Tafner Family’s Book Released

In March 2017, the book “Família Tafner: surgimento e trajetória, na Europa e no Brasil” was released. (In English, “Tafner Family: emergence and trajectory, in Europe and Brazil” – no English version available)

The book was authored by Maria Antonietta Bellato Tafner, Olívio Taffner and Andrey José Taffner Fraga, sponsored by prof. José Tafner and prefaced by Alberto Tafner – current president of the Associazione Trentini nel Mondo (based in Trento, Italy).

In 1995 in Trento, Italy, Maria Antonietta Bellato Tafner gathered the first records that would ultimately shed light on the origins of the Tafner family. On the night she celebrated her silver wedding anniversary, she and her husband Alberto Tafner presented her extended family with her findings. Through her efforts, the history of the Tafner family was recorded for the first time.

Meanwhile, in Brazil in the mid 1990s, José Tafner and Olívio Tafner– two Brazilian members of the Tafner family– had started their own research as well.

José Tafner first contacted Antonietta Tafner and other family members in Trento with the intention of gathering information about the history and genealogy of Giovanni Tafner, José’s grandfather and the son of the immigrant Angelo Tafner, patriarch of the Tafner Family in the state of Santa Catarina (Brazil).

Around the same time, Olívio Tafner began his own research on the history and genealogy of his grandfather Guglielmo Tafner, also a son of Angelo Tafner.

Years later, Andrey José Taffner Fraga started collecting historical and genealogical data with the goal of writing a book on the history of the Tafner family. This soon developed into a collaboration, as the three authors combined their individual findings into one comprehensive body of research.

This is how the history of the Tafner Family was written: distant cousins, working together across continents and across decades. Every word in the book is the result of years of dedicated research in archives, libraries, and interviews. The book offers a comprehensive history and trajectory of the Tafner family in Europe, which merges with the history of Trentino itself, and connects deep into the German and Italian alps.

This history also includes the origins of the family’s last name: Tafner, originally written “Taufner,” in the Middle Ages (around the 1300s), from “Val dei Mocheni” (Fersental), a small Germanic valley within the province of Trento.

In the following chapters, the authors discuss migration within the province of Trento, followed by the emigration of some family members to Brazil, and to the USA.

The final chapters tell the story of Angelo Tafner, an Italian immigrant and the patriarch of the Tafner family in the state of Santa Catarina (Brazil).