Money For America

As a child, my grandmother and I enjoyed talking about the past. I tended to either ask the same questions again and again or the answers swam in a pool of limited information. I always wanted to know about her parents. In retrospect, she did not say too much, but her playful story telling style never made repetition an issue. About Corippo and my great grandfather Bartolomeo's life there, she would say that it was a beautiful but very small mountain village and that it was difficult to raise a family there. This is why he wanted to come to America. I asked if it was expensive to come to America. She said that for the time, it was hard to save money. To earn money for America, Bartolomeo Arcotti found work on the St. Gotthard's Tunnel or Pass I think she called it. She said that Bartolomeo worked very hard and was proud of this work. He felt that in a small way he was doing his bit to honor the country he loved and was soon to leave. He worked for his past and our future, she said.

Here is an article about the St. Gotthard Tunnel from Harper's Magazine-June to November 1878 well before my ancestor work on it, but this is the sort of information he might have read, in Italian.

This is a long article and i am not sure how this will appear on the blog.