One hundred years ago tomorrow, a child drowned in Hamilton Harbour. "Sad death of little Italian girl," read the headline in The Spec.

That moment changed everything for those who loved her. We will learn that even today the family has not forgotten Julia Rosa.

The story is told by Florina Rosa Castura, retired principal of Cardinal Newman high school. She took a tour of Holy Sepulchre cemetery this spring. She checked the stone of young Julia, who would have been her aunt, and realized that a century has come to pass.

So Florina gathered the family photos and pulled the story together for us.

Her grandmother and grandfather lived in Recaoro, a town in northern Italy. They had a piece of land but it was rocky and hilly and hard to make a living. Around the turn of the century, they set out for Canada.

Grandfather found work as a labourer in the steel mills and the couple lived near the harbour.

Early in the summer of 1906, they had their first child and named her Julia.

They had boarders and it's believed one of them left the gate open that day. Julia, 26 months old, wandered down to the water. It looked as though she had been washing her doll's clothes.

"My grandfather found her face down," Florina says. "It was too late."

With that death, the lustre of life in a new country vanished.

A son was born and named Julio after his departed sister. Two girls were born here too, but the loss was still too hard to bear.

Grandmother did not want to live here anymore.

The family moved back to Recaoro, close to the mountains, far from the water.

Five more children were born. It was a difficult life, trying to raise a big family on the receipts of a small farm. But grandmother gladly paid the price. In the hills, no child of hers would drown. None learned to swim. All learned to be afraid of water.

Grandmother died quite young, age 60, in 1942.

Her son Luigi married four years later. Nine months later, a daughter was born. That would be Florina.

Soon Florina and her parents moved to Hamilton, to a house near the mills at 122 Birmingham St. A couple of years later, in 1950, grandfather joined them.

He was 70 then and still looking for things to do. He had a part-time job fixing bottle crates for Dominion Beverage on John North.

He and son Luigi had a chicken business on the side. They would go down to Cayuga, pick up a load of poultry in their little red truck, and sell live birds to their Italian neighbours.

In that same truck, Florina would go to Holy Sepulchre with her father and grandfather each Nov. 2, All Souls' Day.

"Grandfather would tell the story of Julia drowning and about how she was just a little innocent. I could feel his grief.

"I remember we would clear off all the dry leaves. We brought mums from the garden and said a few prayers.

"One year grandfather felt the letters on the stone needed to be clearer. So we bought a little can of gold paint."

Grandfather stayed vigorous until the end. As with his wee daughter half a century earlier, his death made the news pages of this paper. He became the year's first pedestrian fatality when hit by a taxi while crossing Barton Street East on a rainy night, April 26, 1960.

He has a daughter still living in Hamilton. That's Florina's aunt, Caterina Cornale, in her 90s. She travels from her Mountain home on a regular basis to tend the grave of the sister she never knew.

Most of the other gravestones in that area are not legible anymore, and the little lambs and angels that graced them are broken off or worn away by the elements, like carvings made of soap. No one is left to care.

But little Julia still has family. Florina will stop by tomorrow with fresh flowers.

"We're each just a little blip on the map but there's continuity, too. New generations come along."

StreetBeat appears Monday, Wednesday and Friday.

pwilson@thespec.com

905-526-3391