To paraphrase Golden Girl Sophia Petrillo, “Picture It. Marquette Michigan, 1933.”Sophia was known for her sharp wit and being able to relate all kinds of situations back to her girl hood experiences in Italy.So she’s the perfect character to introduce you to my Italian (or Austrian,depending on which country controlled their hometown border at the time) Great-Grand-Uncle, Gaudenzio Daprá. He was the brother of my Great-Grandfather, Romano, and was born December 1875 at Tyrol. In 1920, he followed his older brother to America on the S.S. Gothland, which arrived in New York in late November.By the end of 1922, Gaudenzio decided he liked America enough to make it his permanent home and he followed, yet again, in his brothers’ footsteps, filing a Declaration of Intention with the Federal government, which began the process of becoming a Naturalized United States citizen. Renouncing your citizenship to your country of birth and adopting a new country was not to be taken lightly, and the process was time-consuming and somewhat laborious. This meant that individuals who went through it were certain it was what they wanted for the remainder of their lives.But as it turns out, maybe not all of them..
I’ve been slowly chipping away at making sure I have my genealogical ducks in a row, locating documentation that supports – in some cases refutes – information I’d been told about my family tree. Gaudenzio is found on a passenger list, traveling on the SS Roma to New York in 1926, and I’ve had this record in my files for a while now. But I’d never noticed before that Gaudenzio was listed as a naturalized citizen – he was even traveling with a passport! After some digging, I learned that Gaudenzio was naturalized in 1926 at Marquette, Michigan and that those naturalization records were held at the Library at Michigan State University. The staff there was extremely helpful and sent me copies of Gaudenzio’s naturalization file, which included the standard documents, certificate of arrival, declaration of intention and petition for naturalization, all signed, sealed and approved. As I read, gleaning all kinds of great information about Gaudenzio and his family, a scrawled note on the petition brought me to a complete and total halt. “Cancelled by US District Court Northern Division on October 10, 1933.” Wait. WHAT??
In preparation of telling his story, I decided to pull Gaudenzio’s 1920 passenger list, which was referenced in the “Certificate of Arrival” which stated he arrived at Ellis Island on 30 November on the SS Gothland. Conveniently, Ancestry has a large collection of New York passenger lists, and it includes the manifest of the SS Gothland. Unfortunately, the automatic strategy of “enter a name and find the indexed record” failed miserably to yield a result. So I browsed through the images, searching – in vain – for Gaudenzio. I knew there was something wrong, so I returned to the index and got creative. I asked Ancestry to give me a list of all the passengers on the SS Gothland manifest who were born in or around 1875, and one match stood out from the rest. Guiseppe Datros, an Italian, who boarded at Cherboug, France. Pulling up the correct page revealed that Guiseppe definitely wasn’t who I was looking for… but just two rows below him, there it was: the name of Gaudenzio Dapra, which had been indexed as Gandenmio Lapra. Everything else about this man’s information lines up perfectly with what we know of Gaudenzio – age 46, from Preghana, married to Adele, and heading to Michigan. Just goes to show that relying on indexes along can leave big gaps in your research.
But back to that canceled Naturalization. Becoming a United States citizen is not an easy task and revoking that citizenship takes an awful lot of work, too, so it’s not done on a whim. I called the University and asked them if they had these additional records, but they didn’t. After some more digging, I learned that the records were probably held by the National Archives at Chicago, and they were able to confirm they had them. Minor problem, I live in California. The staff at NARA were happy to assist me, though, and (for a reasonable fee), sent me photocopies of the file. While I stalked the mailman for my packet, my brain churned, trying to come up with what on earth he could have done to warrant the courts revoking his citizenship? Did he get into some kind of trouble? Had I found yet another black sheep ancestor? It only took about three weeks to get the copies of the file… but it felt like months.
Finally, there it was. A yellow legal-sized envelope with the return address of NARA Chicago, Illinois. “Case Number 769, United States of American, petitioners, vs Gaudenzio Dapra, Defendant.” The packet included quite a number of receipts of costs incurred trying to track down Gaudenzio, filing fees, corrections, letters confirming that he was naturalized in 1926… all very uninteresting, drudge details of the mechanics of revoking
Of course… now I’m wondering what changed his mind!
