During the 1880s and continuing through the first two decades of the 20th Century, close to fifteen million people immigrated into the United States. Named The Great Arrival, the mass immigration recorded the highest numbers coming from countries in Europe. They came for different reasons—some to make a better life in a new home, some to escape a bad situation, politically or religiously, and some to work for a short time to send money to families with the intention to return to their home countries. This last group was labeled “birds of passage.”
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| Arriving at Ellis Island on SS Patricia-1906. Getty Images |
The growing industrialization in America created a demand or workers to operate the machines in factories and mills. Foreigners struggling with depleted soil on farms or limited job potential in crowded cities saw the United States as a golden opportunity. Many immigrated with the intention of returning but when they discovered the opportunities so promising, they, instead, worked hard and saved until they could pay for their families to join them.
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| The intake process at Ellis Island-Getty Images |
Records at Ellis Island don’t indicate that intake workers asked if people intended to stay permanently. And the estimate for those who returned after a few years in America and remained in their original country ranges between thirty and fifty percent. People diving into their family’s ancestry have discovered ancestors who made multiple trips between America and their home countries.
About two million of these immigrants originated in Italy. Although the vast majority of these “birds of passage” were young men, women’s names appear on the ship manifest lists, too. Especially in situation where the woman traveling alone was joining relatives already in the US. Learning those facts sparked my idea for my heroine’s backstory for my story titled Gianna’s Wedding Dilemma.
Blurb
Tired of the limited chances to meet eligible men, governess Gianna Rafaello turns to a matchmaker for help. After reviewing the profiles of three men, Gianna starts a correspondence with a businessman, Blake Wymer, in Pueblo, Colorado. Within a few weeks, she recognizes their life goals are aligned and accepts his request to travel to meet in person. Gianna has always wanted to live in a small town, and everything seems rosy…until she meets his disapproving mother.
As the oldest Wymer sibling, Blake inherited the family’s furniture store upon his father’s death three years earlier. Thinking he was letting her work out her grief, he allowed his mother, Elfrida, to continue making the company decisions. But he and his brother, Axton, want to modernize, and Mother resists. She is also dead-set on Blake being married by year’s end and invites single women to supper. Without revealing his plans, Blake is smitten with a woman he’s been corresponding with and has invited her to town.
Gianna arrives, and the two feel destined to be together. As expected, Elfrida is livid. Can Blake stand up to his mother for the first time in his life to save this budding love?
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