Family history, something so close to the story of ourselves, can be a difficult and sobering endeavor for many communities. Often for queer people, the very act of living as ourselves has meant a kind of generational rupture which involves a retelling of personal history, a new sense of self. When we think about our “ancestry,” we often situate ourselves within our community: in a long history of activism, scholarship, and performance that has shaped the way we interact with the world today. We have chosen family and found family. We have community elders who hold our stories for us, who make room for us where our birth families couldn’t. “Family” is an expansive definition for queer people.
Still, I was curious about the people who brought our family—the Precopios—to America. Locating and accessing materials for this kind of family history research can be challenging, even more so when you’re trying to do that work from another country in the middle of a pandemic lockdown. Ancestry is a family history service that gives its users access to a number of digitized collections: federal and state census records, birth, marriage and death certificates, school and church histories, city directories, U.S. military records, and immigration collections. From my home in London, their Worldwide Membership option afforded me access to collections in the United States I wouldn’t be visiting in person any time soon. With Ancestry, and the knowledge of family history that had been passed down to me, however scant, I had a place to begin.
My family arrived in the United States during the great wave of twentieth-century European immigration, the height of which saw two million Italians arrive in the century’s first decade alone. My great-great grandfather Giuseppe was the first to arrive, with my great-great grandmother Philipa Malita coming a few years later. There are dozens of arrival records for Giuseppe Procopio/a in the latter part of that decade. Procopia/o is a common southern Italian surname, and my great-great grandfather most likely came from part of Calabria, the “toe” of Italy’s boot.
Map of Calabria from L’Italia geografica illustrata, Palmiro Premoli 1891. The British Library, via Wikimedia Commons.
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In every iteration of the federal and state census from 1920 – 1940, their birth and immigration years vary slightly, and their surname changes from Procopia to Procopio, which finally became Precopio in the next generation. My great-great-grandmother’s name changes from Philipa to Philippine, and then finally to an anglicized Phyllis. The use of “Ph” rather than a phonetic “F” is unusual for an Italian name, she might have changed it from Filippa, or a diminutive Filippina. Perhaps she stubbornly held onto some iteration of her birth name until she became Phyllis.