"Lost at Sea" is a fitting title for this month's blog had I not had access to Immigration Records in the process of doing family history research on a new project. In fact, it was because of those records that the family I was researching was NOT "lost at sea" so to speak. Their passenger information was recorded on Immigration Records and those records set the foundation for the research on the Italian ancestry of my granddaughter, whose great, great grandfather, Salvatore Campo, was an emigrant from Sicily.
A major part of the research on the family did not come from census records-- my usual "go to" place for research, but rather from ship's records. Using ship's records, I was able to piece together a lot of his history. For example, from one entry, upon his arrival in 1903 from Sicily, the following information was recorded on the ship's passenger list shown below:
Entry number 24 for "Salvatore Campo," shows the following information: He was 21 years old, was a "countryman" for his occupation, was born in Siculiana, Italy, was single, was going to reside in New York, paid for his passage himself, had $12 cash, had never been to the United States before, and his purpose of going into the U.S. was to join his brother Pasquale at 21 Albany Street in New York. In 1911, Salvatore is once again entering the U.S. with a few changes from the passenger list of 1903. He was now 29 years old, married, was a merchant, was a non-immigrant alien (which implies that he had already been to the U.S. previously), and behind his wife in Sicily named Oliva Marzullo. Somehow Salvatore doesn't show up in any of the U.S. census records nor the Canadian census records, for the next 30 years, possibly because he returned to Italy several times and was probably gone at the time the census was being recorded. So if it wasn't for the valuable information from the ship's passenger lists, I would not have been able to research him as well as I did. Lastly, there are immigration "cards" with recorded border crossing information as people went from the U.S. into Canada and vice versa. One of the last "cards" I researched for the Campo family was in 1937 listing Salvatore's wife and four of his children, who, for the first time, were coming into the U.S. with the destination of Montreal, Canada, where Salvatore resided. The family went across the border several times.
Although Salvatore lived in both the U.S. and Canada between 1903 and 1940, the only time he appeared in a census record was in the 1940 Census of Rochester, New York. Had it not been for the Ship's Passenger List records as well as border crossing records, I would not have had the wealth of information that I obtained from those records which gave me considerable information about the family. In between those years, several passenger list documents showed his comings and goings from the U.S., to Canada, back to Sicily, back to the U.S., back to Canada, and so forth over a 35 year time span.
"Lost at Sea" were any of the usual sources for my research procedures; and, if not for the Immigration Records, the Campo family research would also be "Lost at Sea"!
