The Crossings

Two men this archive had failed to find in Italian registers left records in America. That turned out to be the way in, because an arrival manifest records an age — and an age converts to a birth year, which is precisely the thing the family tree keeps getting wrong. The Statue of Liberty Foundation's Arrival Records Collection is free, needs no account for the index, and covers New Orleans as well as Ellis Island.

The Liguria, 22 February 1908 — the image, and the oldest question in this archive

The index gave Michele Donato 's age and nothing else. The manifest page itself gives five more things, and one of them closes a question that has been open since the first week.

S.S. Liguria, sailing from Palermo, 22 February 1908 — List or Manifest of Alien Passengers for the United States

They are on consecutive lines. Michele Donato and Giovanni Polistena crossed the Atlantic together in February 1908, bound for the same town in Florida — and about eight years later Giovanni married Michele's daughter Nunnziata Donato .

Romano, not Pontillo — settled

The family tree gives Giovanni Polistena's mother as Giovanna Pontillo. Act 206 of 1883 says Giovanna Romano. This archive has carried that as an open conflict for days, noting each time that Pontillo is a real Scilla surname and the tree might yet be right.

It is not. A United States immigration manifest, filled in from Giovanni's own statement twenty-five years after his birth and half a world from Scilla, names his mother Giovanna Romano. Two independent records, two continents, one answer.

The father's name moves a little too, and towards the tree. The 1883 act calls him Camillo Antonio Polistena; the tree calls him Antonio; his son in 1908 calls him Antonino. All three are the same man, and the tree's version was never the problem.

Louisiana, New Orleans Passenger Lists, 1820–1945 (NARA T905), roll 19, image 763 — FamilySearch 3:1:33S7-95CH-L8S. The page was read by stitching its DeepZoom tiles at native resolution, 4048 × 4097.

Michele Donato: two independent witnesses to 1856

The tree puts his birth at Scilla in 1851. His daughter's birth act makes him 36 in July 1892. This manifest makes him 52 in 1908. Both give about 1856, and neither supports 1851 — and the manifest image above makes a third — which is exactly why the 1851 index had no Donato in it. It is the only New Orleans arrival among forty-nine Michele Donato records in the collection, and it matches the port and the year the tree already claimed.

It also settles a doubt this archive raised three days ago. Having found no Donato in the Scilla birth indexes for 1851, 1856 or 1859, the working hypothesis was that the surname arrived at Scilla late and Michele was born elsewhere. Fifteen Donato gave Scilla as their last residence at Ellis Island between 1893 and 1921. They were unquestionably a Scilla family. Where Michele was born is still open — but "the Donato are not really of Scilla" is not the answer.

Rocco Arena: the conflict resolves, against the tree's parents rather than its dates

This archive has spent three days on a single contradiction. The tree makes Rocco Arena — born 1861 — the son of Orazio Arena and Giovana Zirilli. Act 228 of the 1861 Scilla register says Francesco Antonio Arena, marinaro, and Serafina Arlotta, and 1861 holds exactly one Rocco Arena. Either the parents were wrong or the year was.

Three independent strands now point the same way.

The tree's year is right. What is almost certainly wrong is the parentage — and Orazio Arena and Giovanna Zirilli, who are documented twice over as a real Scilla couple, are simply a different household that the tree attached him to.

One honest caveat. Manifest ages are approximate and the indexed "year of birth" is derived from the age, not copied from a document. A man born on 20 December 1861 would be 38 in March 1900, not 39 — so this is a year loose. It does not pin the date. What it does do is rule out the alternative the archive was entertaining, that Rocco's birth was years away from 1861 and hiding in another volume. The chart still draws the tree as it stands, because this archive does not rewrite what it was given on the balance of evidence — it records the balance instead.

Four crossings, and a Polistena on the last one

Rocco Arena crossed the Atlantic at least four times, and the archive can now put a ship against every one of them:

The 1892 record dates the tree's bare "1892" to the day, names the ship and the port, and adds a fourth independent statement that this man worked the water — Seaman, after marinaro in 1893, Sailor in 1900, and marinaro for his father and grandfather in the marriage act of 1851.

The 1894 one is a candidate, not a finding. The age is right, the year is right — and it is the year the family tree assigns a crossing to Anna Arena and Generosa Costa, so it may be where that stray date came from, attached to the wrong people. But the occupation is Tailor, where every other record of this man says he worked the water. Passenger-list trades are loosely taken and Arena is a common name. It is not merged.

That last one confirms the family tree twice and corrects it once. The tree gives him a departure from Messina — right — and an arrival on 12 September 1913. It was the 11th.

And he was not travelling alone. Four frames away on the same manifest — T715-2174, frame 292, line 19 — is Rocco Polistena, 44, of Scilla. An Arena and a Polistena came off the same ship on the same day in 1913. A generation later Anna Arena 's son Rocco married Angela Polistena .

Who took a six-year-old across the Atlantic

Anna Arena crossed on the Archimede on 23 May 1899, aged six. On the same film, the same frame, the line immediately above hers, is Giavanni Arena, 45, married, of Scilla. She travelled with him, not with her father — who arrived ten months later, and as an American citizen. Her brother Antonio had been born in New York in 1895.

So the order runs backwards from what the tree implies. Rocco Arena was in America first and for long enough to naturalise; his six-year-old daughter was brought over in 1899 by another Arena; and the family later went home to Scilla, where Anna married Giuseppe Arena and their son Rocco was born in 1924.

Five lines of one manifest: the Luisiana, 2 August 1906

The tree records three people arriving at New York on 2 August 1906 and names no ship. It was the Luisiana, and they were not three people but five, on five consecutive lines of one page:

Domenica Anile's birth is given in the tree as 20 February 1880, which makes her twenty-six on the day — and the manifest says twenty-six. The three-year-old on the next line is her son by Domenico Melluso, and the transcriber ran the child's surname into his mother's, which is how a Filippo Melluso came to be indexed as Foloppo Melluso Anile.

Two people on that page are not in the family tree at all — Teresa Anile, 20, and the one-year-old Francesco. A family of five crossed; the tree remembers three.

There is a second Filippo Melluso of Briatico on the same ship, aged thirteen, four lines and two frames earlier. He is not the tree's man — the tree's is the three-year-old — and he is recorded here so that no one later merges them on the strength of a name and a date.

The Polistena and the Donato were already together in 1903

On the Sicilian Prince, 12 August 1903, line 1 is Annunziata Polistena, 17, and line 2 is Giovanni Donato, 16 — both of Scilla, side by side on the same page. Further down the same manifest, lines 28 and 29, are Giuseppe Polistena, 30, and Maria Polistena, 27, a married couple.

Giovanni Polistena did not marry Nunziata Donato until about 1916. Thirteen years earlier two teenagers from those families were crossing the Atlantic on consecutive lines of one ship's manifest. And in 1901 on the Neustria, Pasquale Donato and Lorenjo Costa of Scilla are two lines apart — Costa being Generosa Costa 's surname. These were not three families who happened to marry; they were neighbours who moved together.

A manifest gives you one person at a time. A census sheet gives you everyone in the building. The 1899 manifest sent Giovanni Arena 's brother to Mulberry Street; Mulberry Street is in Ward 6; and here, on sheet 17A, line 16, household 325, is Rocco Arena .

It confirms the family tree on four points at once — the 1892 arrival, Generosa Costa as his wife, Anna as his daughter, and Antonio born in New York — and it adds two things the tree does not have. He had been married ten years, so Rocco Arena and Generosa Costa married in 1890. And he gave his own birth as September 1861, where act 228 of 1861 says 20 December. Census months are self-reported and three months adrift is ordinary; the year agrees, which is the part that was ever in doubt.

The other five names are the finding. Living with them: a Costa, which is Generosa's surname; an Arlotta, which is Rocco's mother's surname; and three more Arena — Domenico 18, John 42 and Rafael 17. This is not a household, it is a piece of Scilla transplanted into one tenement. John Arena, 42, is all but certainly the brother Giovanni who had brought six-year-old Anna over the year before. And Lorenzo Costa, 24, is all but certainly the Lorenjo Costa, 26, of Scilla who came off the Neustria on 13 March 1901, two lines from a Donato.

United States Census, 1900 — Borough of Manhattan, Election District 5, New York City Ward 6, ED 117, New York County; NARA T623. FamilySearch 1:1:MSJ5-T7D.

The family tree has Rocco Arena and Generosa Costa going to America and coming home. It does not have what happened in between.

Sarafina Arena, born 14 August 1898, died on 30 January 1900 and was buried the next day, aged seventeen months. That is why she is not in the census taken that June, and it is why nobody remembered her.

And her name is evidence. Act 228 of 1861 gives Rocco Arena's mother as Serafina Arlotta — the parentage this archive spent four days arguing about. In New York in 1898, Rocco named a daughter Serafina. It is not proof, and it is the third separate thing to point the same way: the sibling pair in the register, the Arlotta lodging with them in 1900, and now a dead child's name.

June 1949 — Angela Polistena and Antonino Polistena reach Brisbane together. October 1949 — Sebastiano Mazza reaches Fremantle, alone. May 1950 — Michael Antonio Polistena . March 1951 — Domenica Prostamo follows with a son not yet three years old. 1953 — Rocco Arena , and the Cavallaro. 1957 — Francessco Prostamo , aged fifty-six, last of all.

That is the standard shape of chain migration and it can be read straight off the dates: a man goes first, works, and sends for his wife and child eighteen months later; the wife's relatives follow; the grandfather comes last, when there is somewhere for him to arrive. What the archive cannot yet say is which ships. Not one of these eighteen crossings names a vessel. That is the first thing to fix →