MEETING
NOTES
July 10th 2004
our illustrious speaker and author of several book son Italian-American history, Dr. Dominic Candeloro
POINTers In Person, Chicago-North met on
Saturday, July 10, 2004 at the Schaumburg library with 26 Italian genealogists
were in attendance. Dan Niemiec (#2304) opened the meeting
with the news that the POINT conference was to be cancelled. Rose Marie
Ulizzi-Ducato (#1812) and Dan had both already paid for their flights, and the
airlines will only refund a small portion of the money. We asked some of our members why they had
not planned to attend the conference.
Some of them could not plan that many months in advance due to potential
conflicts. Some thought the total cost
(airfare, hotel, conference fee) was too high.
Others did not know the speakers by reputation and did not know if they
would get any direct benefit from attending.
We also were not aware how important it was to book by June 30th. We knew there was a $25 discount to book early,
but if we had known in advance that the conference was actually in jeopardy, we
could have worked harder to get the word out in Chicago to get people to book.
Our chapter will be sharing a booth in
Milwaukee, Wisconsin during the four day Italiana Festa, held July 15th
through July 18th at Henry W. Maier festival park. Milwaukee Chapter #22,
George Koleas (#1527) and his group will be passing out info on PIP and POINT.
Since so many Chicagoans attend the Festa, our chapter will also be on hand to
pass out information and gather e-mail addresses for potential members. Rose
Marie Ulizzi-Ducato and Dan Niemiec will be in the tents on Saturday and
Sunday.
For the past few meetings we have discussed
potentially hosting a one-day conference in Chicago. We had to table this due to lack of time but we need to determine
the best time of year to host it and gather costs for the Italian Cultural
Center rooms. We also need to determine
if we have enough local speaking talent to run two tracks of speakers.
Our database for Chicago-Italian parish marriage
records has been created with two small parishes but we need to add more. Rather than leave it up to everybody to work
on their own, we ought to plan of an evening for 4-5 people to meet at
someone’s house, order a pizza, each brings a laptop and we all work
together. This will allow multiple
people to settle disputes about handwriting.
Dan will convert the spreadsheet data for web searching.
Geneva Shay #4774 brought in an article from the
Chicago Tribune entitled “The Biggest and Best”, by Patrick T. Reardon.
It listed the official names and aliases of Chicago neighborhoods. She
thought we could post the neighborhood names on our web site for non-Chicagoans
who don’t know where “Back of the Yards” is.
Rosie Kotrba and Mary Sturtevant were first
timers. They are first cousins of each
other and their cousin/sister Jean e-mailed Dan and wanted to find other living
cousins for a family reunion. Since
they all hail from Triggiano, Bari, Dan was able to send them a lot of ancestry
and a few living cousins too. Claude
and Ruth Lucchesi, Ralph Tricarico, Lourdes Mordini, Connier Mordini, Luciana
Kuziw, Mariagrazia Mordini, Ron Albiani, Nicholas and Anna La Sorella were
all first timers attending our PIP group.
The huge turnout was due to our illustrious
speaker, Dominic Candeloro, author, professor, and historian. He talked about
his latest book “Chicago’s Italians: Immigrants, Ethnics, Americans.” His other
book titles are, “Italians In Chicago”, Images of America, and “Italians In
Chicago”, Voices of America. All three
series are published by Arcadia, a company that specializes in local histories.
Dr. Candeloro began by comparing the Italians of
today with those of 90 years ago. Most
Italians we know today are middle class or better. Most that came here were dirt poor. Italians today are proud.
Italians of 90 years ago had to hide their pride to keep from conflict
with their non-Italian neighbors.
Italians had to send their ragged old clothes to Italy because those
rags were better than the clothes their families in Italy were wearing.
The schools and churches did their best to teach
the Italian kids their own language and culture but when Italy became America’s
enemy, they switched everything to English and a lot of culture was lost.
Some documentation of what Italians did for a
living can be found at the Library of Congress web site collection of Chicago
Daily News photos. (www.loc.gov)
Chicago Italians had to create their own businesses as their path to
success because they were too small in numbers in any one neighborhood to
affect the political process. There
were eleven Little Italies in Chicago so no one block of Italians could get
their own politicians elected. This
failure to capture political power in Chicago has relegated Chicago Italians to
a peripheral status, where they get streets renamed and housing projects named
for Italians but when the chips were down, such as when they knocked down a
neighborhood to make room for a highway or a college campus, even the Italian
aldermen would not fight for their own people because of the politcal cost at
City Hall.
The Church was a focal point as well, even
though anti-clericalism was rampant among some Italians. Most of the parishes in Chicago were founded
by the Scalabrini Fathers, with a couple founded by the Servites. Italians never had to form a parish (theirs
were in place for centuries already) so the priests from these orders had to do
a lot of the administrative work.
To capture the Italian experience in Chicago, a
series of oral histories were recorded in the 1970s and 1980s and some of these
form a book “Voices of America: Chicago’s Italians”. They are available at the Italian Cultural Center in Stone
Park. The ICC also has exhibits of art
and culture that are present nowhere else in Chicagoland. Any genealogist studying Chicago Italian
families should spend some time there to get background information that helps
explain WHY our ancestors did what they did.
Everyone enjoyed the presentation and several
people purchased Dr. Candeloro’s book s, which he signed for them. He then joined many of us for lunch at
Dominick’s. We thanked him for coming
all the way up from Chicago Heights to Schaumburg to join us.
Our next meeting is September 11, 2004,
10:30am-12:30pm, where Dan Niemiec will present “Italian Cemeteries”,
recounting his experiences in dealing with the cemeteries during his trip to
Italy. For more info, see our web site
at http://www.rootsweb.com/~itappcnc
or contact Dan at pipnorth@comcast.net
or Rose Ducato at psrmducato@aol.com