I’ve been investigating the genealogy of my family lately and as I do, I find out some interesting and funny facts. Here’s one that gave me a good laugh.
My Grandfather, Franchesco DiNardo, arrived in the US from Italy in 1905. At the Ellis Island web site I discovered a log entry for his arrival on the ship named Sicilia. The logs, with one line per immigrant, have columns with spaces for recording such information as age, sex, home city, US destination city, etc. One column in the entry was for Occupation, and when I looked at that entry for my grandfather I laughed so hard I almost cried! The entry said, Occupation: Peasant.

Actually, that was a very common entry for many of the arrivals, but the cruelty of it just struck me as funny – I mean, they could have just written ‘none’, right? Anyway, the first thing I did was to call my brother Gary, because I knew he would appreciate this. I told him, and after we both laughed he made a comment that fit perfectly. He said, ‘Only in America!’

In New York, Italian Americans were often called Wops. The Word WOP was derived from the Ellis Island term ‘With Out Passport”. The term wasn’t intended to be derogatory (it was just brutally blunt), but it did convey a certain disdain. During the great Italian immigration is was not uncommon for many folks to arrive without passports. There were so many people leaving Italy for the US in the early 1900s that the Italian ports were filled with people wanting to board ships. Since there was no time to process them, they were just packed onto ships with whatever they could carry, which was very little for most of these folks who, like my grandfather, came from small, poor villages. Hence, With Out Passport. For my grandfather, arriving her to start a new life, the least of his worries was arriving With Out Passport …. heck … be probably arrived WithOut Shoes!