It all started with a WWII photo of my grandfather, Patrick “Petey Mack” Pantoliano. I never knew him; he died when I was one year old.
To learn more about him and the rich family life of Hoboken, NJ in the middle of the 1900s, I reached out to as many living family members as I could and I collected, scanned, and shared their old photos. In so doing, I learned much family history.
I set out to create a family tree and learned that the patriarch, Francesco Pantoliano emigrated from Monte San Giacomo, Salerno with his entire family in the late 1870s, settling first in New York, and eventually, Hoboken.
I then discovered the civil records housed on FamilySearch, and, eventually, those on the Antenati portal and set out to trace the family backward as far as it would go. I learned that Francesco’s grandfather, Francesco Pantoliano married Benedetta Setaro from Sassano.
I still felt that I was missing the full picture, so, starting in 1809 I cataloged all of the existing civil records of Monte San Giacomo into a series of interconnected family trees with the thought of tracing the Pantoliano family diaspora to the United States. This turned into the Monte San Giacomo Project.
I then discovered the Italian Parish Archives and the work that Peter Barbella and John Cavallone did to photograph and index the records from San Giovanni Evangelista in Sassano. Given the proximity to Monte San Giacomo there was bound to be a lot of cross-over, so I created family trees from the Sassano records between 1644 and 1945.
But it all comes back to Monte San Giacomo for me, and I know other communes in Salerno, specifically the Teggiano/Policastro diocese have more data on the Monte San Giacomese…..so I created this project to publish the research so that anyone can use it for their own searches.