ROCHESTER, N.Y. — A group of Nazareth University students are having a hand in preserving history for generations to come. 

What You Need To Know

  • Nazareth Italian and history majors will conduct in-person history interviews in Italian or English as part of their ongoing Oral History Project
  • For the past two years, led by professor Timothy Kneeland and director Joelle Carota, the project documents and preserves traditions handed down through the generation
  • Preserving their stories and family histories allows its students to thereby create a more accurate history of the Rochester metropolitan area

History can often be learned from books. But nothing tops hearing about it from those who lived it.

“Then we can pass it on and tell our next generation, this is what it’s all about being Italian or being American-Italian or American-Italian,” said Italian-American Gabriele Napolitano.

The stories of many Italian-American families who immigrated to make their home in Rochester are being preserved.

“My mother came back to this country in 1968 and she died in this country,” Napolitano said. 

Thanks to Nazareth University students like Lia Bartolotta, they have been documenting the stories and traditions as part of an ongoing oral history project for the past two years, led by professor Timothy Kneeland and director Joelle Carota.

“It's easy to just look at it like just a story,” Bartolotta said. “But when you're putting names to faces and in learning about their history, their personal history, their values, what's important to them, it is really important to put the appropriate amount of respect into that.”

Giving students the chance to meet and hear immigrants ‘coming to America’ stories firsthand.  

“My grandmother spent years as a single mother in the seventies, which was hard to do especially as a Sicilian woman,” Italian-American Serafino Pavone said.

To date, Nazareth students have interviewed, transcribed and archived close to 100 oral interviews with Rochester Italian-Americans.

“I was lucky enough to inherit my grandfather's portrait,” Italian-American Linda Labate-Burr said. “He died when he was 28 years old. Because of that and because my dad always made sure that we knew the story of how they died in the earthquake.”

Sharing stories both in English and Italian, the goal of the project is to document and preserve traditions handed down through the generations. 

Creating a more accurate history of the Rochester metropolitan area and hopefully continuing their traditions by preserving it for years to come.

“My favorite part is just kind of, I think, putting the picture together from learning about who their parents were to, to learning about who their children are,” Bartolotta said.

As students have found that the past can only be preserved in the present.

“Italy is my birth mother, America is my stepmother,” Napolitano said. “I love them both but I am still Italian.”