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.
Polistena is a town in Calabria, so the name almost certainly means “the family from Polistena”. People were often named after where they came from.
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.
None yet. Angela lived until 2018, so photographs of her almost certainly exist in the family.
Things they actually did
Two families from one small town.
The Arenas and the Polistenas both come from Scilla. Angela Polistena married Rocco Arena, and they had grown up in the same place — a town of a few thousand people on a rocky coast.
Antonino came on the Surriento.
Out of Naples, arriving 17 June 1949. The Australian index had him filed under a shortened name, which is why nobody had found the crossing before.
Angela lived the longest.
Born at Scilla in 1925, died in Brisbane in 2018 — ninety-three years, and the last of the four great-grandparents on this side to go.
The name changed on the way up.
Go up past Angela’s father Giovanni and the surname in the records turns into Pontillo. Names shifting like that is normal in old Italian registers, and it is exactly the same puzzle as Booysen turning into Booyzen.
🔎 The bit we still can't solve
Above Antonio the name becomes Pontillo, and it is not yet clear whether that is the same family writing itself differently or two families being joined up by mistake.