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BENWOOD - The morning of April 28, 1924, Istvan Vargo was ill enough to consider not going to work at Wheeling Steel Corp.'s Benwood coal mine. But with four children to support and another on the way, the Hungarian immigrant knew he should be grateful for any work.

Shortly after 7 a.m. that day, an explosion in the mine claimed the lives of Vargo and 118 other men. For 85 years, the names of these workers have been lost in the shuffle of hasty record keeping and history, but one local man is striving to compile an accurate list of the victims.

Joseph Tellitocci was always interested in history, especially when his grandmother, Julia Vargo Molnar moved in with his family in 1992. Molnar would tell elaborate stories of family history, including her memories of her father Istvan's funeral when she was 5 years old.

Though most of the coal miners were too disfigured to have open caskets at their wakes, she remembered seeing the burns on Istvan Vargo's body.

Tellitocci began to research the 1924 mine accident in his spare time. The explosion also impacted his father's side of the family, claiming the life of a great-grandmother's first husband, Pasquale Fana. She later remarried Tellitocci's great-grandfather, Luigi Tellitocci.

The explosion "pretty much altered my entire family's history," he said. "If this had never happened, I probably wouldn't be here today."

The accident affected scores of families in or around Benwood, but few had the financial means to focus on the disaster. Wives and mothers, suddenly without a source of income, were forced to take jobs or remarry. Mass burials were conducted in Greenwood and Mount Calvary cemeteries in Wheeling, and many families were unable to afford moving their lost husbands to family plots. Some burial records are even inaccurate, misspelling the names of the immigrant workers who populated the mine.

"I looked at one of those lists, and it just bugged me. I wanted to know what these men's names were," Tellitocci said.

Earlier this year, Tellitocci began cross-referencing all the records he could find. Beginning with supposed lists of the victims that he found on the Internet, Tellitocci compared these names to death certificates and interment records. In some cases, he went to the graves of these men, trying to find the proper spellings for their names.

While Tellitocci is not sure his list is completely right, he knows that other families in the area still talk about how so many men were lost on that April day. He hopes that one day a memorial will be erected to honor the fallen miners, but for now, he thinks that knowing these men's names is a proper start.

"We go to our jobs and just take for granted that we're going to come home," Tellitocci said. "These men didn't know they were going to die that day, and I think they should be memorialized in Benwood. I know there are still mine tragedies occurring, but not to the extent of this one."