"Giuseppe, where are you, I have to ask?" Antonio his brother pondered looking about.

"I am here, I am just getting ready for the ceremony," Giuseppe replied, looking out over the fields of Naples.

"Maria, she is a lovely girl, but have you thought of the future?"

"My brother, I have, and Maria and I are emigrating to America. You, as my elder brother will inherit the farm; I have nothing, so we will go and see what this new land has to offer. There are many from Naples in New York, and if it works out well you could come too," Giuseppe answered.

-oOo-

Tony began to ask his dad, what had his father been like, I mean really like.

"Junior,…..my father,….your grandfather?" DiNozzo Senior had replied. "Strange man, he had a collection of buttons. Why buttons I never knew, could have been the war I suppose. That would have been Pearl Harbor…..buttons were hard to come by during the war, and I put it down to the shock."

"Granddad fought in war at Pearl Harbor, I never knew he never talked about it, the war I mean," Tony continued.

"Junior, coffee or a drink, I think we should discuss more." As DiNozzo Senior took his son by the arm, "I really have no idea what this is leading to, but I will try and answer your questions."

As the pair sat in the swanky lounge of the latest posh hotel that Tony's dad was staying, and as they drank their coffee, Tony's dad began to speak.

"From what I was lead to believe, and he never spoke of the horror of that day in December 1941."

"Dad, what was your father doing in Hawaii?"

"His father, your great grandfather had a transportation business, took him some 20 years to build up but he had lorries. My father had been driving them since he knew how, tinkering, and when war was declared he volunteered his services and those of the firm. Didn't quite work out and he got shipped to pearl. Got wounded and shipped home, back to New York."

"But you had a sister and have a brother."

"True your grandfather, my father, Antonio, the name was always given to the first born son, my sister Angelina and Vincenzo. Vincenzo you remember lives in Long Island had the butchers," as Senior took a pip of the coffee before motioning to the waiter to bring something stronger. "You used to play there with your cousin Petey."

"I remember. But my great grandparents came from where?" Tony began to ask, "Because I looked in the Italian phone book and there are no DiNozzo's listed. So dad just who am I?

-oOo-

The crossing from Naples to New York was arduous, the winter seas strong and stormy Steerage was not good but as it was in the bowels of the ship the tossing and swaying was not so bad. So it was that in mid-March six weeks after departing Naples that Giuseppe and Maria eventually landed in New York.

In 1906 most of the Italian immigrants, took their first steps onto American soil in a place that had become a legend, Ellis Island.

Ellis Island had been founded as a solution to a serious social crisis. New York's previous immigrant processing station, a decaying fortress called Castle Garden, had become a pit of corruption and theft, where new immigrants had to run a gauntlet of swindlers, pickpockets, and armed robbers before escaping with their freedom and their paperwork. Si in order to ensure a safe, controlled, and regulated entry process, the federal government took over immigrant processing and erected a set of new, purpose-built facilities on an island in New York Harbor. For many generations of Americans, and for almost all Italian Americans, Ellis Island was the first chapter of their family's story in the United States.

Here newcomers were numbered, sorted, and sent through a series of inspections, where they were checked for physical and mental fitness and for their ability to find work in the U.S.

The consequences of failing an eye exam, or of seeming too frail for manual labour, could be devastating; one member of a family could be sent back to Italy, perhaps never to see his or her loved ones again. Although less than 2 percent of Italians were turned away, fear of such a separation led some immigrants to rename Ellis Island L'Isola dell Lagrime, the Island of Tears.