Genealogy Data Page 154 (Notes Pages)

Individuals marked with a red dot are direct ancestors of Mark Camillo DiVecchio

Filomena Biasella (I12241) [Female] b. 1 Sep 1901 Castel di Sangro, L'Aquila, Italy - d. 27 Dec 2003 Chicago Heights, Cook, IL

email from grandniece, Rinda Milano Tullio, Jul 2011: "All my grandmothers siblings (3 brothers and 1 sister) all came to the States and settled in Chicago Heights, Ill. Giovanni, Luigi and Filomena came over in the 20s and Raffaele (Ralph) came over in the early 50s. Most of them lived to 100 - 102 years of age."

1920 4 Jun EI arrival, 19y, mother in CdS - Emidia. Going to uncle Giuseppe Biasella in Chicago, IL. "Sister of #24 - Giovanni Biasella".
1930 census, Steger, Cook, IL, 29y, imm 1920.

http://trees.ancestry.com/pt/RequestTreeAccess.aspx?tid=15619447&pid=720527837 - this tree does not show the siblings of Filomena but that Filomena is the person in this family. Obituary below is from that web page.

1952 New York arrival, 50y, with daughter, Nora, Chicago Heights, IL.

U.S. Public Records Index, Volume 2
Name: Filomena Ranieri
Birth Date: 1 Sep 1901
Address: 2106 San Rocco Pl, Chicago Heights, IL, 60411

Social Security Death Index
Name: Filomena Ranieri
SSN: 329-22-7873
Last Residence: 60401 Beecher, Will, Illinois, United States of America
Born: 1 Sep 1901
Died: 27 Dec 2003
State (Year) SSN issued: Illinois (Before 1951)

Obituary from Chicago Sun-Times
Filomena Ranieri, 102; seamstress liked to garden, cook
December 30, 2003
BY BRENDA WARNER ROTZOLL Staff Reporter

Prospects weren't great in her Italian mountain village after World War I, so 18-year-old Filomena Biasella set out for America to join a brother in Chicago Heights.

Arthur Ranieri, a Castel di Sangro neighbor three years older than she, had made the trip in 1915. His mother and sister went to join him in 1919 and she traveled with them.

The women had a less scary trip than Ranieri -- all his life he would tell how his ship was just passing Gibraltar when the captain got news of the sinking of the Lusitania by a German submarine.

Filomena lived with her older brother in the Italian-German-Polish neighborhood around San Rocco Church in Chicago Heights for a time. It was called Hungry Hill because no one had any money to speak of. She met her old neighbor, Arthur Ranieri, and in 1922 they were wed. The marriage lasted 81 years until his death at 104 in February of 2003.

Filomena Ranieri died Dec. 27 at the Anchorage nursing home in Beecher, where she and her husband had lived the last four years of their lives. She was 102.

Things weren't easy in the early days. Their first two sons died very young. Their third son and their daughter grew up during the Great Depression. Vincent Ranieriremembers going out as a boy to "knock off coal," where people would climb aboard slow-moving coal trains and kick off loose coal to pick up and take home to fire their potbellied stoves.

The family lost its first home, in Steger, because they couldn't make the $19-a-month mortgage payments. They moved in with relatives for 18 months, then rented a house in Hungry Hill. The house promptly became a neighborhood social center because of the wine press built into the basement. When the Ranieris weren't pressing their own grapes for wine, the neighbors would use the press, storing the wine in barrels in a sub-basement.

As her son and daughter reached high school, Mrs. Ranieri went to work as a seamstress at a dress factory, churning out simple house dresses at the factory or at home on her foot-powered sewing machine.

In 1955 the Ranieris purchased another home, right across the street from San Rocco Church, where they had been married. Mrs. Ranieri was active in the church, being a lifetime member of the Franciscan Mothers.

When she wasn't sewing she was cooking, cleaning or working in her garden.

"Your mother's going to die in that garden," his father would tell Vincent Ranieri. He would have to forcibly take the spade away from his mother and turn the earth over each spring. She canned vast quantities of crushed tomatoes for pasta sauce.

Mrs. Ranieri was an excellent cook who greeted her children by asking, "Did you eat? You got to sit down and eat." Until she was 98 she baked four loaves of bread every week, two for herself and her husband and one for each of her grown children. She had baked four loaves of bread the morning she went to the hospital four years ago, later having to move to a nursing home.

"She was a feisty little thing," who stood less than 5 feet tall, her son said, and never weighed more than 101 pounds -- a weight she regarded in horror as "getting fat."

Other survivors are her daughter, Nora Mirkow; her brother, Raffaele Biasella; five grandchildren; and seven great-grandchildren.

Visitation will be today from 2 to 8 p.m. at Panozzo Bros. Funeral Home, 530 W. 14th St., Chicago Heights. Services will be Wednesday at 11 a.m. at San Rocco Oratory, 315 E. 22nd St., Chicago Heights, with burial in Evergreen Hills Cemetery, Steger.

Change: 5 Jul 2011