The Doctor Who Held the Key to New York: Vincenzo Sellaro
Documented family tree & key facts
Vincenzo Sellaro — physician; founder of the Order Sons of Italy in America (1905). b. Polizzi Generosa (Palermo), Sicily, 24 April 1868.
Parents: Giuseppe Sellaro (b. Polizzi Generosa, 20 Sep 1837), master shoemaker × Serafina Polizzotto (m. 31 Dec 1867).
The line — Sellaro, of Polizzi Generosa (Palermo), Sicily
Vincenzo Sellaro (the elder), shoemaker — furthest documented
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Giuseppe Sellaro (b. Polizzi Generosa, 20 Sep 1837), master shoemaker × Serafina Polizzotto (m. Polizzi Generosa, 31 Dec 1867)
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Vincenzo Sellaro (b. 24 April 1868)
Worth knowing
The doctor was named for his grandfather, the elder Vincenzo Sellaro, a shoemaker of Polizzi Generosa — three generations of the same Madonie mountain town before the man who gave Italian America its largest institution.
Documented by original acts (civil and parish registers of Polizzi Generosa, Province of Palermo). Names earlier than the one marked “furthest documented” are not yet proven and are left out.
When Governor Al Smith handed him a golden key to the State of New York in 1928, Vincenzo Sellaro had already given Italian America something far larger: an institution. A Sicilian doctor from a shoemaker’s house in Polizzi Generosa, he founded the Order Sons of Italy in America — still the country’s largest Italian-American organisation. His own story begins in a mountain town in the Madonie, and the civil registers there record it act by act.
A shoemaker’s son from Polizzi Generosa
Vincenzo Sellaro was born on 24 April 1868, at ten in the evening, in the San Giovanni quarter of Polizzi Generosa (Province of Palermo); his father declared the birth two days later, on 26 April, before the mayor Serafino Borgese. The act names the father, Giuseppe Sellaro — born in the town on 20 September 1837, a maestro calzolaio (master shoemaker) and himself a son of a Vincenzo Sellaro — a shoemaker in his turn, seventy years old at the time — whose name the newborn took. Giuseppe had first married Ignazia Puglisi on 9 August 1863; left a widower, on 31 December 1867 he married Serafina Polizzotto, just seventeen, the daughter of Salvatore. The future founder was a child of that second marriage — and behind him stand three generations of Sellaro shoemakers in Polizzi Generosa, a cobbler’s bench at the very root of the man who would found a national order.
Little Italy’s doctor
Sellaro trained in medicine and emigrated to New York, opening a gynaecology practice at 203 Grand Street, in the heart of Manhattan’s Little Italy. There he watched Italian immigrants suffer and die in American hospitals where no one spoke their language. His answer was practical: he gathered bilingual physicians and helped found the Columbus Italian Hospital, where a patient could be understood in Italian — and later organised a school for midwives under the city’s Board of Health.
The Order Sons of Italy, 1905
On 7 June 1905, in his own home, Sellaro gathered a handful of fellow immigrants — the lawyer Antonio Marzullo, the pharmacist Ludovico Ferrari, the sculptors Giuseppe Carlino and Pietro Viscardi, and others — and founded the Order Sons of Italy in America. He wrote its constitution; its first lodge, Mario Rapisardi No. 1, was chartered on 31 August 1905. What began around a doctor’s table grew into a national order of mutual aid, dignity and belonging for millions of Italian immigrants and their children.
The key to New York
Honours followed the work. Sellaro joined the American Medical Association and pursued research on diabetes and cancer; in 1922 the Kingdom of Italy made him a knight; and in 1928 Governor Alfred E. Smith presented him with the key to the State of New York. He died in New York on 28 November 1932 and was buried at Woodlawn Cemetery in the Bronx — a country doctor from the Madonie who had become one of the founding fathers of Italian America.
The documents behind the story
From a Sicilian mountain town to a New York institution — the primary acts that anchor the family. Click any document to enlarge it.
Every Italian-American story starts in a specific town, with a specific record. Whether your family left a Sicilian mountain village or a coastal city, the acts are there to be found and read.
Documented genealogical research by Clemente Suardi. To trace and document your own Italian family, act by act, request a free preliminary evaluation.