Michael Francis Xavier Gigliotti was born in 1921 in Utica, New York.  His father Francesco Savera Gigliotti was born, an American citizen, in San Bernardo, Calabria, Italy.  His grandfather Michele Francesco Savero Gigliotti, had been born in Braddock, Pennsylvania, the son of an immigrant family that had been recruited from Calabria by the steel and railroad industries to fill their need for laborers.  Grandfather Michele received only a missionary-school education, in Italian, before he began working in the steel mills at age eleven.  By the time he was seventeen, he had accumulated enough scrip to enable him to purchase passage back to Italy, with the intention of learning a trade and finding a wife and starting a family.

 

Michael's father, Francesco Savero Gigliotti, was brought by his father, Michele, along with his family, to Utica, New York, where Michele opened a butcher shop in accordance with his apprenticeship training from Italy.  Fluent in both Italian and English, Francesco, as a very young man, became influential and politically important among the Calabrian immigrant population in Utica.  After graduation from the Utica Free Academy he began several businesses with the help of uncles and other relatives.   Among them were a taxicab company, a photo studio, and the East Utica Savings Bank, of which Francesco became an officer.  With his father and his brothers, he also started the Oneida Charcoal Company, which manufactured and packaged that material.  In 1920 Francesco married Maria (Mary) Caligiure; they had two children, Michael and Francis Pasquale. 

 

In 1922 Francesco died in the midst of a tuberculosis epidemic, leaving behind his widow Mary and sons Michael and Francis (who had been born blind).  Michael's mother Mary kept Francis with her as she moved in with her parents and began a small business as a seamstress and dressmaker in Utica; Michael lived with his paternal grandparents in Utica and, occasionally, with cousins on a farm in Clinton, New York.  In 1925, in Utica, Mary met and married Armando Castellini, a widower with a successful real estate and insurance business in Hoboken, New Jersey.  Armando's first wife came from a Utica family that was a neighbor to Mary's family.