In San Francisco, my grandmother found work as a seamstress at the City of Paris, then one of the city’s most elegant department stores. She had arrived in America barely 15 years earlier, a 12-year-old girl from a mountain village in southern Italy who had crossed the Atlantic in steerage.
I did not grow up knowing much about that journey. She rarely spoke of Italy. To me she was simply Grandma. It was only recently, in a municipal office in Pietrapertosa, a small comune in the mountains of Basilicata, that I began to understand the life she left behind.
On April 8 of this year, a civil registrar handed me a document I had spent months tracing across two continents. It was the certified extract of birth record No. 114 from 1885, the official registration of my grandmother, recorded under the name Angiola Lacava. The entry was written in a clerk’s steady hand 141 years ago.
Her father, Michele Lacava, was a mulattiere, a muleteer who led pack animals along the narrow mountain paths that connected isolated villages. He appeared before a local official on Nov. 11, 1885, to declare the birth of a daughter two days earlier in his home on Via Garibaldi. Her mother, Maria Teresa Amati, was a spinner. Two witnesses stood with him. None of the three men could write. The clerk recorded their illiteracy and signed the document on their behalf.
Thirteen years later, in July 1898, her mother obtained a passport issued in the name of the King of Italy. It authorized her to travel to New York with three of her five children, including Angiola, then 13. They would travel in steerage, leaving from Naples to join Michele, who had gone ahead.
I also hold the inspection cards from the steamship Burgundia, which departed Naples that same month. Stamped in Naples and again upon arrival in New York, they record their last residence as Pietrapertosa. These small, worn pieces of cardboard form a bridge between one life and another.
Like many southern Italian immigrants of her generation, my grandmother lived forward. In America, she built a life. It is where she met and later married Anthony Bourke Ryan, a San Franciscan native and second-generation Irish American. They eventually settled in Fresno. After his early death, she managed the duplexes she owned, raising my father and his sister and securing a measure of stability that would have been unimaginable in the village she left behind.
Pietrapertosa is a place of striking beauty, a cluster of stone houses carved into a cliff. It is also a place people left. In the late 19th century, southern Italy offered little in the way of economic opportunity. The Italian state, newly unified, could issue passports. It could not offer reasons to stay.
I have spent much of my professional life working in countries that produce migrants and refugees. As a United Nations official, I worked in places like Vietnam and Liberia, helping to build institutions intended to create stability and reduce the pressures that force people to leave. I believed, and still do, in that work.
The Lacava family was not fleeing war. They were leaving poverty, geography, and the accumulated effects of neglect. Their decision was not dramatic. It was practical. They went because they saw no viable future where they were.
Today, as immigration is debated across the United States, it is often framed as a problem to be managed, a border to be secured, a system to be controlled. Migrants are reduced to categories and numbers. The language leaves little room for the human reality behind those movements.
My grandmother was a child in the hold of a ship. Her mother worked with thread. Her father worked with mules in the mountains. They were not threats. They were not abstractions. They were people making a difficult decision in the face of limited options.
That decision shaped everything that followed. It made possible not only the life my grandmother built in San Francisco and Fresno, but also my own. It gave me opportunities that carried me far beyond anything imaginable in that village in 1885.
The documents I now hold are more than family records. They are evidence of what people are willing to risk, and of what a country is willing to allow. The inspection cards stamped in Naples and New York are a reminder that borders are not simply geographic lines. They are points of decision. The choices made there shape not only the lives of those who cross them, but the character of the nation that receives them.
Entry No. 114 records the birth of a girl in a mountain village in southern Italy. Everything that followed, the crossing, the arrival, the life she built, depended on how a country chose to receive her.
There was a time when the United States made space for that possibility.
Jordan Ryan is a former United Nations assistant secretary-general. He lives in Belchertown.