The Welsh heritage of Philadelphia
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Whenever I drive through the near northwest suburbs of Philadelphia, the names of the towns and streets there make me feel as though I've been transported to Wales: Bryn Mawr, Bala Cynwyd, Narberth, Uwchlan, Llanalew Road, Llewelyn Road, Cymry Drive, Llanelly Lane, Derwydd Lane…. By chance, through some sort of elective affinity, today I happened upon the following article about that very subject:
"Welcome to Wrexham, Philadelphia and the Welsh language", Chris Wood, BBC (11/12/23)
Rob McElhenney's attempts to learn Welsh provided a highlight of television show Welcome to Wrexham.
But if things had been different, the language may not have been so alien to him – and he might have spoken it in school or even at home.
It was the intention of settlers in parts of his native Philadelphia for the government and people to use Welsh.
However, the attempts in 1681 did not prove as successful as those later in Patagonia, Argentina.
I knew that, early on, German was widely used in America but that, with the coming of the First World War, its prestige rapidly plummeted. The story of Welsh in America was somewhat different in its details, though the results were the same.
Despite the fact that I have been a professor at the University of Pennsylvania for nearly half a century and was well aware that our mascot is the Quaker (it seems that nobody objects), I have learned many new things about Penn's Welsh Quaker roots from this article. Quakerdom is also important for the superb colleges at Bryn Mawr, Swarthmore, and Haverford, as well as some of the finest high schools in the region. But I didn't realize the full extent to which Quakerdom, and its Welsh background, were intertwined with the history of the Philadelphia region.
It's Always Sunny in Philadelphia actor, writer and creator McElhenney started learning Welsh after buying Wrexham AFC with Hollywood star Ryan Reynolds.
But the language was spoken in his hometown on-and-off for four centuries, after two waves of immigration helped shape the state of Pennsylvania.
In fact, the original intention was to call Pennsylvania "New Wales", according to Connor Duffy, who is from Philadelphia and gives presentations on the history.
Hundreds of Welsh-speaking Quakers from rural parts of Wales began arriving in the late 1660s, after facing persecution in Great Britain for their beliefs, Mr Duffy said.
He added: "William Penn, founder of Pennsylvania, converted to Quakerism at a young age and was a strong advocate of religious freedom and democratic values.
"The king granted him a massive tract of land in North America to settle a debt with the Penn family.
"Believe it or not, Penn's first idea for a name for this land was 'New Wales', but King Charles II overruled him and the name Pennsylvania or 'Penn's Woods' was chosen to honour Penn's father, whom the king owed a debt to."
The Welsh Quakers believed an agreement was reached to create a "Welsh Tract" on 40,000 acres (160sq km), where the language of government, law, business and daily life would be Welsh.
But Mr Duffy said this failed to happen, adding: "The Welsh came to know Penn as 'Diwyneb', or 'Faceless' for reneging on their agreement."
However, the settlers left their mark.
In the 1880s, when the Pennsylvania Railroad was built, laying the foundations for suburban Philadelphia, it ran through what was the Welsh Tract.
Giving new areas Welsh names was seen as a sign of affluence by the wealthy residents who moved in.
Many were named by the president of the railroad – George Brooke Roberts, a direct descendant of one of the first Welsh settlers in the 1680s.
He lived at his ancestor's estate "Pencoyd" and raised funds to build the Church of St Asaph, Bala Cynwyd.
[VHM: "Pencoyd in 1291 was written as "Pencoyt". The name derives from the Celtic 'penn' with 'coid', meaning 'wood's end'." (source) Cf. Welsh coedydd ("woods"),
When I start to think about it, everywhere I turn I find how important Wales and the Welsh are for the history and character of this region, and that holds from institutions to individuals. My colleague at Sino-Platonic Papers, Paula Roberts, is of Welsh extraction, but not via the Quaker route. The first Roberts (then spelled Roberds with a D) she knows about came to Philadelphia in about 1730 from Wales, to take up lands as a farmer but refused to become Quaker. All that side were farmers. They started moving west, like many Americans. Paula's Roberts ancestors had many interesting and exciting adventures on the way, but eventually her father and mother settled in Boise, Idaho, where she grew up.
Somehow, Paula's Welsh roots called her back to the Philadelphia area, and when I met her she was living in Wynnewood. Wynnewood was named in 1691 for Dr. Thomas Wynne (< Welsh gwyn ["fair white"]), William Penn's physician and the first Speaker of the Pennsylvania General Assembly.
Roberts is a surname of English and Welsh origin, deriving from the given name Robert, meaning "bright renown" – from the Germanic elements "hrod" meaning renown and "beraht" meaning bright. The surname, meaning "son of Robert", is common in North Wales and elsewhere in the United Kingdom
Lingering observation: the Welsh certainly do love "ll", "dd", and "y"!
Selected readings
- "Welsh 'prifysgol'" (4/25/18) — means "university", as, for example, Aberystwyth
- "Tolkien on walh" (5/26/07) — J.R.R. Tolkien on the Germanic root of words such as Welsh, Walloon, Vlach and walnut (from his essay "English and Welsh", originally a lecture given at Oxford in 1955), highly recommended
Etymological notes on "Welsh":
From Middle English Walsch, Welische, from Old English wīelisċ (“Briton; Roman; Celt”), from Proto-West Germanic *walhisk, from Proto-Germanic *walhiskaz (“Celt; later Roman”), from *walhaz (“Celt, Roman”) (compare Old English wealh), from the name of the Gaulish tribe, the Volcae (recorded only in Latin contexts).
This word was borrowed from Germanic into Slavic (compare Old Church Slavonic Влахъ (Vlaxŭ, “Vlachs, Romanians”), Byzantine Greek Βλάχος (Blákhos)).
Doublet of Vellish. Compare Walloon, walnut, Vlach, Walach, Gaul, Cornwall.
(Wiktionary)
—–
Old English Wielisc, Wylisc (West Saxon), Welisc, Wælisc (Anglian and Kentish) "foreign; British (not Anglo-Saxon), Welsh; not free, servile," from Wealh, Walh "Celt, Briton, Welshman, non-Germanic foreigner." In Tolkien's definition, "common Gmc. name for a man of what we should call Celtic speech," but also applied in Germanic languages to speakers of Latin, hence Old High German Walh, Walah "Celt, Roman, Gaulish," and Old Norse Val-land "France," Valir "Gauls, non-Germanic inhabitants of France" (Danish vælsk "Italian, French, southern"). It is from Proto-Germanic *Walkhiskaz, from a Celtic tribal name represented by Latin Volcæ (Caesar) "ancient Celtic tribe in southern Gaul."
As a noun, "the Britons," also "the Welsh language," both in Old English. The word survives in Wales, Cornwall, Walloon, walnut, and in surnames Walsh and Wallace. It was borrowed in Old Church Slavonic as vlachu, and applied to the Rumanians, hence Wallachia.
- "Elective affinities: Japanese bonds of affection" (8/24/24)
Seonachan said,
August 26, 2024 @ 10:42 pm
I had dimly remembered the Welsh Tract being in present-day Delaware. Wikipedia tells me that was a second Welsh Tract granted in 1701.
I believe there was also a large Welsh community in northeastern Pennsylvania, around Scranton and Wilkes Barre.
Philip Anderson said,
August 27, 2024 @ 1:34 am
When I was learning Welsh, I read a historical novel set during the Welsh settlement, “Y Rhandir Mwyn” (the gentle region) translated into English as “The Fair Wilderness”:
https://llyfrau.com/?p=706
Philip Taylor said,
August 27, 2024 @ 3:38 am
« [T]he Welsh certainly do love "ll", "dd", and "y" » — they do indeed, to the extent that they have succeeded in persuading the Unicode consortium to recognise (at least) the first as a letter in its own right :
https://www.fileformat.info/info/unicode/char/1efb/index.htm
Victor Mair said,
August 27, 2024 @ 6:31 am
Compare Polish "l":
Ł or ł, described in English as L with stroke, is a letter of the Polish, Kashubian, Sorbian, Belarusian Latin, Ukrainian Latin, Wymysorys, Navajo, Dëne Sųłıné, Inupiaq, Zuni, Hupa, Sm'álgyax, Nisga'a, and Dogrib alphabets, several proposed alphabets for the Venetian language, and the ISO 11940 romanization of the Thai script. In some Slavic languages, it represents the continuation of the Proto-Slavic non-palatal ⟨L⟩ (dark L), except in Polish, Kashubian, and Sorbian, where it evolved further into /w/. In most non-European languages, it represents a voiceless alveolar lateral fricative or similar sound.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/%C5%81
Welsh "ll"
In Welsh, ⟨ll⟩ stands for a voiceless alveolar lateral fricative sound (IPA: [ɬ]). This sound is very common in place names in Wales because it occurs in the word llan, for example, Llanelli, where the ⟨ll⟩ appears twice, or Llanfairpwllgwyngyll, where (in the long version of the name) the ⟨ll⟩ appears five times – with two instances of llan.
In Welsh, ⟨ll⟩ is a separate digraph letter from ⟨l⟩ (e.g., lwc sorts before llaw). In modern Welsh this, and other digraph letters, are written with two symbols but count as one letter. In Middle Welsh it was written with a tied ligature; this ligature is included in the Latin Extended Additional Unicode block as U+1EFA Ỻ LATIN CAPITAL LETTER MIDDLE-WELSH LL and U+1EFB ỻ LATIN SMALL LETTER MIDDLE-WELSH LL. This ligature is seldom used in Modern Welsh, but equivalent ligatures may be included in modern fonts, for example the three fonts commissioned by the Welsh Government in 2020.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ll
The Wikipedia article on "ll" also covers its use in English, Romance languages (Asturian, Catalan, Galician, Spanish), Philippine languages, Albanian, Icelandic (also "broken l"), Inuit-Yupik languages, Gwoyeu Romatzyh romanization of Mandarin, and Haida.
J.W. Brewer said,
August 27, 2024 @ 7:39 am
Further to Seonachan's comment, if you're looking for traces of early Welsh settlement in what became Delaware (for a long time a semi-autonomous adjunct of the Pennsylvania colony similarly subject to the Penn family as proprietors) you can check out the https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Welsh_Tract_Baptist_Church, whose present structure was built in 1746 on the site of an earlier wooden structure. That's in the Welshly-named Pencader Hundred, where the local historical society has a modest website. https://www.pencaderheritage.org/
"Hundreds" in Delaware are county subdivisions historically analogous to the "townships" of e.g. New Jersey and Pennsylvania, but in Del. unlike those neighboring states the hundreds over time lost all of their political and administrative functions, with that process ending enough generations back now that their names have in some cases fallen into disuse, with many people not being able to tell you which one they live in. 50 years ago when I was a boy it was reasonably common for area road maps to show their boundaries but I don't know if that's still the case, or had been the case just before paper maps themselves became obsolete. I grew up in a hundred whose name remained in use because by historical happenstance its boundaries matched up with a "natural"-seeming subpart of the county as transformed by post-WW2 suburban development, but the old lines didn't necessarily match up elsewhere with what seemed like a currently-sensible subdivision of the county and I don't know how active versus archaic a toponym Pencader is this days.
Cervantes said,
August 27, 2024 @ 7:43 am
I'm a Swarthmore alum and I have Welsh ancestors, but I never knew of the connection before now. Note that "Welsh" was originally disparaging. Although it has lost that connotation, it is still a foreign word. The name of the country is Cymru, the people are Cymri, and the language is Cymraeg. There is currently a movement under consideration by the Senedd — the parliament — to prohibit the use of the name Wales and call the country Cymru. The football association already uses Cymru and other Cymraeg terms.
/df said,
August 27, 2024 @ 7:52 am
Indeed, the 'll's in Llanfair PG arise from two parishes and also two pools.
As to Roberts, although the surname is popular in Wales, the more Welsh equivalent name is Probert. Roberts is Robert, a Norman introduction from their Germanic neighbours (eg Robert I/II, Kings of W Franks, 10C), with the English/Germanic offspring suffix -s rather than the equivalent Welsh prefix [a]p-. Then there's Robards, as in late 20C actor Jason.
Normans made it to Ireland from Wales ca. 12C, as evidenced at http://medievurtealscotland.org/kmo/AnnalsIndex/Masculine/index.shtml where Robeárd doesn't appear in the earlier name lists. But neither MacRobert nor O'Robert (mac/Ó + Robeárd) seem to have appeared in Ireland, while Robert (eg the Bruce) became popular in Scotland together with Mc/MacRobert.
J.W. Brewer said,
August 27, 2024 @ 8:03 am
In terms of the BBC's negative comparison to the subsequent Welsh enclaves in Patagonia, there are at least two significant differences – plus it should be noted that those communities have in more recent generations undergone overwhelming language shift to Spanish, to a degree that is often overlooked by those desiring to romanticize them.
First, the European settlement of Patagonia in those days was discontinuous geographically, so the Welsh could be plopped down at a considerable distance from any other group of European settlers speaking some other language, with nothing in between but territory lightly populated by indigenes.
Second and perhaps more important, in many times and places religious difference was a greater barrier to exogamy (and thus a greater deterrent to assimilation) than linguistic difference. The Patagonia Welsh were a Protestant community in a sea of Catholics, who were thus able for many generations to remain endogamous enough to avoid disappearing as an identifiable community. Whereas by contrast the early Welsh settlers in Pennsylvania had pretty much the exact same mix of religious commitments (Quakers especially, but also any number of other "Dissenters" from the established Church of England, such as Baptists or Presbyterians or whatnot, who were also appealed to by William Penn's marketing campaign emphasizing religious tolerance and pluralism) as the more numerous English settlers arriving in the same New World location at the same time. Exogamy-driven assimilation was thus highly unsurprising.
Seonachan said,
August 27, 2024 @ 8:32 am
To add to Cervantes's comment re: Cymru/Cymraeg: Brittonic languages held out in other parts of Britain beyond Wales and Cornwall, leading to the names Cumbria and Cumberland. Southwestern Scotland was also Brittonic-speaking, which explains the surname Wallace there (as in William Wallace).
J.W. Brewer said,
August 27, 2024 @ 9:44 am
Here's another factor in the comparative invisibility of the legacy of early Welsh contributions to the U.S. population: while toponyms like "Bala Cynwyd" look exotic, Welsh-origin surnames are generally not the least bit exotic or "ethnic" appearing to U.S. eyes. This contrasts with the typical American having some sense of what "Scottish-sounding" or "Irish-sounding" surnames are like as distinct from regular/unmarked English-origin surnames.
The internet's standard list of the 10 most common Welsh surnames (in their conventionally Anglicized spellings) is Jones, Williams, Davies, Thomas, Evans, Roberts, Hughes, Lewis, Morgan and Griffiths. Eight of those ten are among the 100 most common U.S. surnames, with six falling in the top 50 and three in the top 20. Even the rarer two (Davies and Griffiths) probably don't strike the average American as "ethnic-sounding" and you have to know a lot more about etymology than the average person does to spot the Brythonic etyma in e.g. Morgan or Griffiths. Maybe in the U.K. some of these surnames remain stereotypically Welsh, but I don't think those stereotypes are generally current in the U.S. All of which means that Americans whose surname was brought across the Atlantic by a remote paternal-line ancestor who was a Welshman don't stick out visibly from those whose surname was brought across the Atlantic by a remote paternal-line ancestor who was an Englishman.
Indeed, I suspect but have not investigated that by the time emigration to North America started in the 17th century, many/most of the surnames on that list were also extant in England outside Wales, and not merely among identifiable enclaves of recent migrants from Wales. It would not surprise me in the least if a majority of early immigrants to the New World surnamed e.g. Williams or Lewis had not been born in Wales and did not self-identify as Welsh.
Seonachan said,
August 27, 2024 @ 10:02 am
@J.W. Brewer, I think you're right about that. My grandmother's maiden name was Lewis, and her father was from Pennsylvania. Knowing only that much, I'd long assumed he was of Welsh ancestry. When I dug into the genealogy I found he was descended from New England Puritans, like most people in the community he came from. Plenty of Williamses and Joneses there too. On the other hand, his uncle married a Welsh immigrant also named Lewis.
Benjamin E. Orsatti said,
August 27, 2024 @ 2:21 pm
Seems like the Welsh weren't particularly interested in making it across the Alleghenies, though. Off the top of my head, I can't think of a single "Welsh" Western Pennsylvania placename, and I'd venture to say that the clear majority of "Thomases" here are likely either Italian (<–"Tomasso/i") or Lebanese (as in Danny Thomas).
J.W. Brewer said,
August 27, 2024 @ 2:55 pm
@Benjamin Orsatti: Or Pgh.-born Frank Thomas, who played eight seasons for the Pirates in the 1950's, during which he was typically the team's best home-run hitter. He was apparently Lithuanian-American at least on the side of his father, whose unanglicized name is said to have been Bronaslaus Tumas.
But more broadly I'd say that the initial Atlantic-seaboard Welsh settlers had mostly assimilated into the larger "English" early settler population before their mutual descendants pushed farther west. Although note the Welshly-named Cambria County, Pa. (= Johnstown).
Coby said,
August 27, 2024 @ 6:49 pm
The more "Welsh" forms of surnames like Evans, Hughes, Owens and Williams are Bevan, Pugh, Bowen and Pulliam, but most people probably don't know them to be Welsh.
J.W. Brewer said,
August 28, 2024 @ 7:51 am
@Coby: but those more-Welsh alternative forms are much rarer: the ratio varies but the U.S. has e.g. over 100 folks surnamed Williams for each one surnamed Pulliam. So even if you did recognize these variants as marked-as-Welsh, only focusing on them rather than the more common Anglicized variants would cause you to dramatically underestimate the degree of Welsh ancestry in the U.S. population – although with centuries of exogamy most Americans bearing a Welsh-origin surname are going to have a family tree that is predominantly non-Welsh and may have no self-awareness or self-identification as Welsh.
My only immigrant ancestor whom I affirmatively believe (based on standard sources not guaranteed to be 100% reliable) to have been Welsh-born was the very colorful Thomas Carrier alias Morgan (1626? – 1735), around whom so many improbable-yet-not-literally-impossible stories swirl that the well-documented fact that his wife Martha ended up executed for being on the wrong side of the Salem witch trials is arguably not the most interesting thing about him. (Did he really live to be well over 100 years old? Was he really seven feet tall? Did he really have some sort of enigmatic/anonymous role in the beheading of Charles I before relocating to Massachusetts to get away from Charles II? I dunno.) "Carrier" is not a particularly Welsh surname, although "Morgan" is, and perhaps the tradition is backwards as to which was the birth name and which the alias.
Barbara Phillips Long said,
August 28, 2024 @ 8:59 am
There was a second wave of Welsh migration to Pennsylvania after the colonial period. When my family moved to Cumberland County, across the river from Harrisburg, about 25 years ago, the local chief of police was of Welsh heritage, as were several other families we met. Their family members had been come to the state in connection with the mining industry, and as far as I know, they were not Quakers. Wikipedia says:
In the 19th century, thousands of Welsh coal miners emigrated to the anthracite and bituminous mines of Pennsylvania, many becoming mine managers and executives. The miners brought organizational skills, exemplified in the United Mine Workers labor union, and its most famous leader John L. Lewis, who was born in a Welsh settlement in Iowa. Pennsylvania has the most Welsh Americans, approximately 200,000; they are primarily concentrated in the Western and Northeastern (Coal Region) regions of the state.[15]
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Welsh_Americans
Philip Anderson said,
August 28, 2024 @ 2:07 pm
@Cervantes
The name ’Welsh’, like its relative Wlach, came from the Celtic tribal name Volcae and originally referred to natives of the Roman Empire; in Old English, Wealas also meant slaves, but that may well have been because slaves were brought from Wales, just as Slav>slave not vice versa.
Cymru, Cymry (the people) and Cymraeg are Welsh words and not generally used in English, although many organisations prefer a single, Welsh name, rather than two separate ones.
Hughes and Evans are also more common in Wales than Bevan and Pugh; I think the latter are older, adopted when ‘ap X’ would have been in use (ap>B- before a vowel, >P- before a consonant, including ‘h’). But patronymics continued relatively late, and a son’s ’surname’ could be his father’s name. But the P/B names are less common outside Wales.
J.W. Brewer said,
August 28, 2024 @ 4:39 pm
@Philip Anderson: In "regular" German, "Welschland" is an archaic word meaning "Italy." But in Swiss German, Welschland is a not-quite-archaic word meaning "the predominantly French-speaking part of Switzerland." (The sources I've seen imply that the Italian-speaking part of ditto is not included but I don't know whether they may have just overlooked that detail.)
Philip Anderson said,
August 29, 2024 @ 1:30 am
In Welsh crosswords, and Scrabble, the digraphs are a single letter, and are written together in a box (as Ll) – so a word with ‘ll’ won’t intersect with an ‘l’.
Philip Taylor said,
August 29, 2024 @ 4:06 am
From this week’s Economist (the whole article is well worth reading) —
Benjamin E. Orsatti said,
August 29, 2024 @ 7:23 am
Barbara,
(re UMWA & the Welsh miners) — Neat! I learn something every day here. It didn't even occur to me to think about the ancestry of John L. Lewis. (I did go to high school with a "Lewis", whose name, a generation ago, had been "Wasilewski"). I'll be at the hall in Uniontown next week; I'll see if I can get a little bit of labor history from the District Rep.
Cervantes said,
August 29, 2024 @ 7:38 am
Phillip — Yeah, that's what I said. Welsh is an English word. And yes, in English it meant slave. Your purported derivation of the English word doesn't seem to matter to that point. As I say, it's no longer pejorative and is the English word for the people and the language, but they have their own language although it's not widely spoken nowadays. Do you have some other point to make?
Philip Anderson said,
August 29, 2024 @ 11:53 am
@Cervantes
My point was that the primary meaning of Welsh in Old English was NOT derogatory, it just referred to Britons in general; the extension to mean slave was secondary, but that misleading etymology has been seized upon by certain Anglophobe nationalists.
Barbara Phillips Long said,
August 29, 2024 @ 6:54 pm
@Benjamin E. Orsatti —
The copy of “A History of Pennsylvania” that I have (Philip S. Klein and Ari Hoogenboom, second edition), has a bit of information about the Welsh settlers and later immigrants. The authors say the first wave of Welsh immigrants mostly settled in the vicinity of the Welsh tract. “These people continued to come until about 1720, when perhaps 6,000 had made their way to southeastern Pennsylvania.” Still writing about the colonial period, the authors say “Despite the Quaker opposition to slavery, some 4,000 slaves had been brought to Pennsylvania by 1730, most of them owned by the English, Welsh, and Scotch-Irish.”
The later wave of Welsh immigration turns out to be just one among many different ethnic groups, although it seems the Welsh tended to be higher in the pecking order. On immigration to the state, the authors say: “Pennsylvania attracted more immigrants than any other state except New York. In 1860 over 430,000 (15 percent of Pennsylvania’s population) were foreign-born, while in 1920 almost 1,400,000 (16 percent of the people) were foreign-born. Both the ultimate destination of immigrants and their percentage of the total population remained relatively constant in Pennsylvania. Particularly after 1890 few immigrants farmed despite their agrarian backgrounds; most worked in mines, mills, and factories. …In 1920, natives of Russia were the largest immigrant group in Philadelphia, with Irish and Italians vying for second place; Poles the largest group in Allegheny, Luzerne, Lackawanna and Schuylkill Counties and in the cities of Wilkes-Barre and Chester. … Welshmen were second to the Poles in Wilkes-Barre.” Other ethnic groups listed in this paragraph include Austrians, Hungarians, Yugoslavians, Germans, Lithuanians, and Czechoslovakians.
The authors have this brief note about Welsh social standing in a discussion of the Molly Maguires and labor unrest and organization starting in the 1850s: “Although in the majority, Irish were at this time underdogs in the anthracite area. They were the laborers assigned to the English and Welsh miners; they were the doers of unskilled jobs.”
Benjamin E. Orsatti said,
August 30, 2024 @ 8:10 am
Barbara,
I will definitely check out that book. Growing up in the '80's and '90's, there didn't seem to be a lot of interest in local history, but the other day my son told me that he's taking a course in "Pennsylvania History" during his senior year in high school. That's definitely a turn for the better, if only because it's useful to be able to answer the question: "Who are all these people around me and how did they get here?". For example, I still wonder about what really really really bad thing happened to central Italy during the early 1900's, such that it seemed like entire villages simply picked up and came over.
Delaware native said,
August 30, 2024 @ 1:56 pm
re: Delaware's "hundreds" falling out of common awareness
When I lived in Wilmington, Delaware in the 1970s to 1990s, the Brandywine Hundred was commonly mentioned. I don't recall ever hearing of any other. I couldn't even have told you there WERE others.
Barbara Phillips Long said,
August 30, 2024 @ 5:04 pm
Benjamin —
What I noticed a couple of years ago when taking a course in genealogical research that involved case studies from different countries of origin is how poverty, then as now, had a lot to do with migration. The Irish potato famine, general poverty, political upheaval that triggered economic failures, and so on. Growing up, I met several farm families who had left Eastern European countries due to bank failures that left families destitute (a side effect of this made me value regulatory government). Anyway, the Library of Congress has some basic information:
“What brought about this dramatic surge in immigration? The causes are complex, and each hopeful individual or family no doubt had a unique story. By the late 19th century, the peninsula of Italy had finally been brought under one flag, but the land and the people were by no means unified. Decades of internal strife had left a legacy of violence, social chaos, and widespread poverty. The peasants in the primarily poor, mostly rural south of Italy and on the island of Sicily had little hope of improving their lot. Diseases and natural disasters swept through the new nation, but its fledgling government was in no condition to bring aid to the people. As transatlantic transportation became more affordable, and as word of American prosperity came via returning immigrants and U.S. recruiters, Italians found it increasingly difficult to resist the call of "L'America".
“This new generation of Italian immigrants was distinctly different in makeup from those that had come before. No longer did the immigrant population consist mostly of Northern Italian artisans and shopkeepers seeking a new market in which to ply their trades. Instead, the vast majority were farmers and laborers looking for a steady source of work—any work. There were a significant number of single men among these immigrants, and many came only to stay a short time. Within five years, between 30 and 50 percent of this generation of immigrants would return home to Italy, where they were known as ritornati.“
https://www.loc.gov/classroom-materials/immigration/italian/the-great-arrival/
Benjamin E. Orsatti said,
September 3, 2024 @ 7:21 am
Ah, earthquakes, famines… Italian government. All understandable reasons!