Angelo Locatelli

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The Story

Angelo Giacomo Locatelli was born at 3:30 a.m. on November 18, 1884, in the village of Brembilla, in the Bergamo Province of Italy. He was the only son of Giacomo Locatelli and Maria Rocchi.

He was the only son, but he had two older sisters and three younger sisters. I am sure that put a lot of pressure on him, as the one expected to carry on the Locatelli name.

And can you imagine the NOISE in that house?

Angelo married Palma Rebucini in January of 1909, and ten months later their oldest son, Giacomo, was born. In 1911, they had another son, Battista.

In the spring of 1913, Angelo left for the United States. He was following his older sister Lucia and her husband, Antonio Zanardi, who had gone before him in 1910.

Antonio had already spent a decade living and working as a miner in Utah. He apparently came home to marry Lucia and then returned to America. It seems likely that he helped secure Angelo a job and a place to live. Lucia and Antonio became Angelo’s tie to his Italian family.

On March 28, 1913, Angelo landed in New York City, and almost certainly took a train out west.

His wife was newly pregnant when he left her, and their last baby, Angelo Marino, was born in October. It would have taken weeks to get her letter letting him know his namesake had been born. Six months later, another letter surely arrived — this time with the news of the baby’s death.

He and Palma grieved together, but oceans apart.

Bingham Canyon

Angelo perhaps hoped for a better life outside of his small mountain town in Italy. But when he became a miner at the Bingham copper mine, he swapped the green mountains of Lombardy for the arid brown Oquirrh Mountains here in Utah.

He lived in a town called Bingham Canyon, which in the 1920s was home to around 15,000 people. Today the town no longer exists. It was disincorporated in 1971 and has since been completely swallowed by the mine.

Angelo lived in the Italian section of Bingham Canyon on a street called Highland Boy. It was a tiny, cramped, certainly noisy, and certainly unhygienic place to live. The houses — really more like shacks — were crowded together on the side of the mountain, so close together that a dog standing between two could wag its tail and hit both houses.

Still, that little shack became home. Angelo eventually owned it, which was a small success for him.

The Family Left Behind

Angelo likely assumed he would be able to send for his wife and kids when he was more settled. But the world changed fast.

World War I reached Italy in 1915. International travel would have been risky, and communication and money would have been harder to coordinate. It became even worse in 1917 when the United States entered the war, and then there was disruption on both sides of the Atlantic.

Following the war, Italy was left in an economic and political crisis, and the value of the lira had tanked. Money for travel would have been far too scarce.

And if that wasn’t bad enough, the United States passed the 1921 immigration quota act, followed by the stricter 1924 Johnson-Reed Act, which more or less slammed the door shut on Angelo’s family.

Fueled by post-war fear and nationalism, good old-fashioned racism, and economic anxiety where immigrants were a convenient scapegoat, these immigration acts restricted entry by Italians to less than 4,000 people a year.

The Locatelli family may have been effectively stuck in Italy.

Angelo risked never seeing his wife and sons again unless he returned to Italy himself. And in 1924, he did just that.

The Return Visit

By December 6 of 1924, Angelo received a permit to return to the United States, and sometime shortly after that he headed home for a visit that lasted until mid-September of 1925.

His boys had been toddlers when he left. Now they were teenagers.

I imagine Palma’s black hair had grayed around her temples, and the years of war, work, and waiting had left their marks on her face and hands.

We can’t know what their reunion was like, but I can’t help but hope that, for a little while at least, they were able to hold each other and grieve the years they had lost.

Even though Angelo was not an American citizen, he still had to register for the U.S. draft during the war. On the draft card, the government reduced him to a few facts: a miner, 5’6” tall, with a stout build, black hair, and dark brown eyes.

But it also recorded something more human: his nearest relative was his wife, Palma, back in Brembilla.

After that 1925 visit, Angelo’s return passenger list named his father as his nearest relative in Italy — not Palma. That may have been ordinary paperwork. Or it may have meant that after eleven years apart, the marriage had become something more complicated.

Whether Angelo went home to Italy and found reunion or resentment, forgiveness or grief, he returned to Utah alone.

And in the next record I found him in, the 1930 U.S. census, he was listed as divorced.

Illness and Death

I found no evidence that Angelo visited Italy again, nor anything that suggests his sons visited him here.

His sister Lucia died in 1922, and Lucia’s husband Antonio died in 1938. It appears that the only family Angelo had left nearby were his nephews and niece, Lucia’s children, who were all marrying and moving on with their own lives.

In 1939, Angelo started to get sick. He would have been growing more tired and weak for months. His diagnosis was lymphosarcoma, a form of lymphoma. Eventually the cancer became acute enough that he was hospitalized.

He spent two weeks there before he passed away at 1:30 a.m. on his 55th birthday.

His nephews and niece arranged the last rites and burial, posted an obituary, and gave him a respectable gravestone.

But the obituary listed his survivors with just the phrase “2 sons in Italy.”

Not Giacomo and Battista.

Just 2 sons.

Angelo’s nephew was the informant on Angelo’s death certificate. He reported “unknown” as the name of Angelo’s spouse. The names of Angelo’s parents were unknown. Even his birthday was unknown.

His family in America loved him and buried him with care. I found flowers placed at his grave on Memorial Day this year, so their descendants still visit and remember him — which made me so happy to see.

But the pattern the records tell is still of a man separated from his sons, and from the homeland where his life began.

What I Could Give Back

When Angelo grabbed me in the cemetery, I had a feeling of despair about someone back at home not knowing what happened to him.

Again, I can’t prove that was real. I don’t know if his sons ever knew what became of their father, if they knew his story, or where he was buried.

But at least I know his story now.

And now you do too.

This rock is for you, Angelo.

Postscript: What became of Angelo’s sons?

Angelo’s sons Giacomo and Battista grew up in Brembilla, Italy.

Giacomo Locatelli married Ancilla Maria Carminati in Brembilla on July 6, 1935. Battista Locatelli married Maddalena Vellere of Isola Vicentina, Vicenza, in Brembilla on November 18, 1942.

Both marriage records name Angelo Locatelli and Palma Rebucini as the grooms' parents. That matters to me, because Angelo’s obituary in Utah reduced them to “two sons in Italy,” but the Italian records return their names, their marriages, and at least part of the lives they continued living after their father was gone.

Battista eventually immigrated to the United States. His Social Security records show his number was issued in Virginia in 1973, and later records place his last residence in Arlington, Virginia. He died in Broward County, Florida, on July 13, 1992, at the age of 81.

I do not yet know exactly when Battista came to America. The records found so far place him in the United States by 1973, but he may have arrived earlier. That detail still needs stronger documentation.

Whether either son knew where Angelo was buried, whether they visited him or his grave, or even communicated with him, remains my biggest open question.

The Rock

I painted this memorial rock for Angelo Locatelli and left it at his grave in Mt. Olivet Cemetery.

The design echoes the floral carving on his gravestone, with black linework and copper details — a small nod to the copper mines where he worked.

Source Note

This story was researched using civil registration records from Italy, United States immigration records, census records, draft registration records, death and burial records, Catholic parish records, cemetery records, and newspaper notices.

Record images are not shown here because many are hosted by subscription or restricted-access genealogy databases. Instead, I have summarized what each record contributes to the story and cited where it was accessed.

Conflicting details in the records are noted where they appear. In those cases, records created closer to the original event, such as Angelo’s Italian birth record, are treated as stronger evidence than later records created after his death.