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Crest of Giovinazzo

Descendant Reports for:

George Arnold
John Baut
Gaetano Caropreso
James Conboy
Gabriele DeMartino
Claud Grivelet
Lewis F.R. Holmes
Patrick O'Mara
Michele Vernola

DEMARTINO FAMILY GENEALOGY

My name is Joseph DeMartino. I am descended from Gabriele DeMartino and Rachela Cocciviello, who are my great great great great grandparents who lived over 200 years ago in the village of Monteportuso, Positano, in the Province of Salerno. In about 1820, their son, Mariano, who was born in 1789 in Monteportuso, emigrated to the East port city of Giovinazzo on the Adriatic, just North of Bari, to marry Felicia Caccavo and start a maritime supply business and family.

Every DeMartino in Giovinazzo is descended from Mariano and Felicia. They had many descendants, including two of their sons, Michele Donato and Luigi Raffaello Donato. The family moved into the stone-cutting business and this specialty created an opportunity to come to America to work in the Northeast in the late 1800s in places like Vermont and Massachusetts, working as stone-cutters in the quarries. My great grandfather, Mariano (born in 1859 to Luigi) travelled back and forth between Italy and Boston and eventually remained in Italy after World War One and stopped his commute to America.

Back in Italy, World War One was not kind to the family, whose boys were now in the Army. Mariano's oldest son Luigi went missing in action in the Italian Army. His son Giovanni (my grandfather) was captured by the Germans and spent much of the war in a prison camp. After the war, Giovanni, his brother Angelo, and his sisters Donatella, Giovanna, and Serafina emigrated to New York. In Italy, they left behind their parents (Mariano and Madelena Magrone), their sister (Helen, who was a nun), and their youngest brother Giuseppe in the town of Giovinazzo. Two of Giuseppe's sons moved to Australia later in the 20th century.

There are some DeMartino families in New England and upstate New York who are part of the same Giovinazzo clan. Some of them descended from Michele Donato DeMartino, born in 1820, and Maria DeRuvo through their son Giuseppe, born in 1850.

This website is a genealogical record for my children and their relatives. It contains over 2,000 names of people who are all related to my children in some way.

I believe that showing children their own personal history gives them strength to understand where they can go and what they can possibly achieve. Everyone here in the United States are the descendants of risk-takers and very few of us will ever take the risks that our ancestors did because it is no longer necessary. But, deep in our backgrounds are plenty of risk-takers, many of whom are represented on this website. I believe that the United States has flourished so greatly because our political and economic structure gave risk-takers a platform to excel. ... And they did!

Research was performed with many sources including the NYC Municipal Archives, cemeteries, churches, Ellis Island, Steve Morse's website, US Census Records, Social Security records, Military records, Immigration records, and Progenealogists. I have been building this record for over a decade.

If you are in this database, please contact me so I can include all of your information in my family tree software.

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