People - 2 Dicembre 2020 The Monongah Coal Mine Disaster of 1907 and the Lives of the Widows and Children Grandpa Tropea worked in those mines and he gently pressed into my heart feelings for so many sons, husbands, fathers, cugini and paesani obliterated in a few seconds - and those miners who were not reported. Those unreported miners remained in my memory and, years later, I tried to identify them. Central to understanding the disaster is the documentation of horrors and deceptions in managing the recovery, in the identification and burial of dead miners.