Arturo Marco Domenico Vespignani was born in Modigliana in northern Italy in October 1864. He eventually moved to Palazzo San Gervasio in southern Italy where he met and married his wife Teresa DiPaolo. The family story has always been that his mother died, his father remarried, and Arturo didn’t get along with his step-mother, so he moved south. He supposedly also had a sister who went to live in Argentina. I have absolutely no proof if any parts of this story are correct.
I joined a Facebook group for Modigliana and someone in the group was able to find some census records for me. Who knew there were Italian census records? Not me. I don’t think they exist for all of Italy, but they do for Modigliana. So I was able to get some information about Arturo’s father, his father’s siblings and parents. But I don’t have any information yet about any siblings Arturo may have had. I also found someone in Italy on Ancestry with a Domenico Vespignani in his tree. It wasn’t Arturo’s father, but the guy did help find some other Italian records for me. Here’s the link to the tree for this family https://myfamgen.com/vespignani-family/
Since Arturo moved south and got married, the fact that his surname was not common in southern Italy certainly makes it a lot easier to find records for him and his children in Palazzo San Gervasio. It is not however so easy to find him in records in the US unless you have figured out the crazy ways Vespignani was misspelled over the years. For instance on the ship’s manifest when he arrived in the US it is spelled Vespignano. To make matters worse whoever indexed it at the Ellis Island website entered it as Vupignano, making it a lot harder to find it there. It also lists the town as Palarro S C. I submitted a request to get the index corrected. Then there’s the 1930 US Census, where it is spelled correctly, but indexed incorrectly as Vesfignani on Ancestry. Or even weirder, the 1920 US census where it is indexed as Visfunjun! Although on that one I can’t blame the transcriber because it really does look like that’s what is says.
Arturo came to the US in 1906. The ship’s manifest says he was going to see his brother-in-law Luigi Lamastra. I assume that term was not used literally because it seems highly unlikely that Arturo had a sibling who went to southern Italy with him and as far as we know Teresa only had one sister Carmella and we know who she married. However Luigi and his wife Maria must have been at least close family friends since they were the god-parents to Arturo and Teresa’s youngest son.
We believe that Arturo and Teresa had seven sons, 5 born in Italy and 2 born in the US. I had originally thought that only their youngest son was born in the US, but it turns out that the two youngest were. I had also always heard that the names of the two sons that died young, one in Italy and the one I didn’t know was born in the US, were Marco and Nullo. Well, no Marco has been found in birth records in Italy that I know of. There was a Paolo born in Italy in January 1907. Arturo left Italy for the US in June 1906, so Teresa was 2 months pregnant when he left. She didn’t go to join him until 1911, so she was in Italy with 5 children and no husband for many years. If there was a Marco that we just haven’t yet found a birth record for, that means she would have been there with 6 children. Either way Paolo/Marco died in Italy before she left for the US in 1911. The other son who was born in the US was Silvio, not Nullo. Apparently Nullo means “nothing” in Italian so there is the possibility that he was tiny and ill and was called Nullo even though that was not his actual name. Silvio died at the age of 3. Their youngest son Pasquale was named after his older brother who died 4 ½ months before he was born. The older Pasquale had come to the US in 1910 at the age of 14. We are not sure when, but at some point he went back to Italy, and he died there in early 1914. I have his death certificate that was found for me online, but unfortunately it doesn’t list the cause of death. He was 18 when he died. We have no idea why he went back to Italy when his parents and siblings were all in the US.
I still have a lot more research do to into Arturo’s side of the family. I believe he and Teresa are buried in Bayview-New York Bay Cemetery in Jersey City. I have a picture of his tombstone. The fact that they are buried there is puzzling to me since their son Silvio is buried in Holy Name Cemetery. Holy Name is the Catholic cemetery in Jersey City. I know their children born in the US were baptized in a Catholic church. So was Arturo not Catholic and he couldn’t be buried in Holy Name? And then even though Teresa was Catholic, she was buried with her husband even though she could have been buried in Holy Name? I tried e-mailing Bayview, but I never heard back. One of these days I need to call and see what I can find out. And I need to try to do more research into records from Modigliana to see if I can find out anything about his siblings.