Who Knew Louie?

Certainly I didn’t.  He was my tall, gray-haired, elegantly smiling grandfather and he died when I was three.  I didn’t know much about him at all.  Apparently his daughters, my mother and her sister, didn’t really know his story either.  There’s always the legend—the story that makes good telling in every family…

                In this case, it was Louis (then Carlos Luigi) and his father Battista Rossi coming to America in 1906.  Louie (he only used Carlo Luigi once more that I know about).  Papa didn’t like it here, so he went back to Italy, leaving Louie with friends in Rockford to fend for himself.   (Imagine, the story went, being 12 and on your own in a foreign country.  I can hear my mom saying that more than once.)   Louie’s 1950 obit in the Rockford Register Star (information family supplied of course) said he had lived here 44 years.  Problem is, neither of those things proved to be true.

                Grandpa did come in 1906; he just didn’t stay.  He and Battista appear in Ellis Island records in 1906, going to Rockford.  Papa was a laborer, and Louis was in Rockford, according to annual city directories, through at least 1909.  He may have been in Rockford for the 1910 US Census, but that’s still a little questionable, though there is a Louis Rossi about age 19 boarding with Tom Fedeli and his family.   (The Fedelis, not so much Tom, but Andrea, Rosa, Arturo and Santina were a big part of my own family, but that’s another story—and some new leads to follow-up.)  Then a funny thing happens—Louis disappeared from US records.

                So, at some point after 1909, he also went back to Italy.  I know this because I have his 1915 Italian passport with all the details of his re-arrival in the US that year. I know this, because he reappears in Rockford City Directories, most often living with Andrea Fedeli and his family.

 Perhaps it was an artifact of growing up in the Depression that my mom and aunt never would have thought the family would have had enough money for anyone to come and go back and come back again.  But Louie did.  (And so did his father, who sometime before 1915 returned to join his brother-in-law in Rockford, making no mention of Louie still being there—again, another story for another time.)

                So, now I know Louie—at least a little bit.  And I have new questions about the story of his marriage in 1919 too.  That one had Grandma Rossi, orphaned at age three, coming to join Louie as an unknown, sight-unseen “correspondence bride” in 1919.  But, given the fact that a teen Louie went back to the little Italian village, that could be just another story too.   It’s certainly something I want to explore.