I was trying to look up answers to how the pumpkin roll originated -- as in the food made of pumpkin cake rolled up with cream cheese, not the annual tradition in Ohio of the same name that apparently exists -- and found very little information as to what region of the world, culture, or place it came from. The closest thing I could find was this question thread with a single answer, reading
The pumpkin roll was created by a Italian man in the 20th century. His name was Atoni Figakroski, it was created in Rome on the 22nd of October 1924.
When googling "Atoni Figakroski," however, the only results seem to be blogs crediting him with the invention of the pumpkin roll, all created after the date of this post I've linked. To me, this implies that the man himself is entirely fabricated for shits and giggles, unless some pre-2011 evidence of his existence exists that I've been unable to find. But this still leaves my initial question, of where pumpkin rolls (again, the food, not the Ohioan tradition) came from, utterly unanswered.
"Atoni Figakroski" is a made-up name. The bizarre Italian-Polish sounding "Figakroski" is basically an hapax legomenon that only exists in relation with the alleged pumpkin roll history.
A dive in the archive.org corpus turns up a first version of the pumpkin roll sold from to 1947 to 1961 by Gifford's Ice Cream, which was cylindrical vanilla ice cream with a pumpkin-shaped core of orange-pineapple ice cream (the company no longer sells it). So: not the modern pumpkin roll, though this may have helped to make the name popular.
The first "true" pumpkin roll appears in the corpus in 1977 as the "sourdough pumpkin roll", in the recipe book Rita Davenport's Sourdough cookery, by Rita Davenport (now a motivational speaker). Another version, the "spiced pumpking roll" appears in 1978 in the Sunset cook book of desserts, by David E. Clark, who links it to Thanksgiving. From then, the recipe appears regularly in American cookbooks, including in typewritten ones (Terra Ceia Christian School, Pantego, North Carolina, 1977) maintained by church-affiliated communities.
A search in the Newspapers.com corpus also returns 1977 (24 November) as the earliest public mention of the recipe, in a Thanksgiving-themed article of the Abilene Reporter News who credits it to Sandy Howell from Kelso, Washington.
Now, those corpuses have obvious limitations and they cannot tell when and by whom the recipe was invented, but both point to 1977 as the date when this pumpkin-flavoured version of the Swiss roll became popular in the US. Note that the Terra Ceia recipe is almost identical to that in Davenport's book: it is possible that this book was the first instance and that the recipe spread like wildfire immediately. Or it could have been known for some time, since we don't know the origin of Davenport's roll (she's on LinkedIn, you can ask her!). Note that the roll cake / Swiss roll itself has a rather obscure origin going back to the 19th century (according to Wikipedia).