My paternal grandparents and their siblings and cousins all emigrated from Sicily circa 1895-1910 and settled in New York City.
My grandfather was Vincenzo (Vincent) MANFREDI, born September 12, 1886; his father, a Mr. MANFREDI, had a produce shop in the province of Enna, Sicily.
My father's mother (my grandmother) was Angelina MARINO MANFREDI born July 7, 1893 in Sicily.
Angelina MARINO'S mother was Maria GIANGRASSO MARINO and her father was Giovanni (John) MARINO. Giovanni MARINO had been a mounted policeman and a detective while a young man in Sicily. He wanted to retire and open a produce shop in Castellamare del Golfo, Sicily, like his three brothers, but for some "political" reason, he was denied a license, so he emigrated to Massachusetts circa 1895 - 1897 with his wife Maria and daughters Angelina and Francesca. (Castelammare del Golfo was the site of a family fued that had repercussions in America when the so-called Castellamarese War broke out among Sicilian immigrants who were members of the Mafia; it is not unlikely that members of my family were peripherally involved in these events, as detailed below.)
Angelina first arrived in the United States as a little child. She lived in Massachusetts for a while, but was sent back to Sicily to study in a convent during her teen years and only returned to America later. She met Vincenzo MANFREDI in New York City, circa 1911. For a time she earned her living by making paper flowers. She was always very skilled with her hands and had an artistic sensibility.
Vincenzo and Angelina MANFREDI had three children:
I do not know the name of their first child, a boy who died in infancy. He may have been named Francesco, because this was a common name in the family and, strangely enough, it was the middle name given to BOTH of Angelina's and Vincenzo's next two boys. According to family history, this first child had died from catching a cold at his baptism, in New York City during the winter. This would probably have been in late 1911 or early 1912.
My father Joseph MANFREDI was born on October 3, 1913. His birth name was Giuseppe Francesco MANFREDI. He was born at home in the "Little Italy" area of New York City, at 113 West Houston Street, NYC, NY, where he was delivered by a midwife, not a doctor. I know he was Vincenzo and Angelina's second child, for his birth certificate lists one previous child, deceased.
My grandfather Vincenzo was 27 when Giuseppe was born. Vincenzo's occupation was listed as "laborer" at the time of Giuseppe's birth. In the 1940s and 1950s, i knew him by his Americanized name, Vincent MANFREDI, and he was an inventor at that time, having developed locks and burglar alarms, according to family history. Vincent never held a regular job, according to older family members, and was said to have suffered from, but never succumbed to tuberculosis. He was often gone on mysterious trips, and there is some reason to think that he was related to Alfredo Manfredi -- known in the Mafia as "Al Mineo" -- and that his burglar alarm company was somehow connected with the "protection racket" run by the Mafia in New York.
My grandmother Angelina was 22 when Giuseppe was born, although on his birth certificate her age is given as 21. Angelina was a housewife at that time, but i knew her, in the 1940s and 1950s, as a registered nurse who lived in Saint Petersburg, Florida, where she cared for geriatric patients after separating from, but never divorcing, Vincent. She also Americanized her name, for her death certificate lists her as Angela MANFREDI, not Angelina MANFREDI. I knew her both as Angela and Angelina, depending on who was talking to her or about her at the time.
Vincenzo and Angelina also had a third son, my uncle John, whose birth name was Giovanni Francesco MANFREDI. He was born on January 6, 1917.
During my father's high school years, the family lived briefly in New Jersey, but they soon returned to Manhattan. My grandmother's Social Security card was issued in New Jersey, so this is where she was living when she first got a job outside of the household -- but both my father and my uncle John got their Social Security cards issued in New York, so the family had returned to Manhattan by the time they were old enough to work.
I am the only grandchild of Vincenzo and Angelina.
Sometime between 1915 and 1920, Angelina's sister, Francesca (Frances) MARINO, who had first come to Massachusetts as a child. was living in New York City, and she married a man named Francesco (Frank) PERCOCO, formerly of Messina, Sicily.
My father's aunt Francesca (Frances) MARINO PERCOCO and her husband Francesco (Frank) PERCOCO had 4 children: Giuseppe (Joseph) PERCOCO, Francesco (Frank) PERCOCO Jr., Virginia PERCOCO, and Maria PERCOCO. All the PERCOCO children -- my father's cousins -- were born before 1920. All married and had children. His cousin Maria PERCOCO married an African American man during the late 1930s or early 1940s and moved from Manhattan to Queens, New York.
At some point before 1910, a man named Frank MARINO -- who was my grandmother Angelina's uncle or cousin (no one remembers now) -- also emigrated to New York City from Sicily. He would have been related to my grandmother through her father's MARINO family, not through her mother's GIANGRASSO family.
Around the same time, my grandfather Vincenzo's younger sister also came to NYC from Sicily; i do not know her name, but this "Miss MANFREDI" married my grandmother Angelina's relative Frank MARINO and they had a son, Giuseppe (Joseph) MARINO.
Vincenzo MANFREDI and his brother-in-law (and also probable cousin-in-law) Frank MARINO went into business together in the 1920s, manufacturing burglar alarms, which my grandfather had invented, according to family history.
In 1928, when my father was 15, Frank MARINO and Vincent MANFREDI had a falling out over the burglar alarm company that they co-owned. My grandfather never spoke to his sister again, because she took her husband's side in the dispute. The "excommunication" of the former "Miss MANFREDI" and Frank MARINO from the family was so complete that my father Joseph MANFREDI never saw his cousin Joseph MARINO again.
It may not be a coincidence that the great falling out among the family factions -- the MARINOS versus the MANFREDIS -- coincided with the beginnings of a violent gang war among Sicilian Mafia members in America. This event, known as the Castellammarese War, was primarily waged between families with roots in Castellammare del Golfo, Sicily. My grandmother's MARINO family was from Castellammare del Golfo, and my grandfather may have been related to Alfredo MANFREDI, a Mafia leader who was killed during the Castellammarese War. By the time i was born, none of my elders would talk about why the "burglar alarm company" debacle had destroyed so many family ties in 1928; it was long over and done with, and the fences were never mended,
Meanwhile, my grandfather's father, Mr. MANFREDI of Enna province, had remained in Sicily. After his first wife (my great grandmother) died, he remarried and had a third child, born circa 1920, who was called "The Little Uncle" or "The Little MANFREDI" because he was younger than my father but was his half-uncle. The Little Uncle never came to America, but Vincenzo sent money to help support him and his mother (Vincenzo's step-mother) after the elder Mr. MANFREDI died.
As my father Giuseppe MANFREDI adopted American ways, he chose to be known as Joey MANFREDI, Joe MANFREDI, Joseph MANFREDI or Joseph F. MANFREDI and, after reaching adulthood, by the nickname Fred MANFREDI. I knew him primarily as Fred MANFREDI. He and my mother Liselotte Fransiska ERLANGER MANFREDI were married in 1940. He was an abstract artist when i was a child, but also had a long career as a petroleum geologist and geological cartographer for Standard Oil of California.
My father studied painting at the Art Students League under George Bridgman and then took personal lessons from Beauford Delaney (1901-1979) [often misspelled Buford Delaney] and Joseph Delaney (1904-1991), a pair of African American brothers from Knoxville, Tennessee, who lived and worked in Greenwich Village. He paid for his lessons with the Delaney brothers by modelling for them; he had been a champion swimmer in high school and had a slender, athletic body. Under the tutelege of Beauford Delaney, my faher painted portraits; he eventually worked in the "easel section" of the WPA as an artist.
My father told me that Beauford Delaney, who was homosexual, was briefly in love with him. My mother told me that for a while my father had lived with Beauford. I have been asked by those interested in art history if they had an affair, but i do not know. My father never said they did, although my mother thought it was possible, given my father's inclination toward sexual experimentation in his youth.
Right before World War Two, my father went to Italy to paint, touring and living in the small hill towns of Tuscany and studying late Medieval art. While he was abroad, getting "in touch with the spirit of Dante," as he later put it, his lover and fiancee, an Italian-American woman whose name i only know as Catherine or Caterina, died suddenly of pneumonia. He was devastated by her death and returned home. He would later name me after her -- and i possess a portrait he made of her holding a red Anthirrium flower. He often painted these flowers, and used them as symbols of male sexuality.
Shortly after he returned home, my father met my mother, a Jewish woman who was a recent immigrant from Hitler's Germany. Around this time his work became progressively abstract, The painting shown here is one of my father's New York cityscapes. It was used on the cover of a brochure for a gallery showing by the Bombshell Artists' Group in 1942. It was also reproduced in a newspaper article about the group and its members, which appeared in the New York Times.
My father did not wish to bear arms against his fellow Italians during World War Two and he knew that by working in a defense plant he would be exempt from the draft, so at some point during the war, he and my mother moved to the San Francisco Bay Area, where he worked in a shipyard and made a series of wonderful semi-abstract paintings of shipyard workers and machinery, using the paints found in the shipyard itself -- rust-red primer, battleship grey, and signal yellow. These have all been lost, as far as i know, for although i kept them in a hidden crawl space in our attic, my mother found them and threw them out when i was in college.
Their marriage was tumultuous, with several separations, other lovers (on both sides), experiments at communal living and open relationships, and even one illegal abortion during the early 1940s, when it seemed that having a child would put further strain on their unhappy partnership. Eventually they settled down together long enough to have me, their only child: I was born Catherine Anna MANFREDI in San Francisco on May 12, 1947.
After the War, my father moved toward non-representationalism and total abstraction, often utilizing variations of shapes that were personally meaningful to him and that appeared over and over in his paintings, in various contexts. Among these shapes, which generally appeared in distorted or cut-and-reassembled form, one can often recognize the skeleton of a fish, a bird sitting on a wire, or a rounded shape with a hole in it, apparently derived from a naturally holed rock he had picked up on his travels -- and which he carried with him for decades. He also made many paintings with applied surfaces of sand as well as colour-fields of paint. These works are quite different than his early portraits and cityscapes. They are notable for the precision with which the fields and lines of paint were laid down. Many of them feature unusual "earthy" colour combinations, including chartreuse and deep forest green with stripes of bright cyan, ochre, and white. I remember him painting some of these when we briefly lived in Fresno, California, where my mother was attending college in 1951 - 1952.
We moved back to the Bay Area, to Berkeley, when i was about five years old, and my parents separated. They divorced around 1954 or so. He moved to Sacramento where he met and married his second wife, Rose Mary REED, then to Monterey Park in Southern California, then back to San Francisco, and next to Davis, a small town near Sacramento. I rarely saw my father after the divorce -- only once a year for two weeks during each summer's school vacation, until i left home, and after that not at all until we resumed contact at the behest of my daughter Althaea YRONWODE during the late 1980s.
The older my father got, the brighter the colours he used in his paitnings, until, toward the end of his life, he was working in an array of festive hues such as turquoise, cerulean, rose, white, peach, sienna, and yellow.
Even though he disdained representationalism in his later life, he enjoyed sketching rural California landscapes on paper with pastels and watercolour -- although he never kept these pieces around the studio and never painted such scenes on canvas.
My father's brother Giovanni MANFREDI, my uncle, was known by the Americanized name John MANFREDI or, in later life, when he was a beatnik, as Man Fredi or Man Freddy. John MANFREDI was also a talented artist, but his creativity was stunted because he was a heroin addict. He was incarcerated and institutionalized for drug abuse and petty theft fairly often during my childhood. He died on August 16th, 1962 in Norwalk, Los Angeles County, California from throat cancer, caused by smoking. He was only 53 years old. He had no children, to the best of my family's knowledge.
Vincenzo and Angelina lived well into their 80s. According to my mother, Angelina doted on my father, whom she called "Joey," and she insisted that my mother, a German Jew, learn to cook all of the family's favourite Sicilian dishes so that Joey would have something to eat. Angelina was a good cook and a good teacher, and my mother actually became a proficient Sicilian cook under her direction. When i was young, Angelina still would make paper flowers, as she had once done to earn her living, but just for fun, and she also created rabbit puppets out of linen napkins. She was sentimental and emotional, and she believed in -- and taught me -- various bits of Sicilian folk-magic.
Vincent was fairly distant. My father did not like him and I did not see him often. He and Angelina had separated by the time my parents got divorced. As i recall, Angelina enjoyed her new life as a nurse after they broke up. She liked the responsibility. Strangely, every few years, Vincent would come around and they'd get back together again for a few months. This went on all through their lives. I have no idea what their relationship was like to them. To an observer, it made little sense. Angelina lived in Florida for years, but eventually both she and Vincent relocated to California, where their sons lived.
Vincent died on January 15, 1974 in Long Beach, California, at the age of 87. Angela, who lived with my father Fred and his second wife Rose toward the end of her life, died on December 19th, 1976 in Davis, California. She was 83 years old.
Unbeknownst to my father, his name -- Joseph / Joe Manfredi -- was used by my writer friends at Marvel Comics as the legal name of a Sicilian Mafia boss character better known as the villain Silvermane. The homage was intentional, not a coincidence, and it has always given me a grin to know that my father is a Marvel villain.
Rose Mary REED, my step-mother, was a California native, born September 21, 1911 near Sacramento, California. Her mother's maiden name was Rose MATHER. I know little about the REED or MATHER families of Yolo County, California, except that Rose told me that part of the family had long ago moved west from Dixon, Illinois, perhaps during the 19th century. (She mentioned this to me one day when we were discussing politics; she strongly opposed California Governor and later United States President Ronald Reagan's social policies, and she said that it was odd that he was born in Dixon, IL, where part of her family came from.) Rose had no sisters, only brothers -- Hayward REED, Caleb REED, Ogden REED, and Marvin REED -- whom she helped raise, because she was the oldest child. The REED family had owned a very large pear orchard when Rose was girl. It was named Rose Orchard, after both her mother Rose MATHER REED and herself, but by the time i met her, in the mid 1950s, the land had been sold and she was a social worker with very progressive political views.
Here is some information on Rose REED's family, from a history of Yolo County and from contemporary obituaries. This material was transcribed for the web by Sandra Harris at cagenweb.com; i have amended the punctuation and spelling slightly and have added my own comments in [brackets].
Hayward REED listing in "History of Yolo County":Hayward REED [I], a prominent California orchardist, was born near Washington, Yolo County, on Feb 15, 1876. [This Hayward REED was my step-mother Rose's grandfather.] His parents were Charles W. and Abbie (JENKS) REED, natives of NY and IL. [This accords with what Rose told me about part of the family coming from Dixon, Illinois, in the 19th century].From obituary in Marysville Appeal Democrat:In 1851 Charles came to California via Panama, bringing with him 45 varieties of pear trees. After selecting the Bartlett as the type best adapted to this climate, he established a nursery at Washington, where he raised millions of trees which he sold to consumers in different parts of the Pacific coast. He set out what is known as the Reed orchard across the river from Sacramento. He died in 1896. His wife passed away in 1911 (Abbie B. REED died age 78 in Alameda, California, Feb 27 1911).
Their children were
Howard REED of Marysville
Rowena REED (wife of Professor DeMETER [note spelling deMATER below], who occupies the chair of German at the University of CA, Berkeley
Hayward REED [II] [This Hayward REED was my step-mother Rose's father.]Hayward [II] graduated from the Sacramento High schools in 1898. [He would presumably have been born circa 1880.] He was in the Third US Artillery, Battery L., and went to Manila on the 3rd expedition and served there 16 months. [This was in the Spanish-American war of 1898.]
In Sacramento, Sept 8 1907, Mr. REED married Miss Rose MATHER, who was a native of San Francisco. They had two children: George and Rose. [Note that the name George REED does not appear among the names of surviving children in the Marysville Appeal Democrat obituary for Hayward REED [II] below; George may have predeceased his father. Rose told me that when her father died, she was the oldest child, but she may have had an older brother who had died in childhood.]
He was very active in the building of the YMCA at Fifth and J Streets in Sacramento. He died at age 62 in Marysville on Feb 14 1938 [when my step-mother Rose was 27 years old].
Hayward REED [II] created the great New England orchards south of Marysville and the Dantoni orchards east of Marysville.From the Union article:He was survived by his wife, Rose, and children:
Rose REED [my step-mother]
Hayward REED [III]
Ogden REED
Caleb REED
Marvin REEDHe was the brother of Howard and Dudley REED of Sacramento, Charles Wesley REED of Chico, and Mrs. Rowena DeMATER [note spelling deMETER above] of Berkeley. [Note that Dudley REED and Charles Wesley REED, given here as brothers to Hayward Reed [II], do not appear in the list of surviving children of Hayward REED [I] above. I leave this mystery to REED family members to sort out.]
Mrs. George MATHER of Marysville is a relative by marriage and is assisting the family. [Presumably she was married to a brother of Rose MATHER REED named George MATHER.] Funeral arrangements by Hutchinson & Merz.
Remains were taken to the chapel in East Lawn, Sacramento, and Veterans of the Spanish War will have charge of the ceremonies. The body will be cremated.
Known as the "Pear King" -- home: Rose Orchard, Yolo County -- business address: Box 659 Sacramento CA.
Rose and my father had no children but had a very happy marriage. Rose died in Davis, California, of a stroke, on September 1, 1990. She was 78. Shortly thereafter, my father moved to Nogales, Arizona, to resume his old life as an abstract painter. He died there, at Holy Cross Hospital, on September 13, 1996 from prostate cancer. He was 82.
If you think you are related to me, please drop me a line. I would like to contact any family members to exchange photos and information. I have a few photos of the GIANGRASSO, MARINO, and MANFREDI families, but none of the PERCOCO family.
Summary:
Vincenzo Vincent MANFREDI -- my grandfather
09/12/1886 Enna Province Sicily - 01/15/1974 Long Beach, California
Angelina Angela MARINO MANFREDI -- my grandmother
07/27/1893 Sicily - 01/15/1974 Davis, California
[Francesco?] MANFREDI -- my uncle
?/?/1911-1912 New York City - ?/?/1911-1912 New York City
Giuseppe Francesco Joseph F. Fred MANFREDI -- my father
10/03/1913 New York City - 09/13/1996 Nogales, Arizona
Giovanni Francesco John MANFREDI -- my uncle
01/06/1917 New York City - 08/16/1962 Norwalk, California
Francesca Frances MARINO PERCOCO -- my great aunt
?/?/18?? Sicily - ?/?/19??
The Social Security Death Index web site lists 4 women named Francesca MARINO, but
my great aunt was more likely to have changed her name upon
marriage and thus to have died under the name Francesca PERCOCO.
Social Security lists a Francesca PERCOCO born 8/27/1910, who
died in November 1987 while touring Italy (her death place was
listed as the "American Consulate", a formality; her Social
Security card was issued in New York) -- however, she is about 15
years too young to be my great aunt. It is possible that "my"
Francesca MARINO PERCOCO never had a job outside the home, in
which case she would not have been issued a Social Security number. )
Francesco Frank PERCOCO -- my great uncle. Two men, both born in the 1890s and
both with S.S. cards issued in New York state, are given here,
with their places of death. However, both are about 5 or 10 years too
young to be good fits for being the father of the next entry:
12/24/1895 - 10/??/1979 (Staten Island, Richmond, NY)
12/16/1897 - 09/25/1987 (Flushing, Queens, NY)
Francesco Frank PERCOCO Jr. -- my father's cousin. Again, there
are several Frank PERCOCOs listed with the Social Security
administration, but the one with the best fit for date and place
to be my father's cousin is:
11/20/1911 - 07/15/1997 (Brooklyn, NY)
Giuseppe Joseph PERCOCO -- my father's cousin. Social Security lists 2 men with this name
of the right era whose S.S. numbers were issued in New York state:
03/10/1908 - 06/27/1989 (Woodside, Queens, NY)
06/11/1912 - 09/??/1973 (place of death not specified)
My guess is that the second one, a year older than my father, was his cousin.
Virginia PERCOCO -- my father's cousin. In the unlikely event
that Virginia did not change her name upon marriage, there is one
Virginia PERCOCO listed with the Social Security Administration.
Almost certainly NOT my father's cousin, she is, for the record:
03/26/1911 - 09/??/1986 (Naples, Italy -- not even in Sicily, you see!)
Maria PERCOCO -- my father's cousin. This Maria
PERCOCO should be fairly easy to distinguish from
others of the same birth name because her husband
was African-American, they had children, and they
lived in Queens. In the unlikely event that Maria
did not change her name upon marriage, Social
Security provides two women of the right era, one
of whom died in Queens, but since it is the custom
for women to change their names upon marriage,
neither of these is likely to be my father's
cousin:
09/15/1915 - 12/29/1995 (no place specified)
03/01/1918 - 04/22/1997 (Queens, NY)
Francesco Frank MARINO -- my grandmother's cousin (?)
and at the same time my father's uncle by marriage.
This name is very common. There are 296 men named
Frank MARINO listed with the Social Security Administration.
The one i am looking for, my grandmother's
relative (cousin?) who married my grandfather's younger sister,
would have been born in the 1880s or early 1890s and his S.S. card
-- if he had one -- would have been issued
in either Massachusetts or New York state. Here is one possible candidate, with place of death:
06/20/1892 - 09/??/1997 (Quincy, MA)
Giuseppe Joseph MARINO -- my father's cousin. A common name. This man would have been born in the 1910s, probably in New York. There are too many prospects to list even just of those born between 1911 and 1919.
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