Every family has some tales when it comes to history and the lineage that connects us to ancestors who lived a long time ago. If we are lucky, they are long-winded stories full of color and detail and a relatable sentimentality that can carry our imaginations far across cities and centuries connecting us to relatives we never met.
Other times, there are family histories that are just one-liners. Snippets of stories punctuated with the sparest amount of context and detail. Enough to give you some ideas about who this or that ancestor might have been, or where they came from, or how they experienced life, but beyond that no other information is known. I’m always most intrigued by these slim snippets of genealogical detail. The ones that aren’t flushed out yet enough to form a complete story with a defined beginning, middle, and end. The ones that could have been recited so many times they are now legend tumbled and tossed through generations yet never gaining new insight or understanding. We have quite a few in my family – a great aunt who was a Rockette, a lost family fortune buried somewhere on the island of 18th century Manhattan, a doughnut shop in the Pacific Northwest still waiting to be found. Those quick glimpses into all types of family biography are ripe for more storytelling and a deeper understanding of the experiences that makes up the unique histories of American lives.
In today’s post, we are sharing a 100 year-old-family story brought to the Vintage Kitchen in the form of an heirloom. It did not come with one of the long-winded stories like we mentioned above, the ones full of color and life and detail. Instead, it falls into the latter category. The opposite one. This heirloom came with just a few facts. Vague yet weighty snippets of a story that lightly scratched the surface of a much larger experience.
It starts with an antique tablecloth. Folded up it weighs just over a pound and a half. It’s delicate but also strong, with a heft to its weight like rope. Featuring a hand-crocheted pattern of circular medallions and spider-like stars, it’s executed in thread that is the color of bones. In appearance, it’s not unlike a lot of similar tablecloths that were popular during the 20th century, but this one tells a very specific American story that is very fitting for the 4th of July holiday.
Sent by a woman named Linda, who is a vintage collector in New Mexico, this tablecloth was a family heirloom belonging to Ann, her ex-mother-in-law. When passing down items from her life, Ann requested that this particular linen be handled with respect and appreciation. Although Linda admired the beauty of this tablecloth and the story it represented, she contacted the Vintage Kitchen to see if we might be able to give it a new home.
Arriving in the mail shortly after, the cloth came with a note detailing a few facts surrounding its history.
- It belonged to Linda’s ex-husband’s mother, Ann who had recently passed at the age of 87
- It was passed down through Ann’s family with the understanding that it came to America by way of an Italian ancestor named Catherine who had traveled by boat from Sicily to Ellis Island in the early 1900s and then went on to Chicago to settle.
- According to family lore, the tablecloth was handmade while on the boat waiting to dock in the US
Even though I had a dozen more questions for Linda upon receipt of the cloth, and had requested a photo of it’s maker, unfortunately, Linda and I lost touch shortly after the package arrived. So here it was, this pretty antique tablecloth wrapped up in a handful of intriguing little story snippets just waiting for something more to be told about it.
After a bit of genealogy work and a hunt through Ellis Island immigration records, Linda’s ex-grandmother-in-law’s story burst into colorful life just like a 4th of July firework. It begins here on Ellis Island in March 1916…
Even though it was the very first day of Spring, it was a chilly 34-degree March day when the Caserta arrived in New York Harbor. Carrying immigrants from Naples, Italy, the steamer ship coasted into the harbor on choppy waters passing the welcoming sight of the Statue of Liberty. Her torch was not yet electrified, it would be another nine months before that happened, but to the arriving immigrants, she signaled a bright future ahead regardless. Aboard the ship was 20-year-old rosy-cheeked, chestnut-haired Caterina from the seaside town of Bagheria, Sicily.
Most Italian immigrants during the 1910s were fleeing to America to escape economic depravity in their home country. Depending on weather, war, quarantine, detainments, and ship reroutings, the voyage from Naples to New York could last anywhere from twenty-one days to three months. When Caterina came over it was the middle of WWI, and Italy was involved in the battle of Austria-Hungary. Traveling with her older sister Maddalena, we don’t know specifically why these two girls left Italy, but we do know that Caterina paid her own passage and carried $25.00 extra in her pocket along with a crochet needle and a bundle of thread.
Of medium height and good health, Caterina would have no trouble passing through the medical checkpoint before she was allowed access to her new country. Her $25 dollars in savings would not be an issue either as she brought an amount deemed substantial enough by the US government to successfully start afresh in the New World. With intentions to stay with her cousin, Filippo, in the Midwest, Caterina’s final destination was the bustling city of Chicago.
According to Linda’s family story, while waiting to dock in New York Harbor, Caterina took her crochet needle from her pocket and put her hands to work. She soothed her anxious nerves by crocheting this 82″ x 52″ inch delicately threaded tablecloth featuring a series of interlocking circles and stars.
I loved this part of Linda’s story for two reasons… 1) I didn’t realize that immigrants had to wait for any extended period of time to gain entry into the US. I assumed that most were docked and processed in the same day. So it was interesting to think that Caterina’s boat could have been detained for a significant amount of time – one in which an entire tablecloth could have been made by hand. 2) The other reason I loved Linda’s story was for the amount of comfort that this tablecloth must have brought. The calming effect of repetitive motion and the focus and attention to detail required to make a circle then a star, a circle then a star intertwining each until there was a cloth over 4′ feet long and 3″ feet wide.
I loved this artistic glimpse into one woman’s life and that I could hold in my hands a tangible item that combined thread with all the emotions of a new adventure – excitement, uncertainty, nervousness, fear, and awe experienced over 100 years ago. I wondered about Caterina, there on the boat, stuffed full with people from her home country all experiencing a cacophony of feelings while she sat calmly making this piece. Was she dreaming of the future table in which she would display her needlework? Did she think about it becoming not only a practical household item for her new home but also a tangible reminder of the journey that she chose to take? Did she know then, that it would eventually become an artifact proving that she, Caterina of Bagheria, Sicily and now of the United States had lived?
The closing of other U.S. ports, the rerouting of ships during WWI, and the threat of communicable diseases could have been some of several reasons why Caterina got hung up in New York Harbor long enough to hand-stitch a linen for her new life. After much research, I couldn’t find anything that would attribute to the delay around that date, but I did learn that four days later, the ship she arrived on, the Caserta, was on its way back to Italy loaded with war-time ammunition for the Italian government.
That led me to wonder if the details of Linda’s family story had gotten a little muddled over the past 100 years. Maybe, Caterina made the tablecloth on the voyage over and finished the last pieces of it while she was waiting to dock. Or maybe in fact, she was on a quarantined boat, arriving in New York days or weeks before the immigration officer officially stamped her papers with the date March 20, 1916. Or maybe she just happened to be a master, faster crocheter that indeed had plenty of ample hours in an ample amount of days to complete such a creative undertaking.
I can imagine that this waiting period at Ellis Island whether brief or lengthy, spent while you are between your old life and your new life, would be a pretty intense time. There is something incredibly marvelous and moving about Caterina documenting her stay in these New York waters under the reassuring gaze of Lady Liberty with her crochet needle and some Italian thread. A simple household item made during a magnificent moment with skill enough to make it last a lifetime. And then some.
Linda’s initial recount of the situation began and ended at Ellis Island, but a bit more research uncovered Caterina’s complete life story. She did make it to Chicago. There she became known as Catherine, the Anglicized version of Caterina, and a little over a year later she met and married Alberto, a fellow Sicilian who had immigrated to America just a few years before her.
Alberto was in the grocery business, successful enough to own three delis in the Chicago area during the early to mid-1900s. Catherine and Alberto had two boys – Anthony and Joseph. Joseph served in the US Air Force during WWII and Anthony in the US Navy. The deli trade was never far from Anthony’s heart and upon return from the war, Anthony followed in his dad’s footsteps and worked in the grocery industry for the rest of his life – first in Chicago and then in California where he opened a deli shop specializing strictly in Italian fare. After Anthony married Ann, a former customer of his dad’s shop back in Chicago, they also had two children – Albert and Diane. Albert a young groom in the 1960s, married Linda, the vintage collector who sent us the tablecloth.
As for Caterina, she passed away in Los Angeles in 1987, at the age of 92. Living a majority of her life in the US made her geographically much more American than Italian, but she never ventured far from her Italian roots nor the chance to pass on her cultural pride to her boys who then passed it on to their families. A part of all that was this tablecloth. The heirloom made en route from old Italy to new America. The cloth that wove together two parts of one woman’s life. A woman who chose to settle in the United States, to become a citizen, to raise a family of boys who then fought for the US during WWII and then saw her children’s children grow the branches of their family trees in America all the while contributing to the vibrancy of our country’s dynamic landscape. Caterina’s story is a small leaf on the big tree of immigration, but I felt so honored to be able to tell her story and attach it to the tablecloth, her tablecloth, that still lives bright and beautiful in the world today.
Cheers to celebrating all the immigration stories that make our country culturally vibrant this Independence Day. To slim snippets, that form big stories. And most importantly, cheers to Linda and to Ann and to Caterina for sharing their family’s American experience. Important stories lie in everyday objects.
However you choose to commemorate the 4th of July, we hope it’s a memorable one!
Special note: While researching this post, I came across two pieces of media that were especially insightful when it came to understanding the very human and very humbling experience of immigrating to America.
An oral history interview with Italian immigrant Filomena Latta…
https://heritage.statueofliberty.org/oral-history-library
A tour of the Ellis Island Immigration Museum with National Park Ranger Peter Urban…
In the Vintage Kitchen: Where History Comes To Eat 