Why they moved

These are the circumstances of the waves, not a diary for any one ancestor. Where the paper trail puts a documented person inside a wave, that is tagged below. A personal reason (“left because of X”) is only claimed when a source says so.

The Fellman side’s waves — Great Migration, Baptist persecution, Palatine exile, Irish Famine, Waterloo Mennonites — are on ancestry.fellman.us/migrations/.

Carini to Bagheria, ~1690s (internal, not Atlantic)

Before anyone in this line crossed an ocean, the Mineo family spent about 150 years in Carini, a small town west of Palermo: Alfonso Mineo (b. ~1535) through Leonardo Paolo Mineo (1669–1728), with Taormina, Cusimano, La Fata, Lo Grasso, and related families intermarrying in the same place for centuries.

Around the 1690s the documented line shifts to Bagheria. Bagheria was then becoming Palermo’s villa hinterland — aristocratic country houses, citrus, and agricultural labor on the Conca d’Oro. That is a local economic geography change, not a famine-ship story. 🟢 The parish dates are continuous enough to treat the town shift as real. We do not have a Mineo letter that says why.

See the Carini cluster on the home page and the Domilici investigation.

Southern Italian mass emigration, ~1880–1924

After unification (1861), the Mezzogiorno — Sicily included — was poorer, more heavily taxed, and more land-poor than the north. Phylloxera wrecked vineyards in the 1880s; sulfur and citrus were boom-and-bust; latifundia left little land to inherit. From the 1880s until the U.S. 1924 Johnson-Reed Act slammed the door, millions of southern Italians went to the Americas. Many were not “immigrants” on the first trip. They were labor migrants.

This line’s Atlantic crossings sit inside that window, not outside it:

• 🟢 Simone Domilici (b. 1885, Bagheria) first arrived New York 5 April 1913, went back, and re-arrived 14 June 1919. Two crossings, seven years, then naturalization in 1926 as a Brooklyn longshoreman. That is the classic southern-Italian pattern: try the States, return, come to stay. The investigation is about what he did on the docks, not about inventing a reason he left Bagheria. No Sicilian push-factor document for Simone has been found. The wave explains the traffic; it does not prove his motive.
• 🟢 Girolama Tomasello (1891–1964) and the children, including Sadie (1921), are the settled Brooklyn household that the 1919 crossing becomes.

The 1924 quota law is why this wave has a hard stop. Anyone still in Mazara or Bagheria after that was not going to repeat Simone’s trip on the same terms.

Birds of passage — Mario Majale

🟢 Mario Majale (b. ~1897, Mazara del Vallo – d. ~1965, same town) is documented on multiple Atlantic crossings: 1902 as a child (census self-report), then 1913 and 1923, both departing Palermo. He appears in two U.S. households at different points, once as “Father,” once as “Uncle,” and he died in the town he was born in.

That is the named pattern birds of passage (uccelli di passaggio): southern Italian men who worked seasonally in the U.S. and did not treat the first landing as a one-way door. Historians put the return rate for Italian migrants in this era somewhere around one-third to one-half. Mario is not a brick-wall curiosity who “must have settled.” He is a documented returnee. The brick wall is earlier — his parents Nicolo Maiale and Theresa Morriano in Mazara, with nothing before them in this file.

Trapani province (Mazara) is not the same research problem as Palermo province (Bagheria / Carini / Bisacquino). Different archives, different towns, same national wave.

Before Mazara — did the surname cross from the mainland?

The Maiale surname on the island is a western-tip pinprick (Mazara and Marsala). The bigger living piles are in Campania (three pockets; the counted Sannio core is Sant’Angelo a Cupolo — Campania Maiale), then a dense pocket at Palmoli in Abruzzo, plus a Lazio variant Maiali. Italian onomasts list those as separate stocks. The honest prior is independent occupational nicknames.

Nicholas Maiale’s kit is 57% Sicily, 19% Central Italy, 11% Southern Italy. The 19% is the Lazio / Abruzzo side of the map, and it is too large to be a medieval leftover — if the surname crossed the Strait, it was close to Nicolo. Campania is still the best shipping corridor under the Two Sicilies, and a possible reading of the 11%. It is not the inherited mainland number. Not the Norman Piedmontese “Lombardi di Sicilia,” who settled the centre-east of the island.

That is a hypothesis page, not a crossing with a date. See From the mainland and DNA. The brick wall remains Nicolo in Mazara, ~1864.

Bisacquino stays put

🟢 The Zito line in Bisacquino is the opposite of a migration story: six generations in one hill town, Giovanni Zito (b. 1628) to Vincenzo Zito (1854–1897). People who share a hometown with Frank Capra are not people who left with him. Hometown is not a crossing.

What this is not

• 🔴 Not a mafioso-flight story. Simone’s neighborhood had real organized crime; his own file shows longshoreman, then butcher, natural death. See the investigation and Ruled Out.
• 🔴 Not a titled-family dispersal. “Baron di San Carlo” does not survive a source check.
• ⚪ The Wisconsin State Journal citation (10 July 1984) attached to Mario’s record is unread. It is not evidence of a Midwest settlement wave.

DNA that matches the Palermo–Carini–Bagheria geography: DNA Corroboration.