EXAMINING PATTERNS OF ITALIAN IMMIGRATION TO ...

liquor dealers, masons, and farmers. Data showed that most Italian workers were in fact
employed in the mines. However, the number of Italians that were employed as liquor
dealers, farmers, and masons was found to be less significant than previously thought.
Dividing the occupations into categories allowed comparisons to be made about the number
of Italians working in different fields, and the establishment of employment trends. Further
research could compare these trends with those of other ethnic groups of the area.
Census data also showed in what townships and villages Italians preferred to settle.
Torinesi descendents showed a preference for Calumet Township and Laurium Village.
Adams Township and Trimountain Location were preferred by descendents of Lucchesi. It
would be interesting to perform archeological investigations in some of these places to
complement data from written documents. A lot more could be discovered about everyday
life. Sunny Italy, the Italian settlement in Trimountain, would be the first place to investigate
because it was a purely Italian settlement.
Much information has been found about various Italian organizations, such as the
benevolent societies. Having access to minute books of some of them would have been of
greater help, but unfortunately not much is known about the existence of original documents.
If some of them still exist in private possession, hopefully one day they will be donated to
public repositories and be accessible by the general public.
Italian newspapers published in Houghton County have also helped in getting to
know something about Italian interests, problems, and activities. For some of these
newspapers, however, only few issues have been located. It would have been interesting, for
example, to have issues of Il Minatore Italiano that covered the period of the 1913-1914
strike. It also would have helped this research to find more issues of other newspapers such
as La Sentinella and any issue of La Democrazia Italiana. Again it is likely that private
citizens still have some issues and making them available to researchers would provide a
great deal of information.
All in all this work reveals several tendencies about Italians that lived in Houghton
County between the end of the 19 th and the first decades of the 20 th century. Many little
discoveries, however, represent precious details about the past for some people, researchers
and/or Italian descendents, for example. Hopefully this thesis will be a starting point for
other scholars to investigate the topic to a greater extent. For example future works could
take a closer look at the relation between employment trends of Italians in the three bigger
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