Beautiful Lives II

(Author's note: This is a fluid blog post with new images and pieces of information being added as they become available.)

As always, unapologetically unedited.

I'll admit it: I've wanted to go back. Not necessarily to Boston, but to this family. I've wanted to revisit these Beautiful Lives. There's so much color here, a richness that transcends pedigree charts and dry facts. It's a quality that spans oceans and eras. To say I'm unfamiliar with this area of genealogy (or indeed family history) would be an understatement; yet, as a family saga, it resonates like few others. So yes, I've been pulled back to places like Baker's Alley, Langson Place, or Keith's Alley, and further into the interconnectedness of lives lived. So many lives that all trace back to that troubled, sleepless giant, Mount Etna, and the villages around it that fought off volcanoes and Nazi advances while seeming to court their attacker's favor at the same time.

These are all places connected to Gabriele Mellini and the Randazzo family.

I've been especially interested in these places and how they relate to the "backstory" of Gabriele Mellini, aka Serafino Randazzo. It's fascinating to me when an eleven-year-old kid has an alias and is sent alone on a voyage from Palermo to America. Thus far, there are no cracks in the mystery, though, save for proof of the alias on his marriage record to Anna Scola, and his singular listing as a sixteen-year-old fisherman under that alias in the 1908 Italian Directory for Boston. 

My efforts to figure out the story, if not the answers to Gabriele's origins, have been met with the Black Hand of Silence. My efforts to communicate with Gabriele's very extended family back East have been met with a response akin to a Cosa Nostra reply: "Who are you and what do you want?" It's as if the family still guards the old secrets from well over one hundred years ago. I can respect that. Still, I am hopeful that maybe in time they will warm up to my inquiries. I am curious about who the Scolas and Randazzos were. How do the Mellinis fit in with other names like the Favorolas and the Toccas? To understand more about these people, though, I decided to take a look at the places they lived and the history they lived through. Now this blog post is too limited to go into a lot of history, but it is big enough to shake off that Black Hand and to look at where a lot of it all began.              

I thought I'd start here and work my way backwards. 

The Lodgings of Randazzo: North Street, Boston, Mass.

You can tell a lot about people by where they live. I wrote about this in a previous post regarding the nineteenth-century O'Neal clan of Dade County, Georgia, a family that connects directly to Gabriele Mellini in the years that followed. In this case, Gabriele Mellini, aka "Serafino Randazza," and his apparently adopted father, Gaetano Randazzo, lived at the addresses posted in these surrounding images. In my mind, I don't know what I pictured. I guess some modest little Fisherman's cottage set along some Bostonian tea party waterfront, perhaps upgraded throughout the years, where generations of Randazzo have lived and Mellinis might grow. My searches didn't lead me here, though. It led me to a place I guess I should have expected all along. It led me rather to a "walk-up," maybe a boarding house type of dwelling or "lodgings" of sorts at 177 North Street, in an area called Baker's Alley. (I assume the name grew from the place or area for obvious reasons.) However, the researcher in me wanted to know more. Just what was this boarding house like? What kind of family history could I get out of it?    

And by 1914:   

Now I can't know everything there is to know about these places, but I can tell that, at least historically, the Randazzos may have been connected to "North Street" for decades. So I guess you also might want to think carefully before you speak out at "185 North Street."

                       

Above: What Gabriele Mellini might have seen upon arriving in Boston, "North Street, looking up from North Square, Boston, 1894," The Bostonian Society

 
Okay, I think we have the picture here. Marshall's Lodgings at 177 North Street may be where Gabriele's life in America began. It sure must be where Gaetano and the Randazzo family lived. No cute fishing cottage by the sea. But, only a few years later, and maybe to impress the lovely and talented Miss Scola of Fleet Street, our guy Gabriele gets his own place a few doors down over the Barber Shop. This seems as good a timeline as any, but oh wow, what a tough and hard place to live in the early nineteenth and twentieth centuries. Both of these addresses are rife in the old newspapers with crime, tragedy, and lots of other forms of misery. I did wonder: Is the "Rassano" mentioned in the newspaper an Anglicized disambiguation of the name Randazzo?

         

Above: "Keith's Alley," where Gabriele lived in 1930

Above: Images regarding places where Gabriele Mellini or the Randazzos lived through 1950 on the bottom right.

So why did they come here? I guess to escape some of this:

The Volcano of Randazzo: Mount Aetna...

I don't know what it is about this family. I would've run from the volcano, too, but giving up sunning in the Mediterranean weather for a tenement in the Boston winters is a hard one for me to figure out. What drove them to America? But all that aside, this family (to clarify, those of both Paige Dunham's and Kevin O'Neal) manages to always find themselves in some form of Ripley's Believe it or Not, Guinness's, or some other "Wonders of the World" presentation. 

I mean, seriously, what's up with that? Lol. 

All kidding aside, the history behind "Randazzo" is incredible.  The Volcano, the centuries of life living under its threat. Maybe it was all just too much?

Well, it brings a new meaning to the words "forged by fire." I think you had to be tough to have lived at Randazzo at the foot of Mt. Aetna. I think you had to be tough to leave. I think you had to be tough to make it to a tenement in Boston and to try and call such a foreign place home while making your living doing the only thing you or your family had known for centuries. Fishing. I think you had to be even tougher to dodge the crime coming at you from all directions and find something to have faith and believe in. All that said, the Randazzo / Mellinis had an amazing family who survived it all.

They were tough, too, because they found a way out. 

But what about the people who didn't?

Now I can't speak to Randazzos or Mellinis, who still live in Boston. I can tell you that the family seems very widespread about this great nation. But I can show you a few images of what happened to the Randazzos that they left behind, and what those who didn't leave were forced to deal with. I don't know about you, but in some ways, dealing with the volcano might have been easier. 

The History:

Now there's a lot to unpack here. I will admit too that I was triggered to investigate further by watching the HBO drama Rogue Heroes (2022) which deals with liberating Italy from the Nazis. And as they advised at the start of that program, "this is not a history lesson," still, I was amazed to see that Randazzo, and by extension the people connected to it, were so pivotal in the war.  

So I guess you could say that a lot happened after the Randazzo/Mellini clan left the island and fled the volcano for the wilds of Boston. They left behind a town that became occupied by the Nazis and a pivotal party of Operation Husky. 

Now, just whose side the people of Randazzo were on during the war may be up for debate. I think the correct answer might be, "whichever side was winning" at any given time. I mean, think about it. You're busy worrying about the volcano cooking you and your farm, and half your family has gone to America. Maybe if you make nice with the dang Nazi's they will just leave you alone? Maybe when the Allies get there, you will tell them it was all a big mistake? Hard to know.

I will say that prominent members of the Randazzo clan went on to question a lot of things about the war. 

Very curious questions about a lot of people and things.

 

 It's still going on. But like I say, this isn't a history lesson, and while I am not a fan of Mussolini, I'm sure that some ghosts still haunt the countryside. I hope that Attorney Randazzo mentioned in this 2006 article was just trying to "go fishing" in a different pond and maybe was only trying to make a name for himself. 

Curious stuff. Curious folks, those Randazzos. Maybe that's why Gabriele Mellini distanced himself from the name when he became an adult. It's hard to know. 

 

Anyway, I will continue to explore and connect the dots to this extremely interesting family and their woven history, past and present. At this point, I'm not going to bother with the Randazzos who had ties to the mob in Kansas City or New Orleans, or the Randazzos who excelled at Major League sport. Instead, I thought I would leave you with one of their (the Randazzos) more light-hearted kinfolk. He might not be a household name in every home, but this guy knew how to put a song together and how to make people feel better. 

   

And while "Teddy Randazzo's" connection to Kevin O'Neal may be lost in the dust of time, one thing is certain. Both of their origins trace back to a town at the foot of a sleeping giant, a volcano, and a journey to the New World, and to the same family they left behind.

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