Raposo family papers

The following information has been extracted from “An Immigrant’s Tale” written by João Miranda Raposo.

“My mother was born on the feast of Santiago, July 25, 1923 in the Parish of Remedios da Bretanha on the island of Sao Miguel in a farm house on land that had belonged to her father's family from time immemorial. Her father, Manuel Pacheco Miranda and his wife Mariana de Oliveira Soares were envied by the villagers. They had met and married in America and like countless ex-patriots had returned to the island with trunks of household goods bought in America and with savings that made them wealthy by the standards of the peasantry. Manuel, whose first order of business on arrival had been to purchase the ancestral homestead from the many Miranda heirs, told his neighbors that he had managed to save his pennies, vintens, in the local vernacular, and they, in the time-honored tradition of Azoreans, aptly nicknamed him "Manuel Vintao". His wife became Mariana Vintoa and there are still people in Remedios da Bretanha who remember "Tia Vintoa" and her children, os Vintiios, to this day.”

Due to Manuel’s ill health they returned to S. Miguel shortly after WWI, and they settled in Bretanha on the family’s old homestead. In 1928, Manuel traveled to Brazil to retrieve a family inheritance and subsequently passed away in a psychiatric hospital while there.

The first four of their seven children were born in Fall River, and the two oldest, Maria and João, because of their American citizenship, were able to return to the United States and eventually sponsored their mother and siblings immigration process.