Giuseppe Clemente
B. 1864 D.1938
Giuseppe was born on 26 April 1864 in Sant Elia Fiumerapido, a beautiful mountainside village located in Frosinone, Italy. He was the first- born son of Domenico Clemente and Maria Lanni.
At the age of 23 he married Arcangela Di Mambro on 29 September 1887. In 1889 they welcomed the birth of their first child, a daughter they named Antonia.
At this moment in time, we don’t know exactly when or why Giuseppe, Arcangela and their daughter Antonia, born in 1889, decided to make the move from Italy to England, but we do know that by 1892 they were living in Birmingham, Warwickshire.
According to the records of St. Michael’s Roman Catholic church in Moor Street, their first- born son and my great grandfather, Domenico, was baptised there in 1892. This church was at the heart of a poor area of Birmingham known at that time as Little Italy, because of the large number of homes filled with their own countrymen. We can assume that they were living there somewhere, probably with ‘relatives’!
Five years later in 1897 Giuseppe and Arcangela had their third child, another son, Luigi.
In 1901 the Census shows that the family have moved out of the busy, dirty city centre to Bromsgrove, a more rural area a few miles south of Birmingham. Sadly, we found a 1903 death certificate for their youngest son, Luigi, it states that he died in August of pneumonia. The address is given as Fazeley Street, for some reason the family had moved back to Little Italy.
The 1911 Census has Giuseppe listed as living in Bromsgrove, however Arcangela and Antonia are listed as living in Bartholomew Street, Birmingham. Why two different places for the family, we may never know. Perhaps Arcangela and Antonia were commuting to work in the city from Bromsgrove, and just happened to be there on the day of the census. Perhaps after the death of Luigi there had been a breakdown of the marriage….
1915 is a time for celebration, with Antonia getting married. The marriage ceremony is performed in St. Michaels’s, Moor Street. Antonia married an Italian, Antonio Lamarre, they went on to have ten children who must have brought Giuseppe and Arcangela more celebrations and a lot of joy.
In 1929 Archangela dies, we will not know until the 1921 Census is released if they were still together but, at the age of 65, Giuseppe marries again to a younger lady named Annie Nickless.
Giuseppe’s life ends in 1938, at the age of 74. He left his house on 19 January tragically never to return, his body was eventually found in the water of the Severn River on 10th March 1938.
Birmingham Daily Gazette – 12 March 1938: ‘FELL IN RIVER – Tragedy of wandering man’
The body of an elderly man recovered from the Severn at Clevelode ferry, near Great Malvern, on Thursday, was identified as that of Joseph Giuseppe Clementi aged 73 of Charford Rd, Bromsgrove, who had been missing from home since 19 January.
At the inquest at Clevelode last night, the daughter, Mrs Anne Lamarey, said that her father had once or twice before wandered off and become lost, causing her to seek the aid of the police in finding him.
The coroner recorded a verdict of “found drowned”, adding in view of the daughter’s evidence as to her father’s tendencies that Clementi apparently wandered off and fell into the river.
During his lifetime Giuseppe married twice and had three children and sixteen grandchildren. He made the decision to leave his parents and homeland in Italy to seek a new life for himself and his family in the UK. We can only hope that he believed that he had made the right decision. Today there are many of his descendants enjoying a life that his decision made possible.
