Ellis Island | Hope and Tears | 4

More than 70 years have passed since ferries of immigrants arrived at Ellis Island. But the site is still alive with the memories of all those who entered full of hope for the future — and anxious to become Americans. In this episode, Lindsay is joined by two people who work at the Statue of Liberty & Ellis Island Foundation https://www.statueofliberty.org/. Stephen Lean is the director of the Records Discovery Center, and Riley Dominianni is a research assistant there. Both have found that the archives can be surprisingly personal. You can search for your family in the Statue of Liberty & Ellis Island Foundation’s database, the Arrival Records Collection https://www.statueofliberty.org/arrival-search/, which contains records for Ellis island, but also for other points of entry across the U. S.— including Massachusetts, Florida, Hawaii, California, and more. See Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info.

Speaker names marked ? are inferred from speaking time and the show’s known hosts — they are not voice-verified.

• 0:00Lindsay Graham?

  Audible subscribers can binge new seasons of American History Tellers early and ad-free right now. Join Audible in the Audible app or by subscribing on Apple Podcasts.

• 0:15Lindsay Graham?

  From Audible Originals, I'm Lindsay Graham, and this is American History Tellers, our history, your story.

• 0:37Lindsay Graham?

  Today, Ellis Island is part of the National Park Service, a day outing for people interested in history. More than 70 years have passed since ferries of immigrants arrived there to be processed, but this site is still alive with the memories of all those who entered its vast hall, full of hope for the future and anxious that they be given the chance to become Americans. No one alive today knows these conflicting emotions better than the people who work at the Statue of Liberty and Ellis Island Foundation. The foundation restored and preserved the Statue of Liberty in Ellis Island, and they maintain a database of millions of records of immigrants who came to America through various ports of entry over the past several hundred years. Two of those who work on Ellis Island are Stephen Lean,

• 1:22Lindsay Graham?

  Director of the Records Discovery Center, and Riley Dominianni, a research assistant at the Records Discovery Center. Both know that the archives are far from merely dusty bureaucratic records. Instead, they are often surprisingly personal.

• 1:43Speaker 01

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• 2:25Speaker 01

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• 2:43Lindsay Graham?

  Hi, I'm Lindsay Graham, the host of American History Tellers. In our latest series, in 1892, as millions of hopeful immigrants arrive on American shores, the United States opens a new immigration station on Ellis Island. But over time, some will find that the gates to the American dream are shut to them. Listen to American History Tellers on Audible or wherever you get your podcasts.

• 3:12Speaker 02

  I'm Riley Dominianni. I am a research assistant at the Records Discovery Center at Ellis Island. I started at the Statue of Liberty and Ellis Island Foundation in 2022. I was among the first class of interns that they hired for the summer. I was still in college. When I graduated, I started full-time.

• 3:30Lindsay Graham?

  Riley studied history and anthropology at Fordham University in the Bronx. And for her, the commute to Ellis Island is one that never gets old.

• 3:39Speaker 02

  I wake up every morning, head down to the A train on 145th Street, take that all the way to Fulton Street, switch over to the 45, and I get off the train at Battery Park, cut through Castle Clinton, which was the immigration station before Ellis Island. So I get to start my day by going through that building, so kind of getting into the feel of the place. And I see all of the visitors lining up to take the ferry over to the statue and board the boat with my fellow staff members. And we ride about 10 minutes. We see the statue every morning, which is just so cool. And then we pull up to Ellis Island and I head into the office. Our office is in the main building of Ellis Island in the former kitchen and laundry wing.

• 4:25Speaker 02

  And we call our office the Ice House because it was historically where they stored the ice on the island.

• 4:31Lindsay Graham?

  Working on Ellis Island is very meaningful for Riley.

• 4:34Speaker 02

  It's very surreal to work in that building. You know, there are a lot of museums that are just buildings with things in them, but I think there's a huge privilege in getting to work and have an office in the building where everything happened, where millions of people passed through and started their lives in this country.

• 4:52Lindsay Graham?

  Riley herself is a descendant of one of those millions of people. But at first, she didn't know much about how her family came to America.

• 5:00Speaker 02

  So growing up, I always knew that my family was made up of Italian immigrants. My great-great-grandfather, all I really knew about him was that he left Italy very young. His hometown was Isca Slionio in the province of Catanzaro in the region of Calabria, so southern Italy. I had heard that he had been in Argentina, and then he eventually, you know, paid for his family to come and join him in New York City. I knew his name was Severio Dominianni. I knew my grandfather, Samuel, was named after him. But that's really all I knew before I started working at Ellis Island.

• 5:36Lindsay Graham?

  Riley learned that her ancestor Severio had actually traveled back and forth between Italy and the United States several times, as well as spending some time in Argentina. This wasn't unusual. Many thousands of immigrants came to the US in search of temporary work in the early 20th century before returning home. There was even a name for them, birds of passage.

• 5:57Speaker 02

  A bird of passage was essentially usually a young man who would leave home and come to the United States and kind of work anywhere that they could to get a little bit of money. And they would sort of repeat this cycle of transatlantic crossing, working wherever they could, sometimes bouncing between different cities or states, and then either returning home for good or sending for their family to come and join them.

• 6:23Lindsay Graham?

  But working at the Records Discovery Center, Riley was able to trace all of Severio's trips to America.

• 6:29Speaker 02

  When I first gained access to all of the records that we have at Ellis Island, I looked him up. And the very first trip that I saw, he arrived in 1901, and then again in 1906. I found a record from 1912, and then a final one in 1920. So he's appearing several times, which is very cool.

• 6:49Lindsay Graham?

  But what Severio was doing during this time was a mystery.

• 6:53Speaker 02

  It's a little difficult to figure out what exactly he did. He's listed on pretty much every document just as a laborer. My grandfather recalled him having a toolkit, and he knew that he had done some carpentry. He spent a lot of time in Shamokan, Pennsylvania, which was a coal mining town. So we've sort of inferred that perhaps he was working in the mines. But we really don't know for sure.

• 7:17Lindsay Graham?

  For immigrants who arrived in America with no family or connections, it could be difficult to find work or community. But Riley does know that Severio had at least one connection in Shamokan.

• 7:27Speaker 02

  He had a brother, Piscuale. He was a hotel proprietor. I've heard rumors that it was more of a brothel, but he was a hotel proprietor in Shamokan, Pennsylvania.

• 7:39Lindsay Graham?

  And along with Severio's US arrival records, Riley discovered a temporary work permit that was issued to him in Argentina. It has his signature and a faded photograph of him.

• 7:49Speaker 02

  He's probably in his early 30s, I would imagine, in this photo. He has a very large mustache and a very serious expression on his face. He looks like my family, that's for sure. And the only other photo I have of him is years, years later, as an older man in Brooklyn.

• 8:05Lindsay Graham?

  So then Riley dug deeper into the records at Ellis Island, and she discovered another interesting detail.

• 8:11Speaker 02

  Among the ship manifests that I found him on was one from 1912. He is number 26 on the list. It's a large ledger, split up into two pages now, but originally they were one big, long page. At the top, it says the SS Voltaire sailing from Buenos Aires, Argentina. He's listed as a laborer bound for Shamokan, Pennsylvania to meet his brother Piscuale. And slightly to the right of his name, there are two stamps. One says "in hospital" and one says "discharged."

• 8:46Lindsay Graham?

  Riley was intrigued by these notations, but needed to do some more digging to learn what they really meant for Severio. Riley's colleague, Stephen Lean, has seen hundreds of records just like Severio's and knows all too well that regardless of how many times you may have arrived at Ellis Island, it was always an intimidating experience.

• 9:05Speaker 03

  My name is Stephen Lean. I am the Director of the Records Discovery Center on Ellis Island.

• 9:12Lindsay Graham?

  Steven has worked on Ellis Island since 2015 and still feels the history of the place.

• 9:18Speaker 03

  To step onto Ellis Island is like stepping into, into the heart of the American experience. The impression that the main immigration building on Ellis Island has on me, especially when I'm there before visitors arrive and things are quiet, that impression is probably pretty similar to the impression it would have on immigrants who are being processed there. The size of the building, the way that this building is supposed to impress upon you how serious this situation is, it's a weighted experience.

• 9:53Lindsay Graham?

  Severio and millions of other immigrants like him would walk into the great hall, also known as the registry room.

• 10:00Speaker 03

  The main building on Ellis Island, the one that was opened in 1900, it's in a French Renaissance style. It's made of brick. It is probably the biggest room that most immigrants had been in, aside from maybe your place of worship. When you step into the registry room, the scale of it, the grandeur of it, it's really the emotional gut punch of an Ellis Island visit.

• 10:29Lindsay Graham?

  Today, visitors could walk up the staircase at their leisure and explore the wide open space of the registry room, but that wasn't the case when Riley's great great grandfather Severio came through in 1912. The experience then would have been quite regimented.

• 10:43Speaker 03

  Beginning from the time that the boat would pull into the harbor, you were being broken down into manageable groups of people. The ship manifests that belonged to members of Riley's family and members of my family. They hold about 30 passengers per sheet. And in the era before Excel sheets, it was a really practical solution to start breaking people down while they were still aboard the ship, pinning them with something that's called a landing card. It's really just a paper tag that they would pin to your blouse or your overcoat, and it would have your name on it. It would have the page of the manifest that your name could be found on.

• 11:28Speaker 03

  And once you got to the registry room, you were grouped with people who were on that page.

• 11:33Lindsay Graham?

  So Severio was probably grouped with other passengers on the same shipping manifest page. It was a pragmatic solution to keep track of everyone, especially when around 5,000 to 6,000 people could arrive at Ellis Island every day during the busiest times of the year.

• 11:49Speaker 03

  During your stay in the registry room, you were not walking around. You were assigned to what I've seen in photos from that era described as immigrant pens, because there was a lot of fencing around. Keeping order over that many people from that many parts of the globe, speaking that many languages, it's astonishing.

• 12:11Lindsay Graham?

  Once they got off the boats at Ellis Island, immigrants had to pass inspection, and they were being watched from the moment they stepped onto the island. They were judged on how they looked, how they moved. Anyone who appeared sick or physically handicapped might be detained or quarantined. And among immigrants who had just spent weeks in the bowels of a ship, illness and disease could be common and jeopardize your chances of getting admitted. First, there was the line inspection.

• 12:38Speaker 03

  They were being examined, a physical inspection from head to toe? And if you made it past the line inspection, you would wind up at an inspector's desk. And in front of this inspector would be your manifest.

• 12:54Lindsay Graham?

  So the person the inspector saw in front of him had better match what was written on the manifest, which had been filled out at the port of departure.

• 13:02Speaker 03

  When you're at that inspector's desk, you're going through all that data that's collected on the manifest. It's things like your nationality, who you're leaving behind, who you're coming to join, and that's a big one. If you get to Ellis Island and the address that you gave doesn't look real, they can detain you.

• 13:23Lindsay Graham?

  Officials might send staff to check out an address and see if there actually was someone waiting for you. And if you were a young, single woman, you might get detained on Ellis Island for a different reason.

• 13:34Speaker 03

  Because of the perception of what a young woman could face if she's let on her own in the city, that she's unfamiliar with, that she's unable to speak the language. And a lot of times, women are detained until essentially their closest male relative can come to Ellis Island and claim them.

• 13:53Lindsay Graham?

  There was also a place on the manifest to note marks of identification.

• 13:57Speaker 03

  And we see all kinds of things written in that space. It could be as simple as a scar on your right cheek, a large mole on someone's forehead. It could be something like missing fingers, extra digits. One time, I saw extra finger in toe on left side only.

• 14:20Lindsay Graham?

  And inspectors weren't just concerned with your appearance. They might also ask probing questions about your personal beliefs.

• 14:26Speaker 03

  Including those really fun questions that we get about, are you an anarchist? Are you a polygamist? Are you a criminal? We never see anything other than no for those answers.

• 14:38Lindsay Graham?

  But most concerning of all to the inspectors on the island were any number of infectious diseases, including malaria, typhus, cholera, scarlet fever, mumps, and an eye infection called trachoma, which could eventually lead to blindness.

• 14:52Speaker 03

  It's a very contagious eye infection in your eyelids and around your eyelashes, where it's just sort of red and puffy. They used button hooks to get under your eyelid to pull those down to see if you had trachoma or conjunctivitis. When you talk about 5,000 to 6,000 people a day marching through there, having their eyes poked, like 12,000 eyeballs a day being poked by the doctor they called the eye man, and levels of hygiene that are surrounding this inspection, I would say they had every right to worry about something that contagious being spread.

• 15:27Lindsay Graham?

  If you managed to pass the inspection upstairs in the registry room, you were then free to go downstairs. Many found loved ones waiting for them at a place that came to be known as the kissing post, a location where families rejoiced in reunion. But Riley's ancestor Severio wasn't so lucky. Riley knew from Severio's records that he had gone through the line inspection upon his arrival in 1912, but she discovered that it was there that Severio ran into a problem. On January 1st, 1892, a young Irish immigrant named Annie Moore became the first person processed at the new immigration station on Ellis Island.

• 16:11Lindsay Graham?

  For the millions who followed her, this small island in New York Harbor would become the place where their American dream would either begin or end. Hi, I'm Lindsay Graham, the host of the podcast American History Tellers. We take you to the events, times, and people that shaped America and Americans, our values, our struggles, and our dreams. In our latest series, we trace the history of Ellis Island. For more than three decades, it served as the gateway through which millions of hopeful immigrants entered the United States. But as the nation struggled to decide who belonged, some would find the gate shut to them. Follow American History Tellers wherever you get your podcasts. Audible subscribers can binge all episodes of American History Tellers early and ad-free right now. Join Audible in the Audible app or by subscribing on Apple Podcasts.

• 16:55Speaker 04

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• 17:25Lindsay Graham?

  While researching her great great grandfather Severio, Riley Dominianni learned that he had passed through Ellis Island several times. Most of his passages were without incident, but in 1912, Severio had been sent to the island's hospital.

• 17:48Speaker 02

  When I saw on the manifest that it said that he had been held in the hospital and then discharged, that's really all you get on that first manifest page. However, deeper in the role of microfilm, we actually also in our records have detention and special inquiry forms. I clicked forward and eventually found a record of detained aliens from the SS Voltaire with his name on it. And it said that he was held in the hospital for TRAC dot, which was the shorthand for trachoma.

• 18:24Lindsay Graham?

  Riley considered what Severio's experience in the hospital must have been like.

• 18:29Speaker 02

  I just imagine how awful that must have felt to probably be suffering from this, what I can imagine was a painful affliction, only to learn that on the very last leg of his trip, it was going to possibly deter him from continuing on his journey. You know, coming so far, coming from Argentina, not even his home country, coming back to the United States to continue working. And at this point, by 1912, he has a wife and a young son relying on him in Italy.

• 19:02Lindsay Graham?

  While Severio might not have wanted to be detained there, the hospital on Ellis Island did have state-of-the-art treatment for its time. It was not staffed by immigration inspectors, but by nurses and doctors who were members of the US Public Health Service, and it was a teaching hospital.

• 19:17Speaker 03

  Where else in the country would you get so many people coming from so many different places with so many exotic ailments? When Severio would have been there in 1912, he would have had the General Hospital, and you would have had what was called the measles ward, which is a little bit of a misnomer. It's not only measles, it's anything that's severely contagious. And they would have even had isolation wards. Altogether, it's about 750 beds over the entire hospital complex. So when Severio was there, he wasn't just pulling up on one big building and some outbuildings. The Ellis Island that people can see in the harbor today,

• 20:02Speaker 03

  essentially, it was all there for him. And I imagine, coming from a place in rural southern Italy, this campus may have had more buildings than the town Severio grew up in. It may have actually been a little bit bigger at 27 acres, too. So I'm sure, as he was being shuttled around from building to building over to the hospital building, that may have been really scary for him, too, just the scale of it.

• 20:32Lindsay Graham?

  Margaret Daly, the head nurse from Ellis Island through much of the 1920s and 30s, left behind an unpublished memoir. Even though it's a little after Severio's time in her hospital, it gives a glimpse into the sometimes conflicting feelings public health workers could face as they tended to patients who were desperate to stay in the US.

• 20:51Speaker 03

  She talks about being torn between her duties as a nurse, which is to care for everyone and make them better, and her duties as someone who worked at a hospital that was essentially trying to screen people out, to keep people from getting into the United States. And the conflict that she felt sometimes, and how she ultimately didn't have any control as a nurse over whether someone was staying or being sent away.

• 21:22Lindsay Graham?

  It's impossible to know for sure, but Severio's English language skills may have been limited. That would have made his stay at the hospital even more difficult, even if it is likely that some of the nurses would have spoken Italian.

• 21:34Speaker 03

  We have oral histories, especially of people who were treated as children in the hospital on Ellis Island, and this special bond that they formed with the nurses. And some of these nurses were immigrants or children of immigrants, and so they were speaking the same language as their patients. It still must have been a very challenging experience in terms of communication, especially if you're sick and you don't feel good. It's the common question now where they ask, "From 1 to 10, how is your pain?" I might think, if I were in the Ellis Island hospital, "Well, oh my gosh, if I say that my pain is an 8 or a 9, they're going to think I'm too sick, and they're going to send me back."

• 22:17Lindsay Graham?

  Because there were so many languages spoken by the people coming through Ellis Island, interpreters were essential. Years before he became mayor of New York City, Fiorella LaGuardia worked on the island as one of these interpreters. A child of Italian immigrants himself, LaGuardia felt for the thousands of people arriving to the island who were unable to communicate under stressful circumstances. And he happened to be a talented linguist. He knew Yiddish, German, French, Italian, and several Croatian dialects.

• 22:46Speaker 03

  And it's because of his family's immigrant heritage and how he grew up in a sort of polyglot household when it came to languages. And I wonder if Severio and Fiorello bumped into each other? You wonder if people caught a glimpse of each other in these moments of history.

• 23:04Lindsay Graham?

  There's no way to know if Severio may have interacted with LaGuardia during his time in the hospital, but Riley does know what happens to him next.

• 23:12Speaker 02

  So after I read through what I thought was all of the information on the manifest page, and dug deeper and found the detention record, I saw, all the way to the right, that there's a column for admitted or deported. And he was in the hospital for only two days and was ultimately deported on the same ship, the SS Voltaire, sent right back to Argentina. So of course, I went back to the manifest page, and all the way to the left side, right by his name, there's a very faint stamp that confirmed deported.

• 23:49Lindsay Graham?

  This was not what Riley had expected to find.

• 23:53Speaker 02

  I was shocked. I was very shocked to see that he had been deported. I had known of his many trips in between southern Italy and New York and Pennsylvania and Buenos Aires, but I guess I had never really considered the fact that he may have been sent back or rejected at any point. We learn at Ellis Island that around only 2% of people were deported upon arrival. So to find out that he was one of those relatively small number of people, I was very surprised.

• 24:25Speaker 03

  For people who were part of that unlucky 2% that were deported, Ellis Island was a very different kind of place than the 98% that ultimately made it through. Ellis Island is called the Island of Hope and the Island of Tears. In Severio's case, trachoma was so contagious, there really was no hope of you sticking around if you had it. It was pretty much automatic deportation. It sounds like Severio was on the same ship that brought him while the ship was hanging around New York Harbor for a few days, resupplying to go back to Argentina.

• 25:05Lindsay Graham?

  It was a health issue that got Severio deported. There were many reasons why someone could be turned away. Officials placed people into categories. Some were considered desirable, while others were not.

• 25:17Speaker 03

  Your desirability was, for the most part, determined by whether or not you could make money, spend money, contribute to your neighborhood, contribute to the national welfare. A lot of this depended upon whether or not the inspectors on Ellis Island believed that you could land a job. And the biggest reason why someone would be detained or deported was that they would be labeled LPC, which means likely to become a public charge. You would be living off of charity, either your family, or maybe your church, or your synagogue, or your mosque, or the public dole, such as it was back then.

• 26:00Speaker 03

  If you had a look about you or an eccentricity in your behavior that the inspectors thought, "If I were an employer, I don't know if I would give this person a job." That could mean that you were detained.

• 26:14Lindsay Graham?

  Anything considered a disability might be enough to get you labeled undesirable, no matter what skills you had.

• 26:20Speaker 03

  There was an immigrant who arrived with his brother from Russia, and one of these brothers was not disabled in any way. These brothers were both blacksmiths. The other brother was actually a deaf-mute. And his brother pleaded, saying, "My brother is an excellent blacksmith. He does not need to be able to communicate verbally or to be able to hear somebody in order to do his job." But that brother was ultimately deported because he didn't conform to the standards of the day.

• 27:01Lindsay Graham?

  But whatever the reason, deportation meant hardship, including for Severio, who was sent back to his port of departure.

• 27:08Speaker 02

  And so when he was denied entry, he wasn't being put on a ship back to his wife and son in Italy. He was being sent back to Argentina, where his work permit had expired. And he probably had no plan. I mean, he may have used the last of his means to book that ticket to New York. So it was really hard for me to imagine what might have happened to him, being forced to go back to a place that he was not from.

• 27:40Lindsay Graham?

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• 28:40Speaker 04

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• 29:18Lindsay Graham?

  There's a gap in the record between September of 1912 and sometime in 1914, the year World War I began. Riley Dominianni doesn't know how her ancestor Severio got back to Italy, but he did.

• 29:30Speaker 02

  He had a son, Armando, who was born in 1915. So that puts him in Italy around 1914. And then the very next record I was able to find was from 1920. He arrived at Ellis Island again, sailing from Naples, found for Shimokin to his brother Piscopo again. And I believe that was probably his last trip.

• 29:53Lindsay Graham?

  It would be seven years before Severio's wife and two sons joined him in America.

• 29:58Speaker 02

  What I have heard, and the family did not like to talk about this too much, but I've heard bits and pieces. I speak with my grandfather about it. So Severio's two sons, Giusto and Armando, they're in Italy with their mother, Candida, and they don't come over until 1927. And the story that I have heard is this is a turbulent time in Italy and in Europe in general. Essentially, the younger son, Armando, was joining up with a bit of a socialist crowd, and the older brother, Giusto, was becoming swayed by the influences of fascism. And whether this was the moment for Candida, or perhaps Severio had written to her and said,

• 30:40Speaker 02

  "I have the means for you to finally come join me," I don't know. But I know that something about that time made her say, "All right, we're heading to the States." So they came in 1927. They sailed from Naples on the Conte Biancomino.

• 30:54Lindsay Graham?

  The SS Conte Biancomino was a 653-foot Italian ocean liner that had been launched in 1925, a classic ship of its time.

• 31:04Speaker 02

  And I've heard that my great-grandfather, the older of the two boys, was devastated to leave Italy. He was in love with a girl. And he actually, when they arrived in Shimokin, he ran away from home for a little while, couldn't make it on his own, rejoined his family. And he ultimately became a shoemaker. His younger brother, Armando, was a barber. And he actually married a Jewish girl. And they had to keep their union a secret for a little over a year, I've heard. But Giusto, he married a young woman named Caterina, also from Isca Sioneo. I've heard that it was a bit of an arranged marriage by the two families. This was somewhat common in those ethnic enclaves that we hear about.

• 31:46Speaker 02

  But they were married and moved to Jackson Heights, Queens, New York, had three kids, one of whom is my grandfather, Samuel. And they had a daughter, Victoria, and a son, Vincent. All three of them are still living. My grandfather lives in Indiana. My Uncle Vinny lives on the Jersey Shore. And my Aunt Vicky is down in Florida.

• 32:08Lindsay Graham?

  So after Severio managed to return to the US, he stayed and put down roots. Riley traced how this last chapter of his life played out.

• 32:17Speaker 02

  The second-to-last record that I found of Severio in the United States is the 1940 census. He's in his 60s at this point, and there's no occupation listed. But he's still living with his wife, Candida, and their youngest son, Armando. They lived in Brooklyn at this point. The next record I found after that was his death certificate. He passed away on Christmas Eve of 1943. After that, his wife, Candida, who never learned a word of English, moved in with Giusto, my great-grandfather, and his family. She wore black for 20 years and forbade celebrations on Christmas Eve.

• 32:56Lindsay Graham?

  And then, one day, while she was working at the Records Discovery Center on Ellis Island, Riley heard that people working on a new exhibit needed a sample shipping manifest for the new display.

• 33:07Speaker 02

  So I, of course, having done all of this family research of my own, had this 1912 manifest from Buenos Aires downloaded on my computer. And I thought, well, I might as well send this along as an example. And come to find out, Sarah Litvin, she is one of the museum consultants hired by the foundation to assist with this project. Her family, her great-grandfather, is on the same exact manifest page, traveling from Argentina to New York as Severio. I cannot emphasize enough how crazy this is. I mean, to find out that two completely unrelated people are on the same voyage even,

• 33:49Speaker 02

  or at Ellis Island at the same time, is really incredible. But to be on the same list of 30 names, just lines apart, and then decades later, the descendants are working together on the same project, it was, I can't even describe it. It was very, very cool.

• 34:07Lindsay Graham?

  Such coincidences may be rare, but they do happen at Ellis Island, something Stephen Lean found out a few years ago when a young Italian woman came to ask him about a man called Giacomo Giacomazzi.

• 34:19Speaker 03

  My husband, who is an immigrant himself, he has great-grandparents that came through Ellis Island in 1913 and 1914 separately. His great-grandfather was named Giacomo Giacomazzi. He arrived in November of 1913, headed out towards western Pennsylvania to work in the mines. He met my husband's great-grandmother, Vittorino Rosotti. They had three daughters over here. One of those daughters is my husband's grandmother. And much like Severio, they were birds of passage. They were ritornati. They returned to Italy after a few years, in the early 1920s.

• 35:03Speaker 03

  And they had three sons after they returned to their home in northern Italy. And my husband was vaguely aware that his grandmother was born in America. But when I started working at Ellis Island, I was able to find the manifest for Giacomo Giacomazzi and for Vittorino Rosotti and share that with my family. But what I didn't expect was to come face to face with a member of my husband's family. One day, when I was working at the Records Center, I walked by a computer, and there was a young lady with her boyfriend. They were Italian.

• 35:45Speaker 03

  And they were looking up the name Giacomo Giacomazzi. So I screwed up my courage and spoke in my not-great Italian. And I asked this young lady if this was a member of her family. And she said, yes. And I said, that's interesting, because this is also a member of my family.

• 36:09Lindsay Graham?

  It turned out the young lady Stephen helped was the granddaughter of one of Giacomo and Vittorino's sons, born after they returned to Italy. As for Riley Dominianni, she's now been able to work with Sarah Litvin to commemorate the fact that their ancestors were on the SS Voltaire together from Argentina to New York in 1912.

• 36:28Speaker 02

  Sarah and I have, we talked on the phone. We've met in person. And because of this incredible coincidence, both of our family members are getting a little profile in the exhibit that we're working on together.

• 36:41Lindsay Graham?

  It's a nice homage to Severio, who Riley knows paved the way for her to be in America today. She reflects on Severio's photograph and signature on his temporary work permit from Argentina.

• 36:52Speaker 02

  So for me to have this original document with the photo, with the signature, it was very moving. It felt like coming to a very satisfying close and getting as close to him as I possibly could.

• 37:06Lindsay Graham?

  It's a feeling Riley gets to enjoy seeing in others as they visit Ellis Island and come to the Records Discovery Center.

• 37:12Speaker 02

  They come as a family and share in that joy of seeing a record with their name on it together. They come alone and send photos and FaceTime their relatives from all over and show them, I'm in this massive place, in this massive city, but here, right here, on this screen, is us, is our family.

• 37:32Lindsay Graham?

  Stephen Lean understands this sentiment perfectly.

• 37:35Speaker 03

  In a world where we seem to more and more so lose our sense of place, to lose our sense of value of who we are and where we came from, it lets us get centered again. When we're talking about how many millions of immigrants came over and all of these family histories, Severio, Giacomo, and everyone else, they each have their own unique twists and turns. I remember that quote from Carl Sagan that essentially, we're all made out of stardust. And our family histories are the same. Our family histories all sparkle in their own way. But in essence, it reminds us that we're all in it together.

• 38:18Lindsay Graham?

  From Audible Originals, this is the fourth and final episode of our series on Ellis Island. In our next series, in 1881, U.S. Army Lieutenant Adolphus Greeley leads 24 men on an expedition to the Arctic, chasing scientific glory and the record for reaching the farthest northern latitude. But when resupply ships fail to arrive, the men are forced to retreat south in search of rescue. And as their rations do... American History Tellers is only possible because of listeners like you, so thank you. And don't miss an episode. Be sure to follow American History Tellers on Audible or wherever you get your podcasts. Audible subscribers can binge new seasons of American History Tellers early and ad-free right now.

• 39:00Lindsay Graham?

  Join Audible in the Audible app or by subscribing on Apple Podcasts. And to find out more about me, including my other podcasts, my live show, the history tours I'm arranging, and all sorts of other things, go to historyishuman.com. That's historyishuman.com. Dwindle and polar night descends, Greeley and his men will face a desperate struggle to survive.

• 39:28Lindsay Graham?

  Thank you to Stephen Lean and Riley Dominianni from the Ellis Island and Statue of Liberty Foundation for taking the time to share their stories and insights. You too can search the Statue of Liberty and Ellis Island Foundation's database for your family. The Arrival Records Collection is online at statueofliberty.org. We've put the link in our show notes. American History Tellers is hosted, edited, and produced by me, Lindsay Graham, for airship. This episode was written and produced by Polly Striker. Senior producers Alida Razansky and Andy Herman. Managing producer Desi Blyla. Audio editing by Mohamed Shazim. Music by Thrum. Sound design by Molly Bock. Executive producer for Audible, Jenny Lauer Beckman. Head of creative development at Audible, Kate Navin.

• 40:13Lindsay Graham?

  Head of Audible Originals North America, Marshall Louis. Chief content officer, Rachel Giatza. Copyright 2026 by Audible Originals LLC. Sound recording copyright 2026 by Audible Originals LLC.

• 40:44Speaker 05

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• 41:25Speaker 05

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