Italians in America

My ancestors are most from Southern Italy, particularly Abruzzi and Campobasso. I don't really have any stories of my ancestors because most of them I never met. I know that there are some of my family members left in Italy, but our family is unsure where they are living.

But I did some research on the mass emigration from Italy between 1876 to 1976, mostly to the United States. In 1850, less than 4,000 Italians were reported to be living in the United States, and then in 1880 the Italian population skyrocketed to 44,000 people and then 484,027 Italians by 1900. Throughout the mass migration southern Italian immigrants were the dominate group of Italians coming over to America. Despite the increased number of immigrants, the Italians were actually not the largest foreign group in U.S. cities; Italians made up 1.5% of the U.S. population at its peak.

Italians started working in jobs such as shoe shining, sewer cleaning, ragpicking, or whatever dirty, hard, and dangerous jobs that other people didn't want. Even children started work at a young age, at the expense of their educations. And something I found really interesting was that the Italians were one of the few ethnic groups known for NOT resorting to accepting charity, or turning to prostitution for money; I feel sort of proud that the Italians had some morals and beliefs they stood for.

Like other ethnic groups, the Italians clustered in groups all around America. More specifically, Neapolitans and Sicilians particularly settled around New York, and people from Sicily settled on certain streets, etc. But despite all the clustering of Italians, another interesting point was that there were never all-Italian neighborhoods; there would be some areas or streets with a large number of Italians from a certain part of Italy, but never towns or cities where everyone was an Italian.

A final thing I found while researching was that Italians tended to have horrible living conditions. Most of the places they lived were overcrowded and filthy; the laborers also had a tendency to not eat a lot of food in order to conserve what little food they did have and in order to save money. But then as more and more generations of Italians came over from Italy, their homes started to become less dirty and more home-like. Italians were noted to be very diligent workmen; in later years they obtained jobs as: shoemakers, fruit sellers, fishermen, waiters, and tradesmen.

http://library.thinkquest.org/20619/Italian.html