Argentina

 No, I am not participating in A to Z.  But I have decided to take the opportunity of the A to Z to cover some of the topics I want to discuss in my family genealogy research.  I did read a comment online about A to Z that "no one is interested in someone else's family history," so feel free to quit reading now, LOL.  

I mentioned way back when I started this adventure, that my mother always talked about the family members who went to South America.  Except that no one seemed to know who they were.  One of the first sources I used to find family members was my mother's collection of funeral cards.  They usually have very useful information on them.

One of the cards for a woman who lived and died in Detroit gave me my first South America connection.  I had her married name and date of birth, and searching for her I found that she had been born in Buenos Aires in 1892, returned with her family to Italy, married there in 1918, came to America in 1919 with her husband and settled in Montana.  They eventually came to Detroit and were here for the 1940 census.  As it turns out, her children, who are my fifth cousins, all lived in this area, with the oldest and her family living within shouting distance of my current home.  I could have passed them in the store and never known.

I got curious as to how these people chose Argentina and discovered that there was a great migration from Italy to Argentina between 1880 and 1914, which goes along with what I see in my family.  Most of the farm land where my family was from had been badly depleted of nutrients and Argentina offered a fresh place to start.  They could move there and become citizens within two years.  They were not over-taxed or discriminated against.  Also, many in my greater family are bricklayers, masons, tile workers (that's what my family did), etc.  Those trades were of great interest to South American countries.  

I also found young men moving to South America with their brides following, sometimes after a marriage by proxy was performed.  One distant cousin, a delightful young man named Rodrigo, contacted me last year.  We have yet to figure out our direct ancestor.  

In addition to cousins in Argentina, I also have several in Australia on both the Italian and Polish side of the family, though the Polish connection may be extremely difficult to ever discover.  Though we share a last name, those records are from the time of Russian rule in Poland and very few of those records are available online.  

So my hat is off to men like Pietro Antonio Alba who went off to Argentina in his 40's, leaving his family in Italy in the 1890's.  He died in Buenos Aires in 1904, the fate of his fortune unknown.