Ninety-nine years
On 25 October 1927 the Principessa Mafalda sank off the coast of Bahia with 1,259 people on board, most of them emigrants on their way to America. To remember that night and the lives it marked.
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Journal
What turns up in the archive while the book is being written: documents, newspapers from 1927, questions still open.
The Principessa Mafalda in 3D
A reconstruction of the ship to turn, open and walk through, built from a Lloyd Italiano postcard, with the names of the victims drifting in the background.
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Tracing your ancestors in the province of Treviso, Italy
Monfumo, Castelcucco, Cavaso del Tomba, Maser, Asolo. What is online, what is not, and how to request records from an Italian comune without losing the details that matter.
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Pietro Forner, from Castelcucco to Ellis Island and the Nanaimo coal mines
In 1913 a twenty-four-year-old left the foothills of Monte Grappa, in Italy, for Canada. Three years later a rock fell from the roof of a coal mine. Four documents tell the rest.
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Was your ancestor on the Principessa Mafalda? Where to look
There is no complete official list of who was on board in October 1927. But the records are scattered across three countries, and a family can be found in them. This is the route I took.
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The plaque in Genoa
At the Galata Museo del Mare, a plaque from 2012 remembers the shipwreck and says what Italy kept quiet for decades.
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P. Mafalda, in the steamer column
Six days after the shipwreck, the register of the Hospedaria do Brás wrote down the name of a ship that was already at the bottom of the sea.
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