Ten families,
four cousins.
All four of you were born in Brisbane. The people you come from lived on four different continents.
A stonecutter on a Croatian hill. A carrier who led packhorses over a mountain. A farmer in Italy, a horse trainer in Argentina, a family on the dry plains of South Africa, a soldier who sailed from England — and, on your cousins’ side, a village at the foot of a volcano and a fishing town under a castle.
Here is how all ten of them ended up in one city.
Ten families, one road. Everything in this picture is somewhere your family actually lived — the hill village, the mountain pass, the volcano, the castle on the rock, the English dockyard, the dry plain, and the house with the mango tree.
ADD & MCD’s dad’s side
The side all four of you share
RFM & MJM’s dad’s side
Start at the bottom, where you are, and climb. Every line going up is a real person who really lived. Tap any family to open its own page.
The ten families
Each one has its own colour, its own country, and its own best story.
Defranceski
Stonecutters on a hill in Croatia, who came down to the sea and then sailed to the other side of the world.
Falco
A family named after a bird, who farmed the same green valley for more than two hundred years.
Blažević
A mountain village built on purpose, a port killed by a railway, and one family name spelled in three different alphabets.
Lerena
Horse people. From a river town in Argentina to the racetracks of South Africa — and one of the rarest names on Earth.
Booyzen
Farmers on the dry Karoo plains, a name with a puzzle in it that took two hundred years to spot, and a gravestone that told the truth after ninety.
Mazza
A village at the foot of a volcano. The family this whole side is named after — and the shortest line in it.
Prostamo
The deepest line in the whole family — nine generations, back to 1697 — and it arrives through a grandmother.
Arena
A castle on a rock above a fishing village, where the swordfish boats have prows as long as the boat.
Polistena
From the same fishing town as the Arenas — two families who grew up in sight of each other and ended up in the same Brisbane cemetery.
D’Arcy
A soldier who guarded a convict ship, a surveyor who helped draw the map of Melbourne, and a parrot that shouted “Come in!”
Some of the people
These are photographs of people you are actually related to. The oldest of them was born more than a hundred and sixty years ago.
Ursula 
Filomena 
The wall grave at Senj 
Bob’s passport, 1940 
George Augustus Kolbe How far, and which way
Brisbane is in the middle. Each family sits in the exact direction you would have to set off in to reach their home town — and the lines are drawn to scale, so the longer the line, the further away it really is.
Two pins are split. Croatia carries Defranceski and Blažević, about 70 km apart. Italy carries five — Falco near Naples, and Mazza, Prostamo, Arena and Polistena down in Sicily and Calabria, all within about 350 km of each other.
Six more ways in
How they all came together
Families join together when two people meet. And right at the end, two sisters who were born on the same day married two men whose families had nothing whatsoever in common.