Descendants of John & Jane Bordessa
(1820s-1880s)
John and Jane Bordessa were my great-great-grandparents. Early Census information said that John was a naturalised British citizen, having been born in Italy. A web search initially suggested that the Bordessa family originally came from Lombardy, northern Italy, perhaps around the Como area; there are Bordessas still there today.1871 Census information very kindly supplied by Maggs confirmed that John was born in Como. Recently I found John in the 1851 census; his absence had previously been mystifying, but his name had been mis-spelt as John Bordefa. The entry confirmed his residence as the wholly predictable Clerkenwell (Eagle Court)!
Bloody Foreigners: the story of immigration by Robert Winder, 2005, Abacus has a whole chapter called ‘Little Italy’ (pages 178-193). He says this about the rural families of Lombardy in the early 19th century:
“They had been ravaged many times by the Napoleonic Wars: conscripted into armies, their livestock lost troops. There had been a typhus epidemic in 1816 and outbreaks of cholera ever since … A month-long trudge north across the Alps to Germany, France or England had to be worth a try. The mighty Italian exodus, which by the end of the century would swell to some half a million people each year, had begun.” page 181
And this about Italian immigration in the 19th century:
“In 1861 there were just under five thousand Italian-born
people in England and Wales; by 1901 there were over twenty thousand, and
nearly five thousand in Scotland.” page 185
One of the less than 5000 Italians in the country in 1861 was
my great-great grandfather, John Bordessa.
This is the Bordessa part of my family tree, up to my grandfather James Garside
Neville, who died c1960.
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