The places
A hill village with no street names. A town so windy it can knock a lorry over. A plain where you can watch a storm coming for an hour before it arrives.
A stone village on top of a hill, small enough that nobody needed street names. The priest wrote families down by their house number instead — ours lived at house 5, and then at house 19.
A town squeezed between the sea and a bare grey mountain wall, at the exact point where a road crosses the mountains. That road is the only reason Senj existed.
A village up in the hills behind Senj, built on purpose in the 1600s for families fleeing an invading army. Toma was born in house number 114.
A seaside town of pebble beaches an hour down the coast from Senj. Your great-grandpa Ivan was born here in 1925, his first daughter was born here in 1948, and Hedviga sang in the grandest building in the town — the Hotel Therapia.
A green farming valley under the hills, about twenty miles from Naples and its volcano. Nine documented generations of Falcos were born, married and buried here.
A river city on one of the biggest rivers on Earth — the Paraná is over 4,800 km long, and ships come up it from the sea even though it is hundreds of kilometres inland.
A vast, dry, almost empty plain. Hot in the day, cold at night, and so flat and open that you can see a storm coming from an hour away. Farms out here are enormous because the land feeds so little.
A village on the lower slopes of Mount Etna — the name means, literally, “the foot of Etna”. The volcano above it is still active, and still smoking.
A fishing town on the strait between Sicily and the mainland, with a castle on a rock above the water. Two of the ten families come from here — the Arenas and the Polistenas.
A small white town above a beach on the Calabrian coast. Nine straight generations of one family were born, married and buried here without leaving.
Chatham was a great naval dockyard on the Medway where ships were built and soldiers embarked. Parramatta was a convict settlement upriver from Sydney. One family had children in both, two years apart.
George Kolbe was born in Soho and baptised at St Anne’s. His father made clothes on Conduit Street, just off Bond Street — then, as now, one of the smartest shopping streets in London.
Things that are still there
This is not all in the past. Some of it you could get on a plane and put your hand on.
The gravestone at Burgersdorp
George Kolbe and Margaret Downing are under a cut-stone monument inside an iron railing, and it is still standing. It says he was born in London on 7 December 1802 — and two hundred years later somebody found the London church book, which says exactly the same day.
The wall grave at Senj
Ljubomir and Milka are in the cemetery wall, with two of their sons. For a while nobody could read the stone, until a photograph turned up that had been taken in soft light instead of hard sun.
The books at Pazin
The parish registers of Gračišče are in the State Archive at Pazin, and you can ask for them. The page that proves four generations of this family is a ruled table somebody filled in with a dip pen.
Sant’Andrea at Arienzo
The church where a priest wrote Pasquale Falco into a book in October 1767 is still there, and still a church.
St Anne’s, Soho
The London church that recorded George Kolbe’s birth in 1803. It was bombed in the war and partly rebuilt, but the tower still stands and the registers survived.
Four graves in a row at Nudgee
RFM and MJM’s four Italian great-grandparents lie in consecutive plots at Nudgee in Brisbane — V-1026, V-1027, V-1028, V-1029 — buried in the order they died, with nineteen years between the first and the last. Born in three towns that had never heard of each other, and they ended up side by side.
The hotel Hedviga sang in
It is still standing, and it is still a hotel. It opened in 1895 as the Hotel Archduke Joseph, took the name Therapia in 1899 when a water-cure clinic moved in downstairs, and it is now protected as a historic monument. It stopped being called the Therapia in 2013, when an Austrian hotel company bought it and renamed it the Kvarner Palace — so the name she sang under is gone, and the room is not. You could walk into it.
Toowong and Dutton Park
Two Brisbane cemeteries hold four generations of D’Arcys, including the surveyor who helped chart the ground Melbourne stands on.