Almost every week someone writes to me with the same sentence: “my great-grandmother always said she came over on the Principessa Mafalda”. That is exactly how I started. My great-grandmother, Rosa Forner, was on board with a one-year-old son, and her sister, Maria Luigia, with four children. It took me years to prove it on paper. This is the shortcut I didn’t have.
First, what does not exist
The Principessa Mafalda sailed from Genoa on 11 October 1927 and sank on 25 October off the Abrolhos islands, on the southern coast of Bahia, Brazil. The Genoa embarkation list for that voyage has not been found — not by me, and not by any research I know of. If it still exists, it is in an Italian archive or in what is left of the papers of the shipping line, the Navigazione Generale Italiana.
There is no official list of the dead either. The most quoted figure, 314, is the company’s; other counts give 324. No government ever published the names.
So the search runs the other way: through the ports where the survivors came ashore.
Rio de Janeiro: the passenger lists at the Arquivo Nacional
Most of the survivors reached Rio aboard the Dutch freighter Alhena and the French liner Formosa. The immigrants were taken to the immigrant station on Ilha das Flores, and the immigration service drew up lists there.
They are held by Brazil’s national archive, the Arquivo Nacional, in the maritime police records, series Relações de Passageiros em Vapores — Porto do Rio de Janeiro, searchable through its online catalogue, SIAN. My family’s is the Alhena list of 28 October 1927, reference BR.AN.RIO.OL.0.RPV.PRJ.22463: fifty third-class immigrants, and under “port of origin”, instead of a port, the word Náufragos — shipwrecked. It gives each person’s name, age, marital status, occupation, literacy and destination.
Two tips that cost me months:
- Italian women are listed under their maiden names. My great-grandmother appears as Forner, not under her husband’s surname.
- Names were written down by ear. A girl baptized Gina is listed as Ginneta. Search for variants.
São Paulo: the register at the Museu da Imigração
Those bound for São Paulo state went on from Ilha das Flores to the immigrant hostel in the Brás district. A group of forty-three survivors arrived there by train on 31 October 1927.
The Museu da Imigração do Estado de São Paulo has the hostel’s admission registers digitized and searchable on its website. The survivors’ page is page 290 of Book 100, and in the column for the ship the clerk wrote P. Mafalda.
Searching by the ship’s name will not bring up that page. Search by surname, in every plausible spelling, and check the date of entry: 31 October and 1 November 1927.
The ship’s earlier lists, at Santos
The São Paulo state archive and the Museu da Imigração have digitized the Principessa Mafalda’s arrival lists at the port of Santos — but they stop in early 1924. They will not help with the 1927 voyage. They help a great deal if your ancestor came on the same ship on an earlier crossing: some third-class sheets even record how many trunks each person carried and how much money they declared.
Recife, Salvador and Buenos Aires
Not everyone went to Rio. The British freighter Rossetti landed twenty-seven people at Recife, and that city’s Diário da Manhã printed their names on 29 October 1927. The French liner Mosella took crew members to Salvador. And most of the passengers, who were bound for the River Plate, went on from Rio to Buenos Aires aboard the Duca degli Abruzzi on 1 November. For anyone who went on to Argentina, the place to look is the passenger search of CEMLA, the Centro de Estudios Migratorios Latinoamericanos.
The 1927 newspapers
The Hemeroteca Digital of Brazil’s National Library holds the Brazilian papers of those weeks, and several printed lists of survivors. São Paulo’s Diario Nacional published, on 29 October, the list of Alhena survivors supplied by the shipping line itself — and there the women appear under their husbands’ surnames, the opposite of the official lists. Search under both.
Reading the pages requires typing a code (CAPTCHA) at each session. It is slow, but it is free.
Lists compiled online
Two compilations are useful places to start, and neither says where its data came from:
- the blog listadodepasajeros.blogspot.com, kept in Spain by the great-grandson of a passenger, with a list of 1,187 names by class, separating survivors from victims. All seven members of my family are on it, in the right class;
- the mafaldasinking site (on Google Sites), with survivors’ accounts, the log of that afternoon’s radio messages and pages on individual families.
Treat both as leads, and confirm against the original record.
The list of 1,187 is now a search tool on this site: look up a name or surname. It also finds similar spellings and names written in Spanish, and if you find someone, you can tell the family story right there.
What about Ellis Island?
It won’t help for this voyage. The Principessa Mafalda sailed the South American route — Genoa, Barcelona, Brazil, Montevideo, Buenos Aires — and never called at New York. If your family went from the Veneto to North America instead, the Ellis Island manifests are where to look; that is where I found my grandmother’s uncle.
If you find someone
Write to me. Every family that turns up brings one more name out of the silence, and one family’s papers help read another’s. That is how, by matching two family trees, I found cousins I didn’t know I had. There is more on the ship and the night of the sinking on the P. Mafalda page, and on the Italian side of the search in 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 to Brazil and the sinking of the Principessa Mafalda in 1927. If your ancestor was on board, get in touch.