The headline is that there isn't one

Two people born eight kilometres apart — Arienzo and Arpaia — who married in 1955. At the resolution this test offers, they are the same person.

Both come back around eighty per cent South Italian, and the model pins both to the same sub-region — Campania. Every other difference above is smaller than the wobble between one version of an ethnicity model and the next.

The horizon — and why generation one is invisible

This is the most useful thing on the page. Autosomal DNA halves at every generation, and it halves fast. The reporting floor on these estimates is about 1%. Read the direct line with that in mind.

What this does not mean

Both profiles carry small Eastern Mediterranean and North African components — Syrian 4.9% and 6.3%, Egyptian, Armenian, Tunisian. The obvious reading is a Syrian ancestor, an Egyptian great-grandmother. That reading is wrong.

• Campania was Greek before it was Roman. Cumae was settled in the eighth century BC; Naples is a Greek name. A Greek component in a Campanian is not an immigrant ancestor — it is the population itself.
• The whole Mediterranean basin is in these percentages. Phoenician, Greek, Roman, Byzantine, Arab and Norman contact across three thousand years leaves exactly this kind of small, broad Levantine and North African signal in southern Italian reference panels. A five per cent «Syrian» reading is a statement about the Bronze Age, not about a great-great-grandparent — and by the table above, no individual ancestor that recent could show up at five per cent anyway.
• These are the least stable numbers in the test, the ones that move when the vendor changes model version — which is why v2.5 is recorded at the top of this page rather than left out.
• «Greek and Albanian» is one cluster, not two. The test cannot separate them, so neither can this page.

The «Notable Individuals», and the number nobody reads

Both results offer a ranked list of famous ancient and historical people «most similar to you genetically». On the vendor's own scale, not one of them is a match.

“The Genetic Fit score indicates how closely the model matches your DNA, reflecting how well the combination of ancient populations aligns with your genetics. A lower score means a closer match.” — the test's own words. All 21 entries across both lists score above 5.0. The closest is 5.728. Every single one falls in the «Distant» band. The list is a ranking of things that do not match, ordered by how much they do not match.

Two people with no common ancestor, and one list

Carmine and Francesca are husband and wife. This archive documents no ancestor they share. Yet 10 of the names above appear on both lists, and the top four are identical, in the same order.

That is the proof, and it needs no genetics to follow. If the score measured descent, two people who are not documented kin could not produce nearly the same ranked list of ancestors. What they share is not a family — it is a region. The list is a function of being Campanian, which both of them are.

Two further tells point the same way. Francesca scores closer than Carmine on every single entry — a uniform offset across a whole list is a difference in overall model fit, not a relationship; reading it as «Francesca is more related to Beethoven» is exactly the mistake the shape of the data warns against. And the geography does not cohere: Hungary, Galicia, Mycenaean Pylos, Iron Age Iran, the Copper Age Alps, Bonn, revolutionary Paris. No family goes there.

Nobody has sequenced a Campanian

Read the names again and notice what is not there. There is no Italian on either list. No Neapolitan, no Campanian, nobody from the Valle Caudina, from Arienzo or Arpaia or Benevento, nobody Roman, nobody Samnite — and the Samnites held these very hills.

The list is Hungarian and Transylvanian nobility, a Galician bishop, a Mycenaean warrior, two Iron Age Iranians, an Alpine iceman, a German composer and a French revolutionary. That is not a statement about this family. It is a statement about which graves have been opened and paid for. Ancient-DNA projects have concentrated on royal tombs and famous individuals; the ordinary medieval and early-modern dead of southern Italy have largely not been sequenced.

A list of notable individuals is a map of published research, and this family's own hills are a blank on it. It is the same rule as the rest of this page in a new dress: an absence in the data is a fact about the data.

What the DNA cannot settle here

Worth being blunt, because a test that reaches 1790 tells you nothing about the questions this archive is actually stuck on. None of them moves an inch:

• whether generation three's wife was Andreana Crisci or Andriana Cioffi — Crisci;
• whether Maria Carfora was Filomena Annecchino's mother — Annecchino;
• which Matteo Falco is which, or whether Gioacchino Falco belongs to the founding couple;
• whether the gentry Rivetti and the labouring Rivetti are one family — Rivetti.

An ethnicity percentage cannot name a parent. Only a record can, which is why the rest of this site looks the way it does.

What would actually move it

Figures transcribed in full from the MyHeritage results of 10 September 2026, ethnicity model v2.5. Where these numbers disagree with a later version of that model, the version is the reason — and this page will say so rather than quietly restate them. Method: how this archive decides what to claim.