St. Raphael Society for Italian Immigrants (New York, NY) Records (CMS 005)
July 11, 2016
The Saint Raphael Society for Italian Immigrants was founded in New York in July, 1890 on the initiative of the Scalabrinian Fathers. Throughout its 32 years, the St. Raphael Society assisted newly arrived Italian immigrants in a variety of ways: finding jobs, adjusting irregularities in immigration papers, finding and contacting relatives, visiting sick Italian immigrants in hospitals. Its primary service consisted of providing food and shelter to those Italian immigrants, among them minors, who found themselves destitute, unable to gain a livelihood, or unable to proceed to their place of destination. For this purpose, the Society operated the Casa di San Raffaele. It closed in 1923.
The collection is made up of correspondence with ecclesiastical figures and departments dealing with Italian immigrants, annual reports with photographs of immigrants and personal accounts of immigrant families, financial reports, newspaper clippings, case histories of immigrants with photographs and illustrations, and other materials.