52 Ancestors Week 12: Joined Together

 From Amy Johnson Crow: Week 12's theme is "Joined Together." Could it be a marriage? Could it be an organization? Could it be a carpenter/mason/builder? It can be whatever you make it out to be!

Care for some vino?

    Marriage is usually the first thing that comes to peoples' minds when they hear the term "joined together". That makes sense. Marriage brings two different people together in holy matrimony. Two families unite and they HOPEFULLY live happily ever after. There are, of course, other ways people can join together. Groups of immigrants can band together to form communities in another country where they all speak the same language and have the same basic values and ethnic origin. You see this happen with various "Little Italies" in places like New York and Boston. Did you know it happened elsewhere, too? There was and still is a "Little Italy" in Haverhill, Massachusetts.

La famiglia di Coppola

     During the late 1800s and into the early 1900s, the "Queen Slipper City" saw wave after wave of Italian immigrants come to the city to work in various textile mills along the banks of the Merrimack River.  The first immigrants came from the northern areas around Milan and Florence. By the early 1900s, they were coming from southern towns like San Pietro a Maida and it was all largely thanks to one man: Giovanni Coppola.

  

      Giovanni "John" Coppola was born in San Pietro a Maida in 1875 to Giovanni Coppola and Angela Suverato.  It's easy to say that he took the credit for bringing many Italians from his native San Pietro to Haverhill and there is actually quite a lot of truth to this claim. I've talked to several DNA matches on the Coppola side and they all said the same thing. John brought their family to America. At first I thought it was a coincidence. By the second and third time I heard the story, coincidence started to become fact. Evidence began to pile up thanks in part to ship manifests and one has to wonder why he did this. Why did he bring so many of his fellow villagers to Haverhill?

Definitely not some other Giovanni
Coppola.

    To understand that, you have to understand the conditions in San Pietro a Maida and Calabria at the time he was growing up. Southern Italy was suffering from great economic turmoil after Italy unified in 1861. The Italian government instituted policies which left the southern portions of Italy high and dry. Conditions were bad and this caused many Italians to leave Italy for good or to seek work and send money back home.

    John first arrived in America in 1898 when he was just twenty-two years old according to the Italians to America index.  I wish the index went into more detail because I'd have liked to have known where he went AFTER New York. Did he go to Haverhill? Where did he go? It could just be my imagination, but, perhaps he was going on a fact-finding mission. It never hurts to scout an area and look for potential work. This was smart thinking on his part! 

    We might not find the exact answer. But, he did return to San Pietro a Maida where he and his wife started a family in the late 1890s. Some time after that, he returned to America and then he sent for more than just his wife and kids. That's when the ball really started rolling!

Vincenzo Ferraiolo and Maria Tedesco.

    People like my great-grandparents Vincenzo Ferraiolo and Maria Tedesco made a beeline from San Pietro to Haverhill.  Giovanni's nephew, Vincenzo, made his first visit to America in the early 1910s when he stayed with his aunt, Concetta. He left by the decade's end, returned to America, and sent for his wife and two children by 1929.

    Giovanni even paid the fare for his first cousins, Marianna and Rosa Maria Stella. He was also instrumental in bringing over the Pallaria family as well. Wow! Is there anyone he didn't help? Well, it's important to remember that this is just one case of one man bringing over his friends and family. It couldn't have been a common occurrence. Could it?

    Oh, you bet it is a common occurrence! Let me put it like this. If you're an immigrant living in a country where you don't know the language or anyone else, you're more likely to invite people over who share your culture with you in order to stave off the loneliness. Giovanni lived in an age before the Internet. There was no instant communication with people across the ocean. Sure you could send letters to family and friends. But, it's better to have friends close by because they can help when things are rough. And if you're an immigrant things can be really rough, especially if anti-immigrant sentiment was common in your town. It was just a fact of life and sadly history tends to repeat itself.

Everyone in that pic FINALLY has a Wikitree 
profile.

    This was why "Little Italy" was formed in places like Boston and New York. People joined together because of shared heritage and culture. In the case of Haverhill, a similar neighborhood was formed. Giovanni Coppola had his grocery store on High Street. Nazarene Benedetti's family created the now famous Benedetti's Deli on Washington Street. The list goes on and the Italian community had such a huge impact on the city that it would take way too long to get into here!  If you're really curious, I would check out the book, Italians in Haverhill. It goes into great detail on how huge the impact really was. You can still feel the impact to this day as descendants of those immigrants are still in the area.

    

    While the Italian neighborhood in Haverhill may not be as prevalent as Boston's historic North End,  it still influenced my life and the community as a whole. I remember going to my grandma Ollie's house and seeing all the Italian shops in downtown Haverhill. Since my father was born there, he'd point out various buildings and talked about who owned what shop when he was a kid or who lived in what house. Most of the time my grandmother had someone over her house when we arrived. She was rarely alone! Everyone knew everyone because while they lived in the same general area, they also went to the same nearby church. They also attended festivals such as the "Feast of the Three Saints" in nearby Lawrence, Massachusetts.

La famiglia di Carrabs

    Sometimes I wonder if that was how my grandparents, Marco and Ollie met. When I look at the Haverhill city directories, I noticed how close the Carrabis and Ferraiolo houses were at one point. They were quite literally around the corner from each other! My father has never really been sure how his parents met. But, I think it's safe to say they probably met at church or at an Italian community event. I'm going to go with the latter because in all honesty it would go hand-in hand with what I've been talking about.  As I've discussed before, the Italian community looked out for each other as more and more people arrived from the "old country".

    It's important to remember that they didn't just come from San Pietro a Maida or Gesualdo. They joined together with Italians from all over Italy to create a community where everyone spoke the same language, had the same culture and needed support from their fellow countrymen. Was Giovanni Coppola the first Italian in Haverhill? Probably not. But, you really can't stress the importance of what he did for the community. Difficult circumstances caused many people to leave a land they once called home and they joined together to recreate a piece of that home in America.

Editor's note: In April of 2023, I found that Giovanni Coppola was not the brother of Paolo, Caterina and Concetta Coppola. He is likely a first cousin of the three. Look for details in a future blog post.