From Italy to Lynn, the quest for Gramp’Achille begins

LYNN – 1882 ACHILLE 1948The simple headstone of my paternal grandfather, Achille De Rubeis, lists the year of his birth, in Tussio, Abruzzi, Italy, and the year of his death, in Everett.I wanted to know, as one genealogy expert put it, the stories of “what happened in the dash.” In the case of Achille, or Nonno as I would have known him, his carved name is the dash, and so many of those stories lie silent in the tenements and shoe factories of Lynn.David Lambert, chief genealogist for the New England Historic Genealogical Society in Boston, compares the task to re-assembling a shattered mirror. The first clue I was able to find: Nonno registered for the draft at age 36 during World War I in 1918, when he was living at 42 Silsbee St., just around the corner from the offices of The Daily Item in downtown Lynn.His occupation was listed as shoemaker, and his place of employment was W.K. Johnson Co. of Washington Street. Another clue lies in the 1930 U.S. Census. By then Nonno, his wife, Alba (I knew her as Nonna) and my father, Victor Emmanuel, and aunt, Pasqua, had settled in Malden and their place of employment is listed only as “Rubbershop,” which may or may not be a proper name. Its location: Lynn.Other than that I know little else. While I’m aware that they had to take a streetcar from Malden to work in Lynn, I don’t know how long it took them to get here in those days. I’m aware that their employment may have been sporadic and varied, but even a genealogical expert like Lambert said that, unless someone took employment records home with them when a shoe factory closed, it’s highly likely the records were destroyed. So there Achille’s Lynn story ends, at least for now.’That’s-a-Gramp’Achille’It’s the oldest family photo that I know of, and it’s one of my earliest memories of visiting my maternal grandmother, known to me as Nonna: An 8-x-10 picture of a young man and a young woman, side-by-side.”Who’s that?” I remember asking her, pointing to the man who looked faintly like the pictures of my dad at a similar age.Tips for tracing your ancestors
Just looking to do general ancestry research? Visit ancestry.com and familysearch.org. Fees vary from free to a flat monthly unlimited access fee, depending on how deep you want to get into your family’s research.
Visit the New England Genealogical Society, a major portal to birth, death and marriage records of past residents.
Did your ancestor come through Ellis Island or the Port of Boston before coming to Lynn? Visit ellisisland.org
Know that genealogical experts warn that while Ellis Island processed millions of immigrants between 1892 and 1954, millions of others came through other ports or even Canada.
You may need to try several spellings of a person’s name because their record may be based on what an immigration officer thought he heard
Use at least 10 possible spellings to search, and try removing or inserting spaces in surnames and prefixes
“And try taking every vowel out and pretend you’re playing Boggle,” says David Lambert, chief geneaologist for the New England Historic Genealogical Society.
“That’s-a-Gramp’Achille,” she answered in her still-thick Italian accent, even though she had arrived in America nearly 40 years earlier. “That’s-a-you-Nonno.”Nonno, I was told, was a nice, easygoing guy. He made homemade wine. He would have given me “everything” (read: spoiled me rotten). He would work for six months, and then he would be unemployed for six months – voluntarily or involuntarily, I could never be sure. And I knew that he worked in the shoe factories of Lynn.Such were the snippets of opinion and fact I gleaned over the years about Nonno, who died in April 1948, just over eight years before I was born.It wasn’t until I first visited the U.S. Immigration Museum at Ellis Island in 1992, and again last September, that my curiosity about him was piqued once again. I started researching his voyage with Nonna, my father and my aunt aboard the Conte Verde out of Naples