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Giuseppe Roncada, born on 19 April 1850, was married to Marina Fuochi (22 May 1855) and lived for some years in the city of Buscoldo (MN) in Italy. It was in this city where they had 7 children and lived for about 10 years, before deciding to migrate to Brazil. Giuseppe was not born in Buscoldo, nor he got married there, so he came from some other place in Italy. We do not have this information, and do not know the exact name of his parents or siblings.
Giuseppe Roncada already 37 years old when he decided to immigrate to Brazil with his wife Marina (32 years old) and their children. The year was 1888. So they left Italy for a country that only 6 years earlier had turned independent from its colonial ruler; a country where the practice of slavery was not yet over. They arrived in Brazil on 05 February 1888, on board of the ship named 'Carlo R.' that sailed from Genoa.
However, Brazilian documents do not account for one child named Maria Santa Ida at the time they arrived. She should be 4 years old. And so there was Giuseppe and Marina plus
We do not know any details on how they managed the first years of their new life, the new language, different culture, habits and people. We do know that Marina had brought a huge ball of hardened tomato paste on a stick during their trip across the Atlantic, that she used to take bits to prepare the sauce to feed her family. It was in Brazil that their last child was born: Ulisses Roncada. This name is very suggestive to denote a coragious and endless struggle to survive.
Being peasants, and used to hard work, they came to Brazil in search of better life conditions and the promisse endorsed by the Brazilian Government at the time, that they were entitled to a certain extension of land after working for 5 years in the big farms. Around 1890, the Brazilian economy depended heavily on coffe production and exports. Labor was scarce and slavery had only recently been abolished. They, and a group of other Italian imigrants were sent to work the coffe plantation of a great landowner, known as Barao de Campinas. The place was Araras, in the State of Sao Paulo, which can nowadays be reached in about 3 hours travel time, as it is only 200Km from Sao Paulo city. In those days, it took about one week since the railway did not serve that region. The problem was that Araras was only a stop, even though it seemed like an outpost. They were to settle further deep into the state, following the line of expansion of coffee into new areas. They ended up in a small village, called Monte Alto, and from there taken to a clearing place open in the woods and told: This is it! And there was nothing...no houses, no wells, nothing to eat. They were instructed to set up camp there, that they would be given building material to build the houses they would occupy, and that they would start working the plantation the following day. The building of the house, the planting of vegetables, and the ordinary things in life could wait and be done on the little time left after a full day's work. Meanwhile, they had, of course, credit to buy from the farm's store. You know the rest...
Eventually they got their own piece of land! That is either because the landowner honored their contract after 5 years or much later, when the Italian Government threatened to stop the emmigration flow since a lot many contracts were not being properly honored at the time. They have their land close to the city of Taquaritinga, São Paulo State, and called it Sitio Sabiá. Giuseppe lived to be 92 years old and spent his later years in a property he had acquired in Taquaritinga, close to the local hospital, that was big enough to keep in some farm animals. He is said to have died because he got very sad after Marina, his wife, had died six moths before.
It would be nice to describe here, however briefly, the life of each of Giuseppe's children.
I, however, do not know much, even the story of my own grandfather Tertuliano is quite incomplete.
He married Angela Cian (or Sian) in 1904, soon after returning from a long trip into Italy.
He was in his early 20s, and somehow was able to acquire some land in the neighbouring
city of Santa Adelia. It was there that all his children were born. Later, on account of
the coffee price crisis that struck the market several times in the early 1900's together with
the impact of the Great Depression in 1930, he was forced to sell his lands to pay the
crop creditors (my father once told me the cause of it all was someone in the family, with
financial problems, that he tried to rescue in vain). As a result, with the remainder of the net
sale, Tertuliano and Angela bought 86 acres of land in the city of Quatá bearing the
name 'Fazenda Monte Alvão'. To be continued...
This is the Roncada Family Web Site. It is an ongoing effort to collect and disseminate the genealogical tree of our name and the related family names which we are also part of. You are encouraged to participate in this effort sharing with us any information about the Roncada.
