From Sicily to America: A History of Sicilian Immigration to America, from the Villages to Ellis Island and Beyond (Paperback) (ISBN-13: 9798188065867)

They left hill towns where a day's wage was set in a season, and half of them always meant to come back.

Between the 1880s and 1924, hundreds of thousands of Sicilians walked down to Palermo and Naples, stood in steerage for two weeks, and rebuilt their villages street by street in Brooklyn, New Orleans, Chicago, and San Francisco. This is the whole arc of that migration, told through the documents the emigrants left behind.

Here is the island Franchetti and Sonnino mapped in 1876, the sulphur mines that bought children by the advance, and the six-second medical at Ellis Island where chalk letters split families on the stairs. The 1891 New Orleans lynching that showed the newcomers their standing. The pushcart colonies, the padrone gangs that dug the subways, the festa and the family order that held it all together. The half who sailed home rich, the quota law written to end it all, the grandmothers registered as enemy aliens while their sons landed at Gela, and the long postwar climb from the tenement to the lawn.

The final chapter turns history into inheritance: how to read the passenger manifests, the census, the naturalization files, and the civil registers of Sicily itself, and follow your own surname back to the town where the records begin.

For readers of Sicilian and Italian American family history, and for every descendant who has a name, a photograph, and a town they cannot yet place. Book One of the From Italy to America series.

Author: Salvatore J. Licata
ISBN-13: 9798188065867
Publisher: Independently Published
Language: English
Published: 07/19/2026
Pages: 194
Format: Paperback
Weight: 0.53lbs
Size: 9.00h x 6.00w x 0.49d