I'm Still Here!

Just a quick post to keep this blog from disappearing into cyber space. 

Found my Grandmother's Grave

Just a quick post to keep this blog from disappearing into cyber space and to say that my niece, last summer, was able to find the cemetery were my grandmother was most likely buried. A historian in Grandville, IL said a lot of people who died in the Great Flu Epidemic from the hospital where she died were buried in unmarked graves in this part of their cemetery.

Here's the pictures she took of the area where the unmarked graves are well maintained. Decades and decades after her death my dad and uncle had bought a marker for her grave, drove down south to place it but they left it outside of Catholic church's cemetery where a priest told them to because there was no record of her being there. And no one in the family could find the stone since.

Memories of my Father and Grandfather

In my entire life I’ve never met a man as honorable and honest as my dad. He was a good-natured and soft spoken guy with a clear vision of humanity that included compassion for everyone, in every circumstance. For example, one time my cousin and my brother took Dad to a strip club, hoping to shock my dad for a few laughs and prove how grown up they were now that they were old enough to get into places like that. When my cousin asked Dad what he thought about a woman who’d take her clothes off and dance like that, my dad answered, “She probably has babies at home that need to be fed.” When my cousin told me this story years after it happened he said what started out to be a joke on my dad ended up being a life lesson on learning to walk in other people’s shoes. That was my dad---always caring, always seeing the best in others, always teaching without preaching.


My dad’s formal education ended in the lower grades as did his association with the Catholic Church. His parents were Italian immigrants and he was the youngest of three kids. He lost his mother in the Great Flu Epidemic of 1918/19 and at age eleven he became a latch-key kid in a coal mining town in southern Illinois where one of his jobs each day was to go to the tavern to fetch a pail of beer for his dad when he came home from working underground picking coal in the mines. At the tavern my dad also played the piano by ear to earn a few coins before he was even old enough to wear long pants but even with that background, he wasn’t much of a drinker. At a party here and there but that was it. He was a good, hard working man who always put his family’s needs first, but he gave Mom credit for them being able to build the financial security my folks enjoyed later in life.


My grandfather died when I was a toddler but I heard lots of stories about how he’d sit on the porch singing opera and playing the accordion in the evenings. Like my dad, he was also a good-natured and fair-minded man and he allowed my dad to drop out of going to church on Sundays with the rest of the family when a priest picked him up by the seat of his pants and his shirt collar and pretended he was going to throw him into an open door on a pot belly stove to teach him about the fires of hell. My grandfather, though, told my dad he still had to go to church just not to same church so every Sunday dad walked alone to the only other church in town. There, Dad learned that “Jesus loves all the little children of the world, red and yellow, black and white.” And he got to build things with a hammer and nails and he spent the rest of his life teaching himself how to build and remodel things. My grandfather didn’t want his sons to work in the mines so he devised a plan. He raised potatoes and sold them to the local grocery store owner he had befriended. When he’d saved up enough money to buy a bus ticket he sent my uncle up north to Michigan---still a teenager---to work in the factories and between the two of them they saved up a ‘nest egg’ to move the whole family up north.

And that’s how my dad ended up working for a quarter an hour crawling inside of hot machines to pull wood veneer sheets out. Somewhere along his work life, Dad learned how to be a tool and die maker and he was so good at it that the draft board during WWII wouldn’t let him sign up. He was deemed an essential worker in an essential industry. So he spent the entire war working 14-16 hour shifts making patterns and prototypes for airplane parts and munitions. But what I remember most about dad’s working years is when he’d come home from the factory he carried one of those black lunch boxes with the rounded top and he always had a few squares of a Hersey Candy Bar inside for my brother and me. And it just occurred to me why each night I have two squares of dark chocolate and I’m never attempted to eat any more.


I don’t know how my dad picked up his respect for knowledge and education. Except for the newspaper, he wasn’t a reader yet when I was in college and taking classes in philosophy, world religion and logic we could discuss those topics and he held his own talking about Socrates, Plato, mythical utopian cities and the origins of our values and laws. Life was his teacher, I guess. He’d witnessed Ku Klux Klan hangings while hiding in the woods when he was a kid. He saw the unfairness of the blacks, Italian and Irish getting paid less than whites in the coal mines while they all worked side by side. And I’ll never forget the look of horror and disgust on his face on Bloody Sunday 1963 when the nightly news showed the fire hoses and attack dogs that were turned on the black marchers in Selma, Alabama. I’ll also never forget the look of shear happiness that lit up his face when Tiger Woods won his first PGA in 1999. He was proud of Tiger for breaking the color barrier in a game that dad loved his entire life. Dad was the most fair-minded and ethical person I’ve ever known and I know I got the luck of the draw to have him as my father, my teacher and the person who I’ve most admired and loved my entire life. I hope I made him half as proud as he made me. ©

The Immigration Suitcase

 When my grandfather immigrated to the United States from Italy in 1895 he carried all his earthly possessions in the wicker suitcase below. When my uncle died it was offered to my dad and it came with a treasure trove of papers inside, all of which have been posted on in this blog.  The suitcase itself now has a new home with my oldest niece who has it on displace at the family cottage. Her mission, I told her, is to figure out who should get it next when the time comes---who, in the newest crop of babies in the family grows up caring the most about genealogy and family trees. I need to put a note inside with a list of those of us who the suitcase has passed through. It will contain the names of my grandfather, my uncle, my dad (for about a minute and a half) then me and now my niece.

 

1900 U.S. Census

Certificate of Competency of Coal Miner Illinois 1916

Update

My niece had a wonderful time in Italy last summer and she was able to find Case Riva to visit. She met a woman there and showed her a photo of my grandfather and the women thought he looked just like her grandfather. The best they could figure out is that her line and our line have common ancestors. One day I'd like to post the photos of Case Riva here but we couldn't figure out, yet, how to get them off her new iPod and on to my computer. It's a tiny place.

Update

I'm so excited! One of my relatives is going to Italy this summer, to the exact location of our ancestors. Hopefully, she'll be able to find more information to take our family tree back even farther.

WWI Registration, Coal Country - 1918

On September 12th, 1918, three Riva's walked into the Putman County local draft board office in Granville, Illinois, to register. WWI was going on and the month before President Wilson had agreed to co-operate with the Allies by sending "volunteer" troops. Those Riva's were James/Giacomo Riva (age 45), John Riva (35) and another John Riva, (35). James, we know from crossing checking information on various documents, is OUR James. The other two Riva's we have no documented proof that they are related but we believe they are.

One of the John's lived in Granville and worked for the St. Paul Coal Co. James and the other John (John #1 below) both lived in near-by Standard, Illinois, and worked at the B.F. Berry Coal Co. James and John #1 are also recorded on the 1910 Census as both living in Greenfield Township, Grundy County,IL---both on Sixth Avenue right next door to each other.

James Riva's Registration, Click to enlarge

Birthday: March 25, 1873 – age 45
James is listed as have black hair and blue eyes
Josie Riva (his wife) is listed as his nearest relative
Living in Standard, IL


#1 John Riva's Registration, Click to enlarge

Birthday: June 11, 1884 – age 35
Wife: Minnie Riva
Living in Standard, IL


#2 John Riva's Registration, Click to enlarge

Birthday: August 1, 1883 – age 35
Living in Granville, IL
Nearest Relative: father Bertolomeo Riva in St Ponsio Canavese Italy, Torino Province

So far, I haven't been able to find a St Ponsio. It's possible the above registration document should read San Ponzio or that the village of St. Ponsio no longer exists. Either way it's an interesting mystery because San Ponzio is a village in the same province where James/Giacomo was born. (If anyone has any information on how these two John's might fit into the James Riva family tree please leave a comment.) J.E. Riva © 2008

EDIT TO ADD: Since writing this, I've been told that the "St. Ponsio" is probably San Ponso in the Piedmont region of Torino. (See comment below.)

Christopher, IL & Coal Mining 1920

Christopher, IL, 1928

Josephine (Alaria) Riva died in northern Illinois in 1919 and by the following year her husband Giacomo/James Riva and their three children had moved to the southern part of the state. The 1920 U.S. Federal Census places them in Franklin County, Tyrone Township. More specifically, they moved to a house at 247 Snider Street in Christopher, Illinois. The C.B.& Q. Railroad and four large mining companies had recently transformed the village of Christopher into one of the nations' most productive coal regions.

My generation of Riva's probably all remembers our fathers, John and Peter, talk about their early years in Christopher. We heard stories about how the town was a "company town" with company stores and the mine owners kept people living on credit to stores when the mines were closed seasonally. When they were open, the miners would struggle to pay down their debt. The story goes that there was only one guarded road in and out of the town and no one could leave if you owed money to the company store. According to oral history, James Riva planed his "great escape" from Christopher by growing
potatoes for a store keeper he had befriended thus allowing him to build up a nest egg to send his oldest son north to work in a factory. That son, John D. Riva---so the story goes---was able to accumulate enough money up north to move the rest of the family out of the coal mining community up to Michigan.

Franklin County Miners, 1920

Years ago, Peter Riva gave a taped interview where he talked about his father, James Riva. This is what he said: "My dad worked in the coal mines a lot of years and he was stooped over quite a bit 'cause he worked in the mines where you had to be stooped over. In the mines my dad wore white pants. Figure that one out! They were special heavy canvas bib overalls. They were tough to wear, but besides that, they didn't want no color in them 'cause they'd get poisoned from the dye on the skin. They changed them overalls once a week."

Family folklore also says that James picked and loaded coal for eighty-two cents a ton, and he was almost buried in a cave-in. I've tried to match up cave-in accidents from 1890 through 1930 with the towns that James lived without much success---not all the cave-in accidents are documented on-line at this point in time. One of the worse coal mine accident in history, however, took place near-by where he worked in northern Illinois in 1909. 259 men and boys out of the 481 who worked in the mine died. There is an interesting article about that Cherry accident here. It gives a good description of what it was like to be down in the mines during that time frame.

Another mine accident happened in Christopher just three years before the Riva's moved there and 18 men were trapped in Old Ben. You can read the newspaper account here. There was a second mine accident that occurred in Christopher in the 1920s and that may have been the one our grandfather was involved in but other than the date, I've found no on-line mention of that accident.

Click to enlarge

One of the most interesting articles I've found that gives a good flavor of coal mining in the 1920s is about the Herrin Massacre. It was a time in history when The United Mine Workers was first organizing and striking and many times they came face-to-face with strike breakers hired by the companies. That bloody day of the Herrin Massacre many people were killed. There is no proof that our ancestor was involved in any of the sit-downs except a vague memory of a story I heard in my childhood about a mine owner who had a machine gun aimed at sit-down strikers who refused to go down in the mine. But James lived in the same county when and where the United Mine Workers were forming, so the bad working conditions and low wages reported in the Herrin article would have applied to him as well as those directly involved in the massacre. J. Riva ©2008

The Riva Family, circa 1920s
Maggie, James/Giacomo, John and Peter


Reference for the Census:
Year: 1920 State: Illinois County: Franklin ED: 43 Page No: 026
Reel No: T625-365 Division: Tyrone Township SD: 17 Sheet No: 37B; 226A
Incorporated Place: Snider Addition to Christopher Illinois (lined out) Ward: X Institution: X
Enumerated on: January 14th, 1920 by: Scott McGlasson
Transcribed by Delores Wolos for USGenWeb,
http://www.usgwcensus.org/. Copyright: 2006

1920 Federal Census Franklin County, Illinois (ED 43: File 9 of 34)

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