About.

Sassano to Chicago is a genealogy resource for those with ancestors from the southern Italian town of Sassano, in the province of Salerno, region of Campania, who settled in Chicago. John Cavallone is one of those descendants, working toward helping others discover their heritage. My goal is to provide the definitive resource for the Sassano families that settled on Federal Street in the early 20th century — and I'm confident continued work here will get us there. I encourage others of Italian descent to research and document your own family history, to preserve it for future generations.

If you find any material on this site helpful, I'm accepting donations to help continue the research — see the Support This Project page for PayPal and Venmo. Thank you!

I encourage all fellow paisano to document their family history before it's lost forever. The Casa Italia Florence Bartolomei Roselli Library is helping preserve our history through their "Saving Our Stories" initiative.

If you're of Sassano heritage and would like any photos from 1900 (or earlier) through 1950 posted on this site, please contact me at cavallonegenealogy@gmail.com.

Goals

Now that indexing on the Sassano Project is over 95% complete, my personal goals are:

• Take the data Peter, Pasquale, and I extrapolated from the documents and build out a Sassano Family Tree
• Assist descendants of Sassanesi in finding their pedigree
• Identify certain traits of the population — such as which lines are most likely to carry twins, which families have unusually long or short lifespans, which families tended to marry certain other families, and similar characteristics
• Continue Chicago-based research

Methodology

I regularly add individuals to my Ancestry.com tree, either at random or when someone asks for help determining their pedigree. Every few days I sync my Ancestry tree with Family Tree Maker to generate reports. Biweekly, I export the Family Tree Maker file and import it into RootsMagic, to upload the results to my public RootsMagic Online Tree. I'd like to say one tool is enough, but each has its own advantages — whether for data entry, reporting, or providing a free online source for others doing research.

As I enter individuals into my Ancestry tree, I've also been cleaning the data in the Sassano Project spreadsheets, since translation errors inevitably crop up transcribing tens of thousands of images. Peter and I have also come across records where the original scribe simply wrote the wrong name for a life event. I'm also going back over the spreadsheets, adding image and document page numbers so you can find the referenced material yourself.

Peter once told me there's more work here than one person can finish in a lifetime — I tend to agree. My goals will most likely never be 100% complete. Every day spent working toward them is enough, and I hope this work sparks similar research in other Italian towns, or anywhere else in the world.