About my great-grandmother’s family, the Forners of Monfumo and Castelcucco in the province of Treviso, I knew that two sisters had emigrated to Brazil in 1927, aboard the Principessa Mafalda. About an older brother, Pietro, I knew only a year of death, 1916, and what a cousin wrote to me from Italy: “he died in the United States in an accident at work in a mine, but I don’t know what year”.
No one on this side of the ocean knew more. Four documents, found in three countries, tell the rest.
The Chicago manifest, 1913
The Ellis Island passenger database holds the list of the French steamship Chicago, which sailed from Le Havre on 14 June 1913 and reached New York ten days later. On sheet 39 is Pietro Forner, twenty-four, last permanent residence Castelcucco. As his nearest relative left behind in Italy he names his father: Mr. Forner Vincenzo, at Castelcucco – Treviso.
The second page of the same manifest gives the rest: five feet four, fair hair, passage paid by himself, twenty-five dollars in his pocket. And a destination that was not the United States at all: Kamloops, British Columbia, Canada, where a friend, Bernardi Pietro, was waiting. On the line above, the same friend is the contact for another man from the area, from Monfumo. It was not family pulling him across. It was a network of neighbours.
He did not sail from Genoa, as his sisters would fourteen years later. He left through France.
The Minister of Mines report, 1916
In 1913 a railway was being built through a valley north of Kamloops, and he may have come to work in a construction camp. I have no record of it. The next record is three years later, and from somewhere else: Nanaimo, on Vancouver Island, the largest coalfield in British Columbia.
The province’s Annual Report of the Minister of Mines for 1916 prints, on page K 510, the table of accidents in the coast collieries. Entry 42:
Nanaimo (W.F.C.) — Nov. 25 — Pietro Forner — Brusher — Left lung crushed by fall of rock; fatal.
W.F.C. is the Western Fuel Company, which ran the mine. A brusher cut away rock from the roof or floor of a tunnel to make room for the cars and the men — the job most exposed to roof falls in the whole mine. Pietro was twenty-seven.
Two days later the coroner held an inquest, recorded in the British Columbia archives index.
The estate, 1919
The last record is from June 1919. Because he died with no one in the province, his estate was handled by the Official Administrator, and the sworn statement lists everything he left: $75.33 in unpaid wages and $152.00 in the bank. Total, $227.33. Sole heir: Vincenzo Forner, Father, Castelcucco, Italy.
He had arrived with twenty-five dollars. Two and a half years after his death, some of his wages were still unpaid.
What the family remembered
The cousin who wrote to me from Italy is the grandson of another of Pietro’s brothers. He got the country wrong and the mine and the accident right. And he was not that far off: Pietro did pass through the United States, through Ellis Island, on his way to Canada. For those who stayed in the Veneto, it was all America.
The year 1916 also explains a silence. Pietro is not in the Albo d’Oro, Italy’s roll of the dead of the First World War — because Italy entered the war in May 1915, when he had already been across the ocean for almost two years.
Two brothers
Thirty years later, on 22 January 1947, the brother who stayed, Sante Forner, was fatally injured in a lignite mine near home, in the hills around Asolo. A local history of the mine gives the cause: caduta di un masso, a falling rock, while the roof of a tunnel was being shored up. The other falling rock is an ocean and thirty years away.
If you are looking for an ancestor in Canada
- The Ellis Island database (Statue of Liberty – Ellis Island Foundation) shows the manifest image. Always open the second page: that is where the destination, who paid the passage and who was waiting for the immigrant are recorded.
- The annual reports of British Columbia’s Minister of Mines are digitized by the BC Geological Survey and the University of British Columbia Library, and the Nanaimo Archives keeps a database of mine deaths and accidents.
- The BC Archives have public indexes of deaths, inquests and probate.
For the Italian side of the search: Tracing your ancestors in the province of Treviso, Italy.
This note is part of the research for the book Terceira Classe (Third Class), about Italian emigration and the sinking of the Principessa Mafalda in 1927 — the ship that carried Pietro’s two sisters to Brazil.