I am going to begin by telling you the story of my grandmother, your great-grandmother.  Her name was Marietta Alaimo.  She was born in 1893 (could be 92 or 94, I'm not sure) on November 4, and she lived for 93 years.

In that time, she began life with her father, mother, sister and brother, and her own grandmother, who lived with her until I was about 5 years old.  Her name (my great grandmother) was Marianna Dainotto Alaimo, whose husband, Libertino was Carabinieri (Military Police) in Sicily.  He ruled the roost with an iron hand, and beat his children soundly when they did not obey him.

Grandma Marietta was the fighter in the family, and at the age of 14 met and fell in love with Calogero Ala.  He was older by about 10 years.  They began a flirtation when she sat on the balcony of their home, crocheting, and he would walk by and timidly glance up at her.  One day she decided to get him to pay more attention to her, so she let the ball of yarn fall in front of him, and he picked it up and came up the stairs to return it to her.  From that day forward, when he passed in the evening on his way home, Grandma would be sitting out there waiting.  This grew into a  little romance, with nothing physical happening, but a lot of fiery attaction between them.

Calogero wanted to see more of her, but she assured him that her father would absolutely kill her.  He persisted and finally she agreed to run away with him for she knew with conviction that her family would never approve of a lowly shoemaker to  be the husband of the daughter of a Carabinieri. And so it was that one night, he came for her on horseback (maybe it was only a mule) and took her to stay with his sister Paola.  When they discovered her missing in the morning, Libertino got his coworkers to help and they found her in a neighborhood town.  He insisted on taking her home with him, but she told him she would just run away again, and she did, until poor Libertino had no recourse but to take her to court.
     
Here is where Grandma would take great pride in her own spirit to confront and rebel against her father's wishes.  In the court, she was so small in stature that the judge had to have her stand on a soapbox so he could see her from the bench (She was  only 4'11" in her prime and about 4'6" in her 90's.)  She told the judge that if he ruled that she had to return to her home, she would continue to run away to be with the man she loved.  So the judge wisely told Libertino that it was useless and that he might as well let them get married....and in due time, that is the way it was.
     
Once married, Grandma got pregnant and miscarried that child at the age of 16.  She subsequently had my mother (Angelina) . A year later, they returned to Italy because Grandma was missing her family, and here they stayed and had two other children, Marianina (your own grandmother) and Gesualdo (Uncle Joe Ala)   When word came that Calogero's father, Gesualdo Ala was dying, Calogero (grandma called him Lili) said he had to see his father before he died.  By this time, WWI was raging in Europe, but Lili insisted, so the family took off back to Sicily, the little town of Naro, where the entire family had been born and still lived.
     
Now Lili and Marietta knew that the minute Calogero hit Italian soil he would be drafted, and they decided having another baby would help his draft status.  So when they moved, their fourth child was in the making.  But alas, Calogero was not to come through the war unscathed.  He was shot in the leg.  He wrote a letter to Grandma saying that it would not matter if they cut his leg off since he was a shoemaker and could sit at his work.  But it was not to be.  He contracted gangrene, and he died.
     
Grandma was devastated!  She was unconsolable.  She locked herself in a room, in the dark and refused to eat.  The family could not bring her out of her deep despair.  The fourth of their children, a little girl, was born on August 3, 1917 and was named "Calogera" (female version of "Calogero") after her father.  She too was called "Lili".....That is the Aunt Lily we all remember.
     
Now Grandma was very unhappy in Italy.  She hated the country for killing her beloved.  So she wrote to her Aunt , Caterina Tropia Dainotti (my own father's mother who was married to Grandma's uncle, Alfonso Dainotti... BROTHER to Mariannina, Grandma's mother).  Can you follow that?
     
Now Caterina Dainotti (the name got changed from the "o" on the end to an "i" by Ellis Island) had six children of her own, but a heart as big as all-outdoors, and she vowed she was going to take in this forlorn widow and her four children.  There followed a great upheaval in the family, as they were reluctant to let poor little Marietta and her kids go off to a new land in the state she was in.  At this point, Caterina stepped in and told them that she would see to it that they all found homes in the new land, hence the entire family on the immigration papers...
     
Caterina herself went before the immigration officials as sponsor.  She had borrowed money from everyone she knew and carried it in her bra, to show she could well afford to take care of these immigrants, and pulled thousands of dollars in gold coin from the bra, saying she had much more where that came from.  So she was awarded guardianship.  She took them home, found them jobs, got them an apartment near her, and sent some of her children to help out with the babies Marietta had.  Marietta's mother, father, sister (Philomena/"Fanny")  and brother (Ferdinando) all lived with her.  They took care of the children when she went out to work.