Becoming American: The Journey of Italians in Genesee County

Genesee County historian Mike Eula will present this free program. Although such Italian immigrants as Paolo Busti made their presence felt in Genesee County, New York as early as the late eighteenth century – in his case as the Holland Land Company’s Agent General orchestrating real estate transactions in Western New York on behalf of Dutch investors – it was not until the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries that large numbers of Italian immigrants began to make their appearance in Genesee County. Their origins – and the initial reaction of the non-Italian community – were typical of who these more recent immigrants were and what they faced elsewhere in the United States by the closing decades of the nineteenth century. How those early reactions of many Americans eventually changed, and how the descendants of those immigrants ultimately became an integral part of Genesee County and the country at large, is a story still unfolding today.