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Ancestor Story Of My Great-Grandparents In The Italian Alps
The Story of Angela Grassi and Giuseppe Forelli, and the American Family They Never Meant to Create
They were born just 30 miles apart in the misty valleys of Bergamo province, but they came from entirely different worlds. She was the daughter of a family in Schilpario — a literate, proud Alpine village with its own secret dialect. He was the son of a man abandoned as an infant, raised in poverty on the rocky hillsides of Mologno. They never would have met in Italy. But in Brooklyn, they did.
This is the ancestor story of my great-grandparents — two survivors of loss, tradition, and impossible odds — who found each other in America, built a new family, and unknowingly set the stage for my return over a century later. In 2025, I traveled back to their villages to walk the same narrow paths, touch the stone walls of their homes, swim in their lakes, and finally bring their story full circle.
Angela Grassi: A Life Between Two Worlds
Angela Grassi was born in 1867 in Schilpario, a mountain village in the upper reaches of Bergamo province where survival depended on a family’s strength — in body, reputation, and property. She came into the world with all three.
Her maternal grandparents, Lucia Agoni and Angelo Mai, appear in parish records as possidenti — landowners. In 19th-century Schilpario, this meant more than just holding property: it meant social standing, influence, and security in a place where many survived by tenant farming, seasonal work, or emigrating for wages. Her mother, Violante Mai, inherited that position, and her father, Francesco Grassi, came from a respected benestante family — comfortably above peasant status.
Growing up, Angela likely attended school through third grade, learned to read and write in Italian, and helped with the weaving, cheese-making, and hay harvests that sustained her family. Even for possidenti, daily life in the Val di Scalve was demanding — livestock to feed through long winters, hay cut by hand in steep meadows, barley and rye harvested, potatoes stored, linens spun and sewn at home.
📜 From the Archives — What Possidenti Meant
In 2025, I found the marriage record of Lucia Agoni and Angelo Mai in the parish registers of S. Antonio. In the column for social status, the priest had written possidenti. It was more than a label — it was the foundation of Angela’s early life.
🍽️ What Angela Ate in Schilpario
With no corn grown at that altitude, polenta was rare. The table was set with barley and rye bread, potatoes, cheese from cows and goats, and, after a winter pig slaughter, cured pork to last until spring. Summer meant foraged berries, sometimes preserved as jam or dried. Every bite was the product of planning and labor.
Angela’s mother died when she was just one. Raised by her father, she likely shouldered more responsibility than most girls her age. By her early twenties she married Giovanni Spada, another Schilpario native, and had a son, Pietro. But tragedy struck again — Giovanni died soon after Pietro’s birth, leaving her a young widow.
Angela as a Young Widow
In a place like Schilpario, widowhood could be as precarious as poverty. Angela still had her good name and her possidenti legacy, but without a husband, the ground beneath her feet was less solid.
Her days began before dawn, winter or summer: milking cows, carrying water, cutting hay in steep meadows, preserving food for winter. Pietro might be bundled in a cradle near the hearth while she kneaded rye bread or hung cheese to cure. Summer meant berries in the forests; winter meant endless mending and spinning wool by the fire.
A widow’s future wasn’t hers alone to decide. The parish priest, her father, and perhaps uncles or brothers would weigh her prospects — remarriage, remaining in her father’s house, or, rarely, entering religious life. Land could not pass easily to her hands, and Pietro, without a paternal family in the village, had no automatic claim either.
🧭 When a Good Name Isn’t Enough
Family standing could open doors — but it couldn’t replace a husband’s role in securing property and livelihood. With no mother and no husband, Angela’s support network narrowed to her father Francesco.
It’s possible the decision to leave was his as much as hers. A widower in his fifties, with a daughter and grandson to consider, Francesco might have seen America as a way to secure the family’s future…
Leaving Schilpario was a calculated risk — trading centuries of rootedness for a gamble in a country neither of them had seen. By around 1890, Angela and Francesco boarded a ship for America, leaving behind land, influence, and the only world they had ever known.
🧺 Far Filanda: Spinning Stories by Firelight
On long winter nights, peasant families gathered in the stable — the warmest room in the house. There, women spun flax into linen and men mended tools while children listened to songs and stories passed down for generations. This tradition, called far filanda, was both survival and culture — an inheritance of work and memory.
Giuseppe Forelli: The Bracciante’s Son
Giuseppe Forelli was born in 1863 in Mologno, a small hillside hamlet in Val Cavallina. His father, Luigi Forelli, had entered the world under far bleaker circumstances — abandoned as a newborn at the Bergamo Hospital, left with only a first name on a scrap of paper. His surname was given by the priests. Raised in foster homes and by villagers, Luigi knew what it meant to survive without family roots.
By the time Giuseppe was born, Luigi had built something resembling stability. He had married Anna Maria Forchini, a farmer’s daughter born at home in a stone farmhouse. Together, they worked the land as tenant farmers, coaxing crops from rocky fields and keeping a few animals to get through the winters.
Giuseppe was about four when his mother died. His father remarried — to Cecilia Decorosi, another abandoned child — but security was always fragile. Tenant farmers could be moved off the land if a better offer came along or a harvest failed.
As a young man, Giuseppe joined his father in day labor. A bracciante’s life meant walking from farm to farm, taking whatever work was offered: cutting hay, mending stone walls, digging drainage ditches, hauling timber. Pay came in coins, bread, or not at all if the weather turned.
When Luigi died in 1881, Giuseppe was just eighteen. Without his father’s work connections, the path ahead narrowed. By 1888, with few prospects in Mologno and no land to anchor him, he left for America with little more than the muscle in his arms, the dialect in his mouth, and the will to survive.
📌 Foundlings in 19th-Century Italy
In the 1800s, thousands of infants in Italy were abandoned through la ruota — the foundling wheel. A wooden drum built into the wall of a church or hospital, it allowed desperate parents to place a baby inside and rotate it into the safety of the building, often anonymously.
Most foundlings were given new surnames — often referencing their circumstance (Esposito, meaning “placed outside,” or Innocenti, meaning “innocent”). They were baptized, raised in institutions or by foster families, and often apprenticed into manual labor. Few ever knew their parents or true origins.
🪓 A Day in Giuseppe’s Young Life
- Rise before dawn
- Haul wood, dig ditches, cut hay
- Break for polenta & onions
- Work until dark, paid in coins or bread
- Sleep on straw by a fading fire; repeat
When Mologno Met Schilpario
By the time Angela and Giuseppe met in Brooklyn, each had already survived enough grief to last a lifetime. Angela had arrived with her father and three-year-old son Pietro around 1890, leaving behind both the safety and the scrutiny of Schilpario. Giuseppe had landed two years earlier, in 1888, after losing his mother, his father, and his brother.
📌 Work in Brooklyn’s Italian Enclaves, 1890s
Men: dock laborer, stonecutter, sewer digger, cart driver, ice delivery
Women: washerwoman, seamstress, midwife, home laundress
Most were paid by the day or per piece. No benefits, no protections. If you were injured, you didn’t work. If you didn’t work, you didn’t eat.
It’s not hard to imagine how they found each other: two Italian speakers in a crowded tenement neighborhood, maybe introduced by someone from the old country. Maybe Giuseppe met Francesco first — two working men sharing news of Bergamo in a language that felt like home. Maybe Pietro tugged on Giuseppe’s pant leg before Angela ever spoke to him.
Angela saw something in Giuseppe worth building on. He had no land, no pedigree — but he had grit. And he accepted her son, Pietro, as his own. They married in 1893 in Hoboken, New Jersey. It wasn’t a fairy tale — but it was a second chance.
The Second Family
Together, Angela and Giuseppe built a new family in Brooklyn — one born not of land or lineage, but of shared survival and stubborn hope. Over the next decade, in addition to Angela’s son Pietro Spada, they had five more children:
- Luigi (1894)
- Anna (1896)
- Francesco (my grandfather, 1902)
- Lena (1901)
- Giovanni (1905, who died in infancy).
Life was far from easy. Italian immigrant families in Brooklyn typically lived in crowded tenements, where several families shared a bathroom, and laundry lines crisscrossed narrow airshafts. Work was long, wages low, and children worked as soon as they could contribute. But there was joy, too — children’s laughter echoing off brick walls, Pietro helping with his younger siblings, Angela once again at the center of a household.
🏚️ Why Immigrant Children Ended Up in Orphanages
Orphanages weren’t always for orphans. Widowed parents — especially fathers — often placed children there temporarily until they could bring them home again.
Angela died in 1906 at just 39, likely from kidney disease. Her death came only four years after my grandfather Francesco was born. Giuseppe — now going by Joseph — placed Francesco and Lena in an orphanage for a time, likely out of desperation. When Joseph remarried, he eventually reclaimed his children. Whether this felt like healing or just another adjustment, we can’t know. But early separations leave echoes — and they ripple across generations.
“Felicità”: My 2025 Return to the Land of Angela and Giuseppe
I had been searching for my great-grandparents’ Italian roots for as long as I could remember, always chasing the Forelli line. For decades, I followed half-formed hunches, combed through obscure census records, and chased family stories that went nowhere — until one breakthrough changed everything: stop looking for Giuseppe, and start looking for Angela.
That shift opened the door. I discovered that Peter Spada (a name I had seen on the census but didn’t know who he was) was Angela’s son from a previous marriage. I typed his name into Portale Antenati and he had his own record showing his birthplace as Schilpario.
That meant Angela was also from Schilpario, and surely Giuseppe had to be from nearby. Once I started looking in the Bergamo province, I quickly found Luigi Forelli. I still couldn’t find Giuseppe, but Luigi had to be his father. Luigi Forelli showed up frequently in the records and he was always marked esposito — abandoned at birth.
That’s when it hit me: I have no Forelli ancestors in Italy. The name ends with Luigi, a surname handed to him by strangers. No wonder I could never trace my Forelli family.
The door on my last name slammed shut just as another swung wide open. In contrast to Forelli, my great-grandmother’s family names — Grassi, Mai, Spada, Agoni — were and are everywhere in Schilpario, shared by what felt like half the town.
I made a decision right then: I had to go. I had to see my ancestral homeland with my own eyes. I organized an ancestry tour with the genealogist that researched Luigi Forelli’s early years in foster care and got advice from Italea Lombardia.
🎙️ The Italea Lombardia Podcast Interview
During my trip, I was interviewed for a podcast by Italea Lombardia, sitting on the Venetian walls of Bergamo near Porta San Giacomo.
Beatrice asked: “If you had to describe this journey with one word, what would it be?”
I didn’t even hesitate:
“Felicità.” Happiness. Wholeness. That immense joy when you feel home in a place you’ve been searching for your whole life.
In July 2025, I went on an ancestry tour and walked the streets of Bergamo, speaking fluent Italian—a language I’d fallen in love with at age 18 and dedicated my life to learning. I stood on the cobblestones of Angela’s village in Schilpario and saw the peaks she saw. I found the house where Luigi lived as a foster child and his last residence in Mologno. I touched the baptismal font where Giuseppe began his life.
There is no DNA test, no record scan, no ship manifest that compares to being there — the wind in the pines, the smell of stone and woodsmoke, the uncanny sense of being home in a place your ancestors had to leave.
Angela and Giuseppe didn’t leave behind castles or heirlooms. They left resilience. They left stories that almost disappeared. They left me. And in 2025, I came back to say thank you.
🌿 Ready to Start Tracing Your Own Story?
If this story moved something in you — you don’t need a passport or a degree in Italian to begin. You just need curiosity, a little patience, and the willingness to follow breadcrumbs through history and heartache. Start with:
- 📷 An old photo
- 📜 A birth or death certificate
- 📖 A name scribbled in a Bible
- 💭 Or a feeling you can’t explain
The past is never as far away as it seems.
📌 Tools That Helped Me Write This Ancestral Story
This journey didn’t happen in a vacuum. I used a mix of online tools, language skills, and expert help to bring the story to life:
- FamilySearch.org
- Portale Antenati
- The Statue Of Liberty
- MyHeritage & Ancestry
- Ancestral prompts for ChatGPT from Carole McCulloch
- Years of studying Italian
- A tour with a genealogist specializing in Northern Italy
- Tour of the Museo Etnografico in Schilpario
- Conversations with Italea Lombardia
🕵️♀️ Research is detective work. Ancestral storytelling is the reward.
Read More Of My Best Genealogy Tips and Stories:
- How To Start Finding Your Italian Roots From Home
- How To Use Portale Antenati To Find Your Missing Family Member
- Search For Giuseppe – My Lifelong Quest To Find The Italian Birthplace of My Great-Grandfather
- Finding Angela – My Italian Genealogy Research Reveals An Amazing Discovery
- Is Hiring A Genealogist Worth It In Italy?
- Ancestry Trip Anxiety: My Emotions Before My Italy Trip
- Ancestry Tours In Italy: What To Expect
