When
A number like 1750 does not mean much on its own. So here are all ten families on one line, where you can see which of them reach back furthest — and then the biggest moments in all of them, in the order they really happened.
How far back we can prove
The solid bar starts at the oldest person we have a real date for. The faded part is older still — but it is reached through the mothers instead of the fathers, or it has not been properly checked yet.
Ten families, and 186 years between the oldest start and the youngest. The Prostamo bar reaches furthest of all — nine generations in one small Calabrian town — and it arrives through a great-grandmother, not through anybody’s surname. The short bars mark young research, not young families.
32 moments
Smokvica Krmpotska and Krivi Put were founded, not grown: families fleeing the Ottoman armies were settled in the Senj mountains to hold the frontier. Two of Hedviga's four grandparent lines come out of those villages.
Franco Antonino Prostamo, born at Briatico on the Calabrian coast. Nine generations of Prostamos follow him in the same small town, and the line reaches ADD and MCD’s cousins through a great-grandmother. He is the oldest person in this entire website.
Nicolaus Gerkacs, on the Croatian coast. But his name comes off a family tree, not out of a church book. The oldest ancestor with an actual record behind him is Joannis Antić, born about 1739 — and he is on this side too.
At Gologorica in Istria. He is the top of the Defranceski ladder, but this date comes off the family's own hand-drawn chart, not out of a register. What is certain is that he existed: later clerks kept calling his son “son of the late Giovanni”.
He grew up to command the Royal Engineers at Chatham. Above him the family papers start arguing with themselves.
He writes that a baby has been born to Matteo Falco and Francesca Crisci, and is to be called Pasquale. That single line is the oldest Falco proof there is.
In Soho. Two hundred years later the register was found, and it agrees to the day with a gravestone six thousand miles away in the Karoo.
He was seventeen. Eleven months earlier he had married Margaret Downing by swearing they were both twenty-one. He was sixteen; she was fifteen.
He became one of the 1820 Settlers, preached across the Orange River, and named his Karoo farm “Wurtemburg” after where his own father's family came from in Germany.
House 19, Gračišće. He shaped hard rock with a hammer and a chisel, and so did his son after him.
Major George Pitt D’Arcy is aboard, guarding convicts. One of his children was born at Chatham in 1825 and the next at Parramatta in 1827 — so the crossing is pinned exactly.
One of them is Frederick Robert D’Arcy. The city of Melbourne stands on the ground they surveyed.
The gravestone at Burgersdorp is still standing today, and still naming him and his wife.
Remembered for fifty years as the man shot by the British — when in fact he died of a stomach ulcer, in bed, with a doctor and his eldest son beside him. And his baptism page is the one that shows the family name already spelled with a z.
He grew up to be a trhonoša — one of the carriers who took packhorses over the Vratnik pass. Later he kept an inn on the same road.
Up on the Velebit road above the town. She came down off that road into Senj, and the family stayed.
The new line from Karlovac to Rijeka went somewhere else, and the port died. Everything the carriers used to bring over the mountain now travelled by train. Almost every job in that family afterwards is downstream of this one decision.
On the Paraná river in Argentina. He ended up with his own racing stables on the other side of the Atlantic, in Cape Town.
Giuseppe Arena was born in 1892 and Anna Arena in 1893, in the same little town on the strait between Sicily and the mainland. Same surname, one year apart. Their son Rocco is the Rocco that RFM is named after.
The grandest building in the town, with sea-water baths and, within about ten years, an X-ray machine. Fifty-odd years later your great-grandma Hedviga sang in it. It is still standing — it has been called the Kvarner Palace since 2013.
The family is living right inside it. Burgersdorp alone produced 1,048 Cape Rebels. One family wedding was held mid-war, in July 1901, in the house of a man called D. Schoeman — and a Commandant D. Schoeman led about 400 Cape Rebels one district away. It might be the same man. Nobody has proved it.
He is the one who eventually moved the whole Falco family to the other side of the planet. He is buried in Brisbane.
She was a widow of thirty-four who rolled cigars in the tobacco factory. Their daughter Hedviga was born six years later.
Michele Mazza came out of Messina and stepped ashore at Brisbane. The family tree recorded eighteen crossings and not one ship’s name; somebody went to the Australian passenger index and found nine of them, including this one.
The Argentine consulate issues Bob Lerena serie A no. 07962. Under “profession” it says one word: Trainer. His photograph and his signature are both still on it.
In the last year of the war. His name is on the wall grave at Senj with his parents.
The year the family remembers. Europe had just been wrecked by a war and other countries were offering Europeans somewhere safer to start again — and there is a second, quieter reason the family has always suspected and nobody wrote down. It took them three countries to stop moving: Botswana, then Zimbabwe, then South Africa.
Catherine Booyzen marries Nuno Lerena at St Joseph's, Mayfair. South Africa meets Argentina — the first of the joins that end in you.
Out of Genoa. By 1954 all four of the Italian great-grandparents on that side were in Queensland — born 1920 to 1928, in three towns that had nothing to do with each other.
Ivan Defranceski died at Senj on 30 October 1995. Hedviga died at Johannesburg on 30 October 2001 — the very same date, six years later.
On 19 December. Her twin sister married the other pair's dad too — and between the two weddings, ten families became one lot of cousins.
Ivan and CAL moved 11,635 km in a single night — the last journey in this entire website, and the only one the four of you were alive to see.
What the rest of the world was doing
It is hard to feel how long ago 1750 is. Here is what had not been invented yet.
When Giovanni was born, about 1750
There were no photographs, no railways, no electric light and no anaesthetic — if you needed an operation, you were awake for it. Mozart had not been born.
When the Nautilus sailed, 1819
Napoleon was still alive, in prison on a tiny island in the middle of the Atlantic — not very far from the route the ship was taking. He died two years later.
How many grandparents have you got?
Everybody has two parents. So everybody has four grandparents, and eight great-grandparents. It doubles every single time you go up a step.
So think about Matteo Falco
He is your 8× great-grandpa, at the very top of the Falco ladder. That means there were 1,024 people in his generation who all had to exist, and every single one of them had to meet somebody, or you would not be here. Matteo is just the one whose name we know.