secured a passport and travel arrangements to the United States. He was drawn there with the promise of work in the coal fields of Illinois. Once he found a job in Coal City as an underground miner, he saved some money and then sent for his family. In 1887, Margherita and Giacomo travelled to the United States to join Battista. My dad has a copy of their joint passport--they left out of Le Havre, France, and disembarked in New York City, travelling only with their two suitcases. Giacomo, who came to be called Jocko, was 5 years old at the time.

In 1894, Battista died in a mine collapse. My father believes that at this time, Margherita was encouraged to move to the state of Washington by her brother Pietro. She took her son and moved to Washington, about 100 southeast of Seattle.

Jocko eventually became a bartender in Ronald, then took a job maintaining mining equipment in and around the mines. He eventually moved the tavern to Roslyn, where he set up a grocery store. In early 1910, the 27-year old Jocko married Carlotta Bianco, who died in 1911 several months after giving birth. I found the three of them in the 1910 census. Evidently, Jocko's mother Margherita wrote to an Italian family who had also immigrated to Coal City (originally from another small village in northwestern Italy) , inviting them to send Mabel Barbara Viano by train to Washington, in order to meet Jocko. In early 1913, the 30-year old Jocko and 23-year old Mabel marry. Mabel in my great-grandmother.

In late 2005, I travelled with my parents and two of my sisters to Coassolo. My dad has been working on our Italian family history for nearly 40 years--ever since he travelled to Italy at the end of his mission to France in the late 1960's. No one else in his family has helped him in the research, and I think he was motivated to take us there, hoping that someone else in the family would catch the bug. In Coassolo, we were able to visit the tiny municipal building where the office workers there permitted us to enter a back room and look through the dusty vital records that dated back to 1860. We sat there for portions of two days, combing through the records, looking for family names, and writing down all the information that we found.

It was exciting to see the Italian variation of my birth name--Bellezza--in the handwriting of a person from 150 years ago. As it turns out, the surname of Giovanni Battista was Bellezza Fontana (the beauty by the fountain), and is unique from other variations of Bellezza. When Jocko came to the United States with his parents, the name was changed to Bellessa.

I have a couple of strong memories from our time in the Coassolo Municipio. One of the pieces of information that was included in the vital records was the job of the decedent or the parents of the newborn child. Almost every single record listed a job of contadino, or peasant.

The other recollection I have is of the death record of an infant with one of the surnames we were searching for. The child was only a few days old. The next death record that was listed was of the child's mother. And her death occurred shortly after the baby. I was acting as the record reader, with my mom transcribing, and we both got choked up with this information.

I hope that our son will be born this week. We have been thinking about what to name him, and as with our other two children, I have been fence sitting, unwilling to make a decision. I keep thinking that perhaps a better name than those we have thought of will come to me somehow and that I should keep an open mind just in case. I have thought for some time, though, that I would like him to have the middle name of Giacomo. Not only would this honor my dad and grandpa, but it would pay homage to my Italian heritage.

Yesterday, I had a conversation with a group of women about baby names, and I started second guessing Giacomo. It is unusual, it doesn't go with our last name at all, and doesn't really go with any of the first names that we're thinking about. AJ has said for quite a while that this is a name that our son won't want to tell his friends about. In the middle of the night, when I had to get up to go the bathroom, I thought perhaps we should just go with the English equivalent of James.

But, in the shower this morning, I was thinking about it again. I wish I knew more about the lives of my Italian ancestors. Only the barest facts of their lives can be put together from the information I am able to collect about them. But, even that skeleton of information is sobering to me. For example, just a few weeks ago, I found the death records of three small children in one family. Ursula died when she was 18 months old, and just a few weeks after another sister was born into the family. A few years later a son was born--Giovanni--but he survived for only a week. Another little boy--Giuseppe--was born 2 years later but he died when he was about 6 months old. All these, in addition to the death of first born child Maria Catarina at age 4. So, out of 6 children, only 2 survived past early childhood.

I think about the contadini in the rocky and barren hills of northwestern Italy. And I think about leaving a country behind with only two suitcases for a "good job" as a coal miner, which in a few short years would lead to the death of a husband and father.

I want my child to be connected to my Italian ancestors. I want them and the hard lives they had to be remembered in some small way. I think we will keep the name Giacomo.