Alito's classic family odyssey

WASHINGTON -- It was the summer of 1913, and Maria Alati was pregnant and staying behind in Italy as her husband left for America. Antonio Alati boarded the SS Ancona and headed for the port of Philadelphia.

It was a classic immigrant saga: Antonio would miss the birth of his son, Salvatore, because he was making money as a New Jersey laborer to pay for his family's passage to America.

And it turned out to be a classic immigrant miracle: Ninety-two years later, their grandson, Samuel A. Alito Jr., became President Bush's nominee for a seat on the Supreme Court.

Now that heritage has become part of the nomination saga. One of the first things Bush told the country about Alito was that he was the son of an Italian immigrant.

Alito himself said his father was ''an extraordinary man who came to the United States as a young child and overcame many difficulties and made many sacrifices so that my sister and I would have opportunities that he did not enjoy."

A White House spokesman, Steve Schmidt, was quoted in The New York Times as having said that Alito's father ''came to America as a young boy searching for opportunity."

In fact, according to immigration and Census records, Alito's father was only about 5 or 6 months old when he arrived in Philadelphia.

''He was an infant, not even a year old" when he emigrated from Italy, Rosemary Alito, 91, said in a brief telephone interview, about her husband, who died in 1987.

It was really the grandparents, Maria and Antonio, who lived the classic immigrant tale, struggling to come to America, learning a new language, and searching for opportunity from the bottom of the economic ladder.

Their story, pieced together from a variety of public documents, puts in clearer perspective the immigrant background of the Alito family.

It also rebuts suggestions raised in websites last week by some critics of the nomination that Alito's father was not an immigrant at all.

Those suggestions were based on a World War II document that suggested that Alito's father was born in New Jersey -- but that almost certainly was mistaken.

The story of the Alitos in America begins in the summer of 1913, as Europe was on the brink of war. The family, then known as Alati, decided to make a new life in America. But first, they had to split apart.

The first to leave was Antonio Alati. After arriving in Naples, Alati boarded the Ancona, a six-year-old single-smokestack steamship that plied the Atlantic between Italy and the United States.

The ship, which held up to 2,560 passengers, sailed at a typical speed of about 16 miles per hour and arrived in Philadelphia on Sept. 4, 1913.

Alati soon made his way to nearby Trenton, where he found work as a laborer.

Six months later, back in Italy, Maria gave birth to Salvatore Alati. Like many immigrants from the time, she then prepared to cross the ocean to be reunited with her husband.

Maria and Salvatore duplicated Antonio's trek -- going to Naples, boarding the Ancona, headed to Philadelphia. They arrived in the summer of 1914.

One year later, as World War I gripped Europe, the steamship Ancona was on its way from Italy to New York when it was sunk by an enemy torpedo; more than 200 passengers were killed.

Establishing their new life in America, the Alatis moved around Trenton. Antonio got work as a city street repairman, according to Census records. The Alatis had three more children. By 1930, the family owned a house valued at $4,500, an appreciable sum at the time.

At some point, the family name changed to Alito. Salvatore Alati became Samuel Alito.

In 1941, war again gripped much of the world, and Samuel Alito, then 27 years old, filled out an enlistment card for the Army. Alito said in the document that his ''state of nativity" was New Jersey. This has led some critics, particularly on some liberal blogs, to say that this proves that the senior Alito was born in the United States and that, therefore, Samuel A. Alito Jr., the Supreme Court nominee, is not the son of an immigrant.

But Dana Perino, a White House spokeswoman, said that the document was incorrect and that there was no doubt that Bush was correct when he said Samuel Alito Sr. was born in Italy.

In addition, three other documents reviewed by The Boston Globe -- the 1920 and 1930 census and a citizenship paper -- all confirm that Samuel Alito Sr. was born in Italy. The Globe asked Sharon Hodges, a professional genealogist, to review several of the documents.

She agreed that he was born in Italy, noting that the earlier documents contained contemporaneous information provided by the parents, Maria and Antonio, who would have known where their son was born.

Further, Hodges said that the question on the World War II document may have seemed open to interpretation to someone who had spent only five or six months in the land of his birth.

''Even though he was born in Italy, he was 5 months old when he left. What would he remember?" Hodges said. It is possible that Alito thought the Army wanted to know where he had spent nearly all of his life in the United States.

Samuel Alito Sr. became a high school teacher and director of New Jersey's Office of Legislative Services.

In recent years, Samuel Alito Jr. has become a devotee to the subject of his ancestry. In addition to speaking about his roots at the White House announcement ceremony, he said in his Senate questionnaire that he is an active member of the National Italian American Foundation, an organization that celebrates the heritage of Italian-Americans.