Falco
A family named after a bird, who farmed the same green valley for more than two hundred years.
Falco is the Latin word for falcon — a fast, sharp-eyed hunting bird. People got the name for being quick, or sharp-eyed, or for keeping falcons.
From you, all the way back
Start at the bottom. Every step up is one more generation into the past — a real person, in a real place, written down in a real book.
What do the numbers mean? “2× great-grandpa” is just a short way of writing great-great-grandpa. Once you get past three or four greats it is quicker to count them than to say them. So your grandpa’s grandpa is your 2× great-grandpa, and his grandpa is your 4× great-grandpa, and his grandpa is your 6× great-grandpa.
Look at them
Real photographs of real people you are related to. Some are more than a hundred years old.
Things they actually did
Your family is named after a falcon.
Falco means falcon. Somewhere long ago, somebody was called “the falcon” — and the nickname stuck so well that it is still your family’s name today, hundreds of years later.
A priest wrote your family down in Latin in 1767.
On 24 October 1767, in the church of Sant’Andrea at Arienzo, a priest picked up his pen and wrote that a baby had been born to Matteo Falco and Francesca Crisci, and that he was to be called Pasquale. That single line is the oldest proof we have.
They stayed put. For a very long time.
Nine generations of Falcos were born, married and buried in the same little town. Farmers, nearly all of them, working the same valley their great-great-grandparents had worked.
A saint lived in the house next door.
From 1762 to 1775 the bishop who lived in the palace right beside the family’s church was Alfonso Maria de’ Liguori — and he is a saint now. He did not baptise anybody in our family. But he was next door.
Words beat numbers.
One record looked like it said 1780. But the priest had also written the year out in Latin words: octogesimo nono — eighty-nine. So the real year was 1789. When the words and the numbers disagree, the words win.
Then one of them got on a ship to Australia.
Carmine Antonio Falco was born in Arienzo in 1901 and is buried in Brisbane. He is the one who moved the whole family to the other side of the planet.
🔎 The bit we still can't solve
Above Matteo the church book has a hole in it: the pages between 1738 and 1761 are missing. To climb any higher we have to find another way round. And Pasquale has two birthdays: the baptism register says he was a newborn in October 1767, but his death record makes him old enough to have been born in 1765. Both cannot be right, so this site follows the register.