Arms
No coat of arms belongs to this family. Several are sold as though one did. This page explains the difference, because it is the commonest way a family history goes wrong.
This family bore no arms, and this archive will not display any.
Search «Falco family crest» and you will be sold one within seconds. It will be handsome, it will very likely carry a falcon, and it will have nothing to do with the people in these registers.
What the registers actually say they were
Every generation of this line that the registers describe is given a trade, and the trades are these: colono and contadino — men who worked another man's land — with massaro and bracciale appearing for the same men in different years. Generation six is entered as a farmer.
Arms in the Kingdom of Naples belonged to the propertied and the titled, and the registers are perfectly clear about who those were, because they write it down: the possidenti, the proprietari, the gentiluomini, the Don and the Donna. Arienzo had plenty of them. Don Giovanbattista Rivetti the apothecary; Don Francesco Morgillo, son of a doctor; the Cillo and the Troisi who between them supplied the town's mayors; Donna Angela Maria Lettieri, proprietaria.
None of them is this family. That is not a disappointment — it is the single most consistent fact the sweeps have produced, and it is why the same surnames keep appearing on the same nineteen streets for two hundred years.
The two things that look like heraldry and are not
- The name itself. Falco is the Italian for falcon, so any arms invented for it will show one — canting arms, invented from the word, not inherited from a person. The Name →
- The «Don» in the registers. It appears constantly in these volumes and it is a courtesy title for the propertied and the clergy. It is never once applied to anyone in this line. Where the archive records a Don, it is recording a neighbour.
What would change this
A grant, a seal, or a tomb. Not a website. If a document ever tied arms to a named ancestor in this descent, it would go on Documents with its citation, like everything else. Until then this page stays as it is — because an archive that publishes its negatives has to publish this one too.
Where the name comes from · Under whose rule they lived · How this archive decides what to claim