The DiSantos, from Pescolanciano to Newark and Irvington, 1906 to 1984

Pescolanciano is a hill village in the Molise, in the old province of Campobasso. Between 1906 and 1921 a young couple from there made their way, one at a time, to Newark, New Jersey. Their daughter grew up to lead a veterans' auxiliary in Irvington.

Domenico goes first

Domenico DiSanto was born at Pescolanciano on September 23, 1887, the son of Giovanni Di Santo, a farm laborer, and his wife, Maria, who was also a Di Santo by birth. The town's register of births, kept today at the State Archive in Isernia, enters him as Domenico Antonio. His parents had stood before the mayor on May 21, 1882, both twenty-four; the groom, who signed as Giovanni, was the son of Pasquale Di Santo and Albina Del Ciello, and the bride, Mariantonia Anastasia, the daughter of a different Pasquale Di Santo and Mariagiuseppa Mancini.

At eighteen he sailed from Naples on the Napolitan Prince and landed at New York on June 2, 1906. The manifest describes him as a single laborer who could read, bound for Newark, where his brother Angelo had paid his passage. He had served two years as an infantry soldier in Italy, and he married Lucia Mancini, a girl from the same village. She had been born on April 22, 1894, in a house on Via Garibaldi, the daughter of Onofrio Mancini and Addolorata Pellegrino; her father registered her at the town hall as Maria Lucia and signed the book himself.

Angelo was the older of the two. The Pescolanciano register records an Angelo Oreste born to Giovanni and Maria Di Santo on August 2, 1886, thirteen months before Domenico, in the same house at number 20 on the third lane off Via Olmo; Giovanni registered him two days later. That this child is the Angelo waiting in Newark is not written in any one record, but the pieces agree: in June 1917 Angelo and Domenico gave the draft board the same address, 46 Madison Street, and the same employer, the Crucible Steel Company across the river in Harrison, and Angelo named Pescolanciano as his birthplace. He was single then, a pipe-fitter's helper, tall and stout with blue eyes. The birthday he gave, October 2, 1887, cannot be right: no Angelo was born in the town that year, and it would make him nine days younger than his brother.

There were sisters, too, both older than the boys and born in the same house: Michela Elvira on September 29, 1883, a year and a half after the wedding, and Angelica Annunziata on April 10, 1885. Giovanni went to the town hall each time, and on the second occasion he signed the register himself. Those four, Michela Elvira, Angelica Annunziata, Angelo and Domenico, are the only children the couple had in Pescolanciano between their marriage and the end of 1887. What became of the two girls is not yet known.

Lucia's parents were probably the couple who married at Pescolanciano nearly nineteen years before her birth. On the afternoon of September 16, 1875, Onofrio Antonio Stefano Mancini, a farm laborer, and Dolorosa Pellegrino, nineteen and still under age, stood before the mayor, Gabriele Mancini, in the town hall; Dolorosa is taken here to be a form of Addolorata. The groom's late parents were Pasquale Mancini and a woman of the Sacco family whose first name is hard to read, and the bride was the daughter of Antonio Pellegrino and Carmina(?) Del Ciello, another uncertain reading. No other marriage of an Onofrio Mancini turned up in the town's registers for 1875 to 1893, but the act gives the groom's age as thirty, which does not square with the forty Lucia's father gave in 1894, so the match is likely rather than certain. A witness of the same name and occupation, Gioacchino Del Matto, a town servant, also appears in Lucia's birth record.

Onofrio's mother can probably be found four years before the wedding. On the evening of November 25, 1871, Rosa Sacco, a farm laborer of seventy-two and the widow of Pasquale Mancini, died at Pescolanciano; her own parents had been Pasquale Sacco and Giuseppa Donatucci. Her husband's name fits Onofrio's father, though the record does not name Onofrio, and the unclear first name in the 1875 act could be Rosa without proving it. Her age is the difficulty: she would have been about forty-five if Onofrio was born in 1844 or 1845, as his marriage record implies, but about fifty-four if he was born in 1853 or 1854, as Lucia's birth record implies. She is counted as his mother only provisionally. The page survives in a copy the town certified in 1959.

Two years after the wedding, on the night of December 8, 1877, Addolorata gave birth to twins at home. Onofrio was away from Pescolanciano, so it was the midwife, Romana Pettine, who went to the town hall the next day. The boy was named Pasquale Antonio, the name of Onofrio's father, and the girl Concetta. Neither lived long: both died on December 11, the girl in the morning and the boy that evening.

Another daughter of Onofrio and Addolorata, probably Lucia's older sister, lived to adulthood. Maria Giuseppa was born before dawn on January 30, 1879, and Onofrio registered her at the town hall that same day. The registrar wrote his age as thirty-three, which fits the thirty of his marriage record; the father who registered Lucia in 1894 gave forty. Maria Giuseppa married Luigi Del Ciello, the son of Domenicangelo Del Ciello and Irene Sacco, on February 12, 1898, when both were nineteen, and she signed the register herself. Only her mother gave consent. Her father could not: the banns papers include a sworn declaration, made before the magistrate at Carovilli that January, that Onofrio was away and that no news of him had been heard. The declaration speaks only of that January. If he is the same Onofrio who registered Lucia's birth in 1894, as seems likely, he had gone away sometime in the four years since.

Another daughter of the couple, Maria Domenica, was born in the house on Via Piazza at a quarter past one on the morning of April 24, 1881, and Onofrio registered her a few hours later. This time the registrar wrote his age as thirty-six, again pointing to a birth about 1845. A note added later in the margin records her marriage to Michelarcangelo Testa in May 1902; the register of that year is not online.

Six years later, on January 1, 1887, a girl named Lucia Rosa was born on Via Venti Settembre to Onofrio Mancini, recorded as the son of the late Pasquale, and his wife Addolorata Pellegrino; Onofrio registered her two days later and gave his age as forty-two. She was probably Lucia's older sister. The page survives as a copy made in 1959, and it calls Addolorata the daughter of the late Domenico Pellegrino, where her marriage record had named her father as Antonio, still living; which is right is not known. Lucia Rosa died aged seven days, at home at number 59 on Via Venti Settembre, at seven in the morning on January 8, 1887, and Onofrio reported the death at the town hall that same morning. If these were the same parents, their daughter Maria Lucia, born in 1894, shared the name Lucia with the baby who died in 1887. The records do not explain the choice.

Domenico and Lucia's son Livio, called Leo, was born in Italy on the last day of 1911.

When the United States registered its men for the First World War, Domenico signed his card at Newark on June 5, 1917. He lived at 46 Madison Street, worked as a laborer at the Crucible Steel Company's plant in Harrison, and said he supported a wife and a child. They were still in Italy.

Lucia follows

Lucia made the crossing after the war. Sailing from Naples on the steamship Duca degli Abruzzi, she landed at New York on March 12, 1921, under her maiden name, Lucia Mancini. The second page of the ship's list shows where she was going: to her husband, Domenico Di Santo, at 33 Prospect Street, Newark. Beside her was Livio, eight, going to join his father. Behind her in Pescolanciano she left her mother, Addolorata.

A year later, on March 2, 1922, Lucia gave birth in Newark to twins. The state birth index enters them one above the other, a boy and a girl with the same date and the same city. The girl, Anunziata, was known all her life as Nancy.

The reunion was short. Domenico died in Newark in December 1923, when the twins were twenty-one months old. In 1930 Lucia was the head of her own household at 73 Melvern Street in Newark, a widow of 36 with Leo, 18, and the eight-year-old twins.

The DeVitos of Welland Avenue

On December 20, 1930, Lucia married again. Her second husband, Giuseppe Antonio (Joseph) DeVito, came from Casalattica, Italy, had been in Newark since 1910 and was already a citizen. The family moved to 99 Welland Avenue in Irvington, where the 1940 census found Joseph and Lucia, his older children, Lucia's twins as his stepchildren, and two small sons born to the couple in the 1930s.

About 1941 Lucia petitioned the federal court at Newark to become a citizen herself. Her petition gives the dates of her life in America and the names and birthdays of all five of her children, and it records the marks a clerk used to describe a person then: five feet two, brown eyes, hair already gray, a birthmark on her neck.

About 1962 Lucia and Joseph left Irvington for St. Petersburg, Florida. Lucia died there on August 28, 1967, at 73. The St. Petersburg Times notice remembered her as a member of St. Jude's Women's Guild and the Mater Domini Society, listed her four sons and her daughter Nancy in Irvington, and said she would be brought home to Newark for her Requiem Mass and burial. Joseph probably lived on in St. Petersburg until 1975; a Social Security record with his birth date ends there that April.

Nancy

In 1943 Nancy married Edward J. Milewski of Harrison, who joined the Marine Corps that August. After the war they settled in Irvington and raised two sons and two daughters. Nancy gave much of her time to St. Paul the Apostle Church and to the veterans' organizations: by 1984 she was president of the Ladies Auxiliary of the Veterans of Foreign Wars, Camptown Post 1941, and had served as president of the Essex County district auxiliary and of the church's Rosary Altar Society.

Nancy died at St. Barnabas Medical Center in Livingston on September 5, 1984, at 62. Her two brothers survived her. She was buried in Hollywood Memorial Park.

What we're still looking for

• Domenico's death certificate, to settle the day of his death and where he was buried.
• Where Domenico and Lucia are buried in Newark.
• What became of Domenico's brother Angelo after 1917.
• What became of Domenico's sisters, Michela Elvira (born 1883) and Angelica Annunziata (born 1885), and whether more children were born after 1887.
• Domenico and Lucia's marriage, about 1910 or 1911, and Leo's birth in December 1911. The Pescolanciano civil registers online at Portale Antenati end in 1899.
• What became of Onofrio Mancini, declared absent with no news of him in January 1898. His death is not in the Pescolanciano registers through 1899, the last year online.
• When Addolorata's parents, Antonio Pellegrino and Carmina(?) Del Ciello, died. Both were living in 1875, and neither death appears in the Pescolanciano registers from 1876 through 1899.
• When Onofrio's father, Pasquale Mancini, died. He was dead by September 1875, when his son married, and by November 1871 if Rosa Sacco was his widow. Part of the 1867 death index is missing.

Sources

• Pescolanciano, register of deaths 1887, act 1: Lucia Rosa Mancini (Archivio di Stato di Isernia, Portale Antenati). antenati.cultura.gov.it/ark:/12657/an_ua113677/LeG1YbD
• Pescolanciano, register of births 1887, act 1 (1959 certified copy): Lucia Rosa Mancini (Archivio di Stato di Isernia, Portale Antenati). antenati.cultura.gov.it/ark:/12657/an_ua113715/0M9GqG3
• Pescolanciano, register of births 1881, act 19: Maria Domenica Mancini (Archivio di Stato di Isernia, Portale Antenati). antenati.cultura.gov.it/ark:/12657/an_ua113708/LDmGEBl
• Pescolanciano, register of births 1879, act 5: Maria Giuseppa Mancini (Archivio di Stato di Isernia, Portale Antenati). antenati.cultura.gov.it/ark:/12657/an_ua113706/57PGMjq
• Pescolanciano, register of marriages 1898, act 2: Luigi Del Ciello and Maria Giuseppa Mancini (Archivio di Stato di Isernia, Portale Antenati). antenati.cultura.gov.it/ark:/12657/an_ua113655/LmezPQB
• Pescolanciano, register of marriage banns 1898, act 1: Luigi Antonio Del Ciello and Maria Giuseppa Mancini (Archivio di Stato di Isernia, Portale Antenati). antenati.cultura.gov.it/ark:/12657/an_ua113613/0nov2Vg
• Pescolanciano, register of births 1877, acts 73-74: Pasquale Antonio and Concetta Mancini (Archivio di Stato di Isernia, Portale Antenati). antenati.cultura.gov.it/ark:/12657/an_ua113703/Lydy77l
• Pescolanciano, register of deaths 1877, acts 61-62: Concetta and Pasqualantonio Mancini (Archivio di Stato di Isernia, Portale Antenati). antenati.cultura.gov.it/ark:/12657/an_ua113669/wO4GrvG
• Pescolanciano, register of deaths 1871, act 43 (1959 certified copy): Rosa Sacco, widow of Pasquale Mancini (Archivio di Stato di Isernia, Portale Antenati). antenati.cultura.gov.it/ark:/12657/an_ua113663/LDmGElG
• Pescolanciano, register of marriages 1875, act 7: Onofrio Antonio Stefano Mancini and Dolorosa Pellegrino (Archivio di Stato di Isernia, Portale Antenati). antenati.cultura.gov.it/ark:/12657/an_ua113626/LqJ7q6G
• Pescolanciano, register of marriages 1882, act 4: Giovannantonio Di Santo and Mariantonia Anastasia Di Santo (Archivio di Stato di Isernia, Portale Antenati). antenati.cultura.gov.it/ark:/12657/an_ua113635/wQ8QxQl
• Pescolanciano, register of births 1883, act 44: Michela Elvira Di Santo (Archivio di Stato di Isernia, Portale Antenati). antenati.cultura.gov.it/ark:/12657/an_ua113710/wrd36by
• Pescolanciano, register of births 1885, act 18: Angelica Annunziata Di Santo (Archivio di Stato di Isernia, Portale Antenati). antenati.cultura.gov.it/ark:/12657/an_ua113713/w68G72N
• Pescolanciano, register of births 1886, act 32: Angelo Oreste Di Santo (Archivio di Stato di Isernia, Portale Antenati). antenati.cultura.gov.it/ark:/12657/an_ua113714/02JGMG3
• U.S., World War I draft registration cards: Angelo Disanto, Newark, 5 Jun 1917 (Ancestry). www.ancestry.com/search/collections/6482/records/32553282
• Pescolanciano, register of births 1887, act 48: Domenico Antonio Di Santo (Archivio di Stato di Isernia, Portale Antenati). antenati.cultura.gov.it/ark:/12657/an_ua113715/LPRj1En
• Pescolanciano, register of births 1894, act 27: Maria Lucia Mancini (Archivio di Stato di Isernia, Portale Antenati). antenati.cultura.gov.it/ark:/12657/an_ua113723/wlGdbMW
• U.S., World War I draft registration cards: Domenico DiSanto, Newark, 5 Jun 1917 (Ancestry). www.ancestry.com/search/collections/6482/records/32553218
• New York, U.S., Arriving Passenger and Crew Lists: Domenico Di Santo, SS Napolitan Prince, 2 Jun 1906, list 23 (Ancestry). www.ancestry.com/search/collections/7488/records/4010298179
• New York, U.S., Arriving Passenger and Crew Lists: Lucia Mancini and Livio Di Santo, SS Duca degli Abruzzi, 12 Mar 1921, list 43 (Ancestry). www.ancestry.com/search/collections/7488/records/4025161741
• Petition for naturalization no. 49330, Lucia Di Vito, U.S. District Court, Newark, about 1941 (Ancestry, New Jersey, U.S., Naturalization Records).
• New Jersey, U.S., Birth Index: Di Santo twins, Newark, March 1922 (Ancestry). www.ancestry.com/search/collections/61252/records/7016652
• New Jersey, U.S., Death Index: Dominick Disanto, Newark, December 1923 (Ancestry). www.ancestry.com/search/collections/61260/records/1528920
• 1930 U.S. census, Newark, Essex Co., N.J., ED 158, sheet 2A (Ancestry). www.ancestry.com/search/collections/6224/records/20729530
• 1940 U.S. census, Irvington, Essex Co., N.J., ED 7-175, sheet 16B (Ancestry). www.ancestry.com/search/collections/2442/records/133691187
• New Jersey, U.S., Marriage Index: Edward J. Milewski and Nancy DeSanto, 1943 (Ancestry). www.ancestry.com/search/collections/61253/records/990994640
• Funeral notice, Lucia M. DiVito, St. Petersburg Times, 30 Aug 1967, p. 9-B (Newspapers.com). www.newspapers.com/image/316927743/
• "Nancy Milewski" and death notice, The Star-Ledger (Newark), 6 Sep 1984, p. 42 (Newspapers.com). www.newspapers.com/image/1112283554/