A Coal Miner’s Daughter: The Musical Journey of Marie Montain (Mary C. Carbone, 1914-2004)

Speaker: Jerry Carbone

Mary, who changed her stage name to Marie Montain, was born in 1914 in a coal camp called Carneyville, near Sheridan, Wyoming. As a daughter of recent Italian immigrants, Mary found her love of music and made a splendid career as a violinist and opera singer. She trained at the Lamont School of Music in Denver as well as prestigious conservatories in Rome and Naples and eventually went on to sing and travel with the Philadelphia Opera Company.

Bio

Jerry Carbone is a retired public library director and now a professional genealogist who enjoys research in Italian (southern), Colorado, Wyoming, & Vermont topics.  He has written articles for Vermont History, The Colorado Genealogist, and numerous book reviews for American Library Association Booklist in “Reference Books Bulletin”, and a forthcoming article in Annals of Wyoming, “Italian Immigrants and Yellow Journalism in a Sheridan Coal Camp.” He lives in Brattleboro, Vermont with his wife, Kathy and cat, Theo.

Carbone received his B.A. in History from Colorado State University, Fort Collins, Colorado, and his M.L.S. from University of Texas at Austin, Graduate School of Library and Information Science. After 37 years at Brooks Memorial Library, 22 years as its Director, Carbone retired and went on to earn a Certificate in Genealogical Research at Boston University in May 2016, as well as further education with G.R.I.P. 2016, “Italian Genealogical Research,” and a ProGen course in 2017. He is a member of Association of Professional Genealogists, the New England and Colorado chapters and its Italian Research Group, as well as the Italian Genealogy Group (IGG), and the Genealogy Society of Vermont. Carbone is a co-facilitator for the Windham County Genealogy Interest Group, which meets on Zoom and at two public libraries in Windham County, Vermont. Videos of past presentations are available here .

The paternal side of his family immigrated from Reggio Calabria in the 1890s and early 20th century and went west to work in the burgeoning coal fields of Wyoming. His paternal grandfather was a bird of passage over a 17-year period and lived in Marshfield, Oregon; Sheridan, Wyoming; Rincon, Monclova, Coahuila, Mexico, and finally, with his family who immigrated in 1929, in Denver, Colorado. His maternal side is from Potenza, located in the region of Basilicata, Italy.