Mazza
A village at the foot of a volcano. The family this whole side is named after — and the shortest line in it.
Mazza is the Italian word for a club or a mallet. Somebody was nicknamed that a long time ago, and it stuck. It is a very common name in Sicily.
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.
Nobody to look at — yet
📷 No pictures. Not one.
No photographs of the Sicilian side have been gathered here yet. The Mazza archive has a picture store — they just have not been brought across.
Things they actually did
The village is called “the foot of Etna”.
Piedimonte Etneo. That is literally what the name means, and it is literally where it is — on the lower slopes of a volcano that is still smoking today. Look for it in the big picture on the front page.
The family is named after its shortest line.
The Mazza line runs back only four generations before it stops dead at Rosario Mazza, a man with no dates at all. Meanwhile the Prostamo line, which comes in through a grandmother, reaches back nine. A surname tells you far less about where a family comes from than people think.
Sebastiano sailed on the Toscana.
Out of Genoa, on 4 October 1949. The family tree recorded eighteen crossings and not one ship’s name; somebody went to the Australian passenger index and found nine of them.
A sixteen-year-old on the Palermo.
Michele Mazza landed in 1925, off a ship out of Messina, aged sixteen. That is twenty-four years before Sebastiano — two family emigrations, a generation apart.
There are 120 Mazzas and no one can join them up.
In the whole archive there are 120 people called Mazza, in six separate groups that no record connects to each other. The name the family is named for is the most broken-up thing in it.
🔎 The bit we still can't solve
Rosario Mazza is where it stops. No birthday, no death, nothing — exactly like Gerthardus on the Booyzen side. Two families, two continents, and the same kind of locked door at the top of each.