My maternal grandmother, Grazietta Silverio, came to this country
from Chieti, Italy when she was 7 years old in 1913. She came with
her mother and sister on the Napoli and arrived through Philadelphia,
joining her father first in West Virginia and then in Western
Pennsylvania, where she lived the rest of her long life. (She died at
98.) She lived in coal and limestone mining country, and it was the
custom to take in boarders from the home country who also came to
find work. At age 16, she fell in love with one of these young men,
and when her parents thought them too young to marry, she took to her
bed in her room - my feisty, utterly practical grandmother - and
would not come out until her parents relented. One morning when she
was five months´ pregnant with my mother, he took his lunch bucket
and went to work and never came back. She later heard that he had
died in a train accident, but we never knew for sure. She married the
man I knew as "Tata" when my mother was two years old. My mother is
the girl on the far right of the photo, Grazietta is next to her with
dark hair, Tata is behind them.
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