About
An evidence-first archive of one family's maternal line — Arienzo in the province of Caserta, to Brisbane. Every claim carries its confidence or is marked unproven.
This is the maternal line of one family, followed backwards from Brisbane to a single street in a small town in Campania. Nine generations, from a Matteo Falco born by about 1735 on strada Camellara in Arienzo, to a generation living in Australia now.
It is built for one reader's descendants, and it is public because a family history that lives on one laptop dies with the laptop.
The five rules
- Every claim carries its confidence, or is marked unproven. Documented, inferred, disputed, family lore — and dna, which ranks below documented because a register entry names a person and an estimate names a probability.
- Negatives and nulls are published. If a search was run and found nothing, that is written down, so nobody repeats it. What has been read →
- Corrections are visible, never silent. A withdrawn reading stays on the page that carried it. Where the family tree still asserts something this archive discarded — Agostino Falcone at the head of the line — he is drawn struck through beside the man who replaced him. Corrections →
- A name is not a person, and a shared surname is not a relationship. This parish has three Maria Falco and four Pasquale; «Pasquale Falco» alone carries seventy-nine records. Nothing is merged on a name. Method →
- Living people are named, and nothing more. A name and a relationship — never a date, a place, a record or a photograph. That line was drawn on 10 September 2026, and the one time it slipped, the failure is on the corrections page.
Where the evidence comes from
| Body | What it gives |
|---|---|
| Antenati — the Italian state archives' portal | The Arienzo civil death registers, read act by act rather than searched. Twenty-one volumes so far. How → |
| FamilySearch | Handwriting-recognition full text over parish books nobody has indexed by hand, and the Benevento civil registration index. |
| Nudgee Cemetery, Brisbane | Fifteen burials, including generation seven and his wife in adjoining niches. Graves → |
| The family's own papers | An estratto from the Comune di Arpaia, a War Merit Cross citation, photographs, and a MyHeritage tree of 427 people — the last of which is unverified and labelled as such everywhere it appears. |
How it is built
Static pages generated with Astro from plain JSON and TSV, all of it in the public repository ↗ — including the working notes, which keep the wrong readings alongside the corrections. Nothing on this site is asserted that cannot be traced back to a file you can open.
What it is not
- Not a genealogy service. It follows one line and the town around it.
- Not finished. 258 volumes of processetti have never been opened, and the act that would settle generation seven's mother is in an unindexed Forchia register. Open questions →
- Not neutral about its own mistakes. Twice in two days the same misreading was made, and saying so is treated as more useful than the finds.