First select your language tab; English, Italian, Dutch.
We're so pleased you dropped in to visit our site. We've worked for over 30 years on this family and its connections to our ancestors. Since the First Edition of The Palladino Family in America book was first published in 2004 we uncovered a treasure trove of new information relating to the Palladino / Pauldine family genealogy and have now traced and factually documented the family tree all the way back to the late 1600’s and have added hundreds of additional family members. Thus the 1st edition is now woefully out-of-date and no longer in print. Inasmuch as family history research is a rather open-ended task that is never really completed the 2nd Edition of The Palladino Family in America, was published and may be ordered at Barnes & Noble bookstores or on Amazon.com. The book is a whopping 436 pages beginning with our ancestors in the feudal Kingdom of Naples and Two Sicilies. Italy was not yet a country.
Due to space limitations the 2nd Edition contains only the direct descendants of Michele Palladino, circa 1695. There are several thousand documented sources and hundreds of newspaper clippings of births, engagements, weddings, obituaries, funerals, and photographs that because of their sheer volume were not included in the book but may be found and downloaded from this Palladino / Pauldine family website.
You may wonder why the Hoetjes family link tab in the upper right is included in this Palladino family tree website. The website author Peter Hoetjes married into the Palladino clan and fell in love not only with his wife, but also with her entire colorful Italian family. My genealogical research for both families has been a labor of love.
The Chosen
We are the chosen. In each family there is one who seems called to find the ancestors. To put flesh on their bones and make them live again. To tell the family story and to feel that somehow they know and approve. Doing genealogy is not a cold gathering of facts but, instead, breathing life into all who have gone before. We are the story tellers of the tribe. All tribes have one. We have been called, as it were, by our genes. Those who have gone before cry out to us: Tell our story. So, we do. In finding them, we somehow find ourselves. How many graves have we stood before now and cried? I have lost count. How many times have we told the ancestors, "You have a wonderful family; you would be proud of us.". How many times have we walked up to a grave and felt somehow there was love there for us? We cannot say. It goes beyond just documenting facts. It goes to who I am, and why I do the things I do. The photo is the sanctuary of the Church of Santa Maria Maggiore in Campobasso, Italy where many of our oldest Palladino family forefathers were christened, married, and worshiped. This ancient parish church is located within the medieval walls of the old city and on the same hill dominated by the Monforte castle.
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Family Name Origin
photo: Salvatore C. Pauldine & Florence Lyda Pero Wedding 1936
The family surname is directly derived from the Italian first name "Paladino" and its French language counterpart “Paladin”. The first recorded Paladino was a medieval knight and the nephew to the Holy Roman Emperor Charlemagne, 742 – 814 AD. Paladin was one of the twelve knights in attendance on Charlemagne.
The original family name back in Italy was Palladino. Following the immigration of numerous Palladino's to America late in the nineteenth and early twentieth century the name for those that emigrated to Oswego, New York evolved to Pauldine. It was thought by many that government officials at Ellis Island changed many last names because of difficulties in proper surname pronunciation. That however was rarely the case. Many of the immigrants themselves, in their struggle to adapt, moderated their Italian identity and changed their names to more American-sounding ones. We surmise, that in this circumstance, that local Oswego employers, following the new immigrants employment in their new jobs in America, altered and anglicized the family surname to Pauldine.
Other related Palladino family from the Campobasso Italy region retained their original family name and settled in Elmira and Syracuse, New York, Connecticut, Pennsylvania, and Cumberland, Wisconsin areas. There are numerous included names of Paladino's spelled with one L although we have not yet uncovered any direct relationship to those spelled with two L's.
I hope that The Palladino Family in America website and family book will be the object of conversation at family reunions, holidays, weddings and other gatherings.
Family updates, histories, and photo's are welcomed and may be sent to:
Peter A. Hoetjes,
61 New Milford Road East,
Bridgewater, Connecticut 06752-1122
E-mail: TheBizWriter@yahoo.com
Give me your tired, your poor,
Your huddled masses yearning to breathe free,
The wretched refuse of your teeming shore.
Send these, the homeless, tempest-tossed, to me:
I lift my lamp beside the golden door.
Emma Lazarus. 19th century American poet. “The New Colossus”
Printed on the base of the Statue of Liberty