A Collective Family Tree

These are the Zeiglers, a typical American family: Theresa’s parents and grandparents emigrated from Italy to California by way of Colorado. Her husband Arthur’s great-grandparents both came from Germany, married in Pennsylvania and settled in Michigan. The Zeiglers’ three sons are native Californians.

Immigration is both an ongoing chapter in the story of America and a thread running through the family stories that have been posted on the Internet since the launch early this year of “My History Is America’s History,” a national millennium project.

“We feel like every American is a historian at heart,” says William R. Ferris, chairman of the National Endowment for the Humanities, which is sponsoring the project, and these family stories are “a microcosm of the history of our nation.”

It is a natural for the endowment, a federal agency that since its creation in 1965 has funded humanities programs including cataloging of presidential papers, preservation of historic newspapers, museum exhibits and projects encouraging the study of American traditions and cultures.

Among those who have posted their stories on “My History” is Theresa Zeigler, 70, of Rancho Santa Margarita, who, through the magic of the World Wide Web, has found a cousin in Illinois she knew nothing of, as well as “a whole folder full of people” with tenuous ties to her parents, the Pinamontis, or to their family home, Rallo, a northern Italian village that before World War I was under Austrian control.

Zeigler’s story is one of about 300 posted thus far on the endowment’s Web site (https://www.myhistory.org). She tells of growing up American as a child of parents from the “old country” who clung to old ways while embracing America. She writes, “I can remember . . . when a letter would come from Italy with a black border around the envelope. After opening it, my mama would be crying. After that would come days and months of Mama wearing black until a year was up. . . .”

Her papa, Carlo Pinamonti, she writes, came to America with his mother and two siblings in 1900, when he was 15. His father, Battista, had come over five years earlier to work in the Colorado coal mines. Father and son worked in the mines, eventually saving money enough to open a saloon in Radiant, Colo. Carlo married 17-year-old Josephina Valentini, who died a year later, having contracted blood poisoning after having an abscessed tooth pulled.

Mining camp life was hard. Wages were low, and living and working conditions miserable. Working only in the winter months, the mine laborers earned no more than $500 a year.

Josephina’s death led to a nine-year correspondence between Carlo and his sister-in-law Carlotta in Rallo, who had been only 5 when he’d left. In 1920, she came over to marry him. Zeigler doesn’t know whether it was an arranged marriage, but prefers to believe “that she was a romanticist” and fell in love with Carlo from his photograph and letters.

Zeigler knows that her mother “came over by herself, not speaking a word of English, and landed at Ellis Island,” having accepted her father’s long-distance proposal. They married in 1920 and set up housekeeping in Radiant.

As a saloonkeeper, Zeigler’s father was well-known. He told her of director Frank Capra coming to Radiant to film on location and how Carlo was led to believe he would be hired as an extra. That night, “he went home and shaved off his [handlebar] mustache. Then they didn’t want him.”

By 1925, Carlo and Carlotta had three children. In pursuit of the American dream, they set out for Southern California. Along the way, all six slept in their 1924 Buick touring sedan. Carlotta washed the children’s clothes and diapers in rivers and streams, hanging them to dry on tree limbs. She cooked their meals over an open fire.

At first, they settled near downtown Los Angeles, but Carlotta wanted to live in the suburbs. So, Inglewood it was. Three more children were born in California, including Theresa, the youngest. It was in St. John’s Chrysostom Roman Catholic Church in Inglewood that she had her first Communion. She remembers her mother tying cloths made from flour sacks over every faucet in the house, just as her own mother had done, to remind the Communion child that she was to neither drink nor eat after midnight on her big day.

The Pinamontis were among the first Italian families in Inglewood, Zeigler recalls, and “people sort of looked down on us. One neighbor called me ‘spaghetti.’ ” She laughs and says, “My mother didn’t learn to make spaghetti until she came to this country,” as polenta (cornmeal) was the staple in Rallo.

In 1927, Carlo and a partner opened the Open Air Midnight Market at the end of the trolley line in Inglewood. Prospering, they were bought out by the owners of a larger store. Then the Depression hit, the buyers went under and Carlo was left holding worthless paper. Although he had opened another store, and was doing well, he too went broke, as a result of extending credit to hard-hit families.

To support his family, he bought a truck from which he sold fish door to door. Later, he trimmed palm trees and mowed lawns. He filed a claim on a gold mine in Victorville, but it yielded no gold. Eventually, he signed up with the Works Progress Administration (later called the Work Projects Administration), a New Deal program created by President Franklin D. Roosevelt in 1935 to provide jobs for the out-of-work, ranging from artists and writers to laborers who helped build roads, bridges and airports. Carlo took odd jobs until in 1940 he found work as a machinist at Douglas Aircraft in El Segundo, where he stayed until 1953, the year before his death at 64.

Always intrigued by her family history, Zeigler, an outgoing woman who organizes a big annual family reunion in Trabuco Canyon near her home, “really got into it” about three years ago, after one of her sons introduced her to the Internet. One of the first hits after she typed in Pinamonti: “An e-mail out of the blue from Italy,” from a distant cousin, Ricardo Pinamonti, in Tuscany.

“Very few people are interested [in tracing family roots] when they’re young,” Zeigler says. “You’re busy raising your family and making a living.”

Jan Jennings, past president of the Burbank-based Southern California Genealogical Society, says, “There’s a booming interest, and the Internet has a lot to do with it.” But she sees that as a mixed blessing, noting that, as a result, attendance at the society’s genealogical research library is down. And, she adds, too often those on the Internet are “just passing around bad information, taking whatever they get from somebody as gospel.”

For example, says Jennings, one man had posted information about her own family on a site called Ancestry.com. “He’s got the whole thing all messed up.” The society’s motto, she says, is “There’s no truth without proof” and its library is a free resource for birth, marriage, death and cemetery records, as well as census records, family histories and regional and country histories.

Complicating the search for Zeigler was the fact that neither she nor her four surviving siblings can read or speak Italian--Carlotta wanted to be American--and old family records are in Italian. Both her parents died in the ‘50s.

Before Theresa and her husband, Art, visited Rallo for the first time, in 1984, she bought a cassette, playing it over and over until she had “learned enough Italian that I could ask a couple of questions” and communicate with four first cousins she’d never met.

Retired, the Zeiglers have lived since 1984 in a ranch-style home in Rancho Santa Margarita, where they display some of Art’s 30-year collection of Coca-Cola memorabilia. While Theresa hones her Internet skills, Art works on his golf game or in their yard. History buffs both, they enjoy driving vacations that include visits to historic sites such as Gettysburg, the Alamo and the South Dakota burial site of Sitting Bull.

A Way to Make History Come Alive for Students

National Endowment for the Humanities director Ferris wants “My History” to help make American history come alive for students from kindergarten through 12th grade. “It animates history when you can see your own family lodged in it, whether it’s the civil rights movement or World War II,” Ferris says. “All of us have had loved ones, family and neighbors that we felt very close to. When they die, we realize the door is closed forever on knowing them.”

He regrets that, to date, there has been a paucity of California submissions. “Perhaps more than any other state,” he says, “California has an extraordinarily diverse history, which is exactly what this project is designed to embrace.”

The “My History Is America’s History” Web site yields a treasury of stories--stories about Native American ancestors, women who pioneered in the Wild West, soldiers who died in Vietnam, World War II heroism. There are stories of forebears who fought in the Civil War, of those who came to America seeking religious freedom, of those who fought for racial equality.

One story, submitted by a granddaughter, tells of Fong Soo Foon, one of the Chinese laborers who circumvented the Chinese Exclusion Act of 1882 by becoming a “paper son,” buying a new identity. After birth certificates and citizenship papers of many Chinese immigrants were destroyed in the 1906 San Francisco earthquake, some claimed “sons” or “daughters” left behind in China--and pocketed the money paid them by others seeking to come to America.

The Web site is designed as a virtual “front porch” where families may exchange stories, post photographs and create family trees, using a link to the Web site of Genealogy.com, a partner in the venture. Its site offers searchers the tools and links to conduct their own research into their family trees.

Copies of the full-color, 98-page guidebook, “My History Is America’s History,” have been sent to more than 16,000 libraries nationwide, including Central Library in downtown Los Angeles and its regional libraries.

Another major source for those tracing family roots is the Los Angeles Family History Center at the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints temple in West L.A. Its library and research staff are available without charge to the public. The center also maintains two Web sites: https://www.lafhc.org and https://www.familysearch.org.

Ferris, 58, a Clinton appointee on leave from his post as director of the Center for the Study of Southern Culture and professor of anthropology at the University of Mississippi, has a passion for this project. As a folklorist, he has interviewed and written about subjects as diverse as mule traders and quilt makers.

It does not surprise him that so many of the stories submitted relate wartime experiences. “Certainly, war is a defining moment for many, many families. In the future, I think Vietnam will be an increasingly important point in our history that Americans will relate to.” The submissions, he adds, “are sort of like folk tales, stories that have been told in families. And you do have the feeling of the dinner table conversation, an intimacy that’s really very, very powerful.”

One of Ferris’ personal favorites is that of blues legend B.B. King, a sharecropper’s son from Mississippi who picked up the blues beat while working in the cotton fields. On the Web site he tells of hitchhiking to Memphis and launching his career as a musician.

Growing up in Vicksburg, Miss., Ferris would listen to B.B. King and Muddy Waters on radio broadcasts from Nashville. He and King later would become friends, and Ferris, too, would be inducted into the Blues Hall of Fame for his work keeping American folklore alive.

Ferris quotes an African proverb: “When an old man or old woman dies, a library burns to the ground.”

* The guidebook “My History Is America’s History,” with tips ranging from “playing detective with family photographs” to “uncovering history in the attic,” may be downloaded from https://www.myhistory.org or ordered for a shipping and handling fee from (877) NEH-HISTORY.

* Beverly Beyette can be reached at beverly.beyette@latimes.com.