Among them was Giuseppe Adamo. When he left his Italian village, San Mango d'Aquino, he was told there was work to be found in the coal fields of eastern Pennsylvania. Even for a 12-year-old.

It was an era of self-starters. Adamo mined coal and taught himself to read and write. In his 20s, he returned home to marry Carolina Bonacci, the bride his family had chosen for him. But before the wedding took place, he was conscripted into the Italian army. World War I was in full fury.

Adamo survived being shot (a religious medal deflected the bullet), as well as a stint in a German prison camp. On furlough in 1918, he married Carolina. (The arranged marriage lasted more than 40 years.)

Completing his military obligation, he returned to the United States in 1921, this time settling in Cleveland.

Adamo wanted desperately to study music. Some of his wages as a night watchman and as an elevator operator went for lessons. Violin, mandolin, clarinet, flute, piano, trumpet: He mastered them all. In time, he even became a music professor, teaching others to play.

He also began to compose serious pieces such as "Marcia - Il Presidente," an immigrant's musical tribute to the U.S. presidency. Like most of his works, it was published in Italy. It earned him a medal from the Italian government.

(In 1955, the piece was played by the U.S. Navy Band - conducted at the time by Nicola Adamo, Giuseppe's third child.)

With three musically gifted children, including Maria and Antoinietta, the Adamos gave frequent concerts around Cleveland and on area radio stations.

A photo of Adamo from around this time shows a debonair, almost rakish man. But the image camouflages the real Giuseppe. He was very strict, say his descendants, and very demanding.

The Great Depression came. In 1933, with Giuseppe out of work and Carolina homesick, they returned to Italy. There, the family continued giving concerts. Giuseppe continued teaching.

Returning later to America in order to preserve his new U.S. citizenship, Adamo took a variety of jobs - street vendor, barber, shoemaker and, again, watchman. In 1939, he sent for his family.

Through all that, he never stopped composing. And in time, he began recording his works, preserving them on home recordings made from wax discs.

At the time of his death in 1963, Giuseppe Adamo had three children, a sort of knighthood conferred on him by a music guild in Italy, and a proliferation of wax recordings.

He also had a grandson, Lorenzo Gigliotti.

Adamo resurrected
An accomplished musician himself and a Web page designer, Gigliotti was 5 when his grandfather died. "I don't remember him at all," he admits.

But Adamo had left the family a musical legacy. "Growing up in the 1950s and '60s (in Long Beach), I would get my weekly dose of quite an eclectic variety of 78-rpm records every Sunday morning," says Gigliotti.

"We listened to the phonograph play Johnny Cash, Elvis and a variety of old Italian songs. We also would sometimes hear some incredibly hissy, almost inaudible home recordings of Grandpa's songs."

The sad truth was that the old recordings which Adamo hoped would live through the years were, instead, disintegrating. They were breaking into fragments. Their coating was eroding. The compositions seemed doomed to oblivion.

But Antoinietta, the composer's daughter and Gigliotti's mother, had an ace in the hole - numerous aces, actually - her father's sheet music.

Gigliotti confesses he had no interest in playing the music himself, but he did want to hear it. So he combined his musical and computer skills and produced synthesized versions of four of his grandfather's compositions.

Exacting work
"I started transposing the sheet music directly into various music programs that I had acquired. After painstakingly entering each individual note in the computer as written, and sometimes having to do some math in order to make the time signatures match the notes, I pressed the play button.

"Voila! There it was: 'Digital Grandpa'!"

There are four songs on Gigliotti's "Digital Grandpa" web site. (See accompanying instructions on accessing the site.) They are:

"Isola." Played on a synthesized English horn, Gigliotti finds it reminiscent of theme music from the movie "Il Postino."

"La Sartina." He likens it to background music from Fellini films.

"Ovest."

"Antoinietta Mazurka." Adamo wrote this waltz-like melody for his daughter, Lorenzo's mother.

The songs were written in 1929 and 1930. Says Gigliotti:

"True, I did take some liberty with instrumentation and some of the accompaniment that might have been unavailable (to Adamo). But the main body of the melodies, existing accompaniment, beat and rhythm are as close to what was written as possible." He plans to synthesize - he calls the process "digital music transposing" - more of his grandfather's work.

Hearing the programmed songs played back on the computer for the first time was "a very compelling moment," says Gigliotti.

"It was as if I discovered a treasure that someone had left behind. Besides his family, these musical scores were the only cherished items that were left by this man. Forty years after his death, the music that he struggled to create now has a chance to spread and be heard by anyone with an Internet connection."

And Giuseppe Adamo will live on. As "Digital Grandpa."

Tom Hennessy's viewpoint appears Sunday, Tuesday, Thursday and Friday. He can be reached at (562) 499-1270, or via e-mail at Scribe17@aol.com