The households

53 reconstructed families of the parish of Sant'Andrea at Arienzo and of the civil registers after it — read entry by entry. Every name below is a link to that person.

What these tables establish

• The line reaches a generation further back than it did. Pasquale Falco's baptism of 24 October 1767 names his father Matteo Falco and his mother Francesca Crisci . Matteo replaces the unproven Agostino Falcone.
• Vincenzo's marriage names four people at once — himself, his father Pasquale, his mother Chiara Rivetti, and his wife Andreana's father Arcangelo Crisci. It is the single most load-bearing document found.
• Matteo's other son is traceable too. Giuseppe Falco married Antonia di Guida, and their household can be followed for three more decades — including a son named Matteo after his grandfather, who died in 1809.
• The Crisci marry in three times. Matteo married a Crisci in the 1760s; his grandson Vincenzo married Andreana Crisci two generations later; and Pasquale's daughter Anna married an Arcangelo Crisci and died at 22 in 1820.
• One marriage needed the Pope. Crescenzo Falco, son of Giuseppe and Antonia di Guida, married Angela Maria Morgillo only medio dispensatione obtenta a Sanctissimo Domino Papa nostro Gregorio super quarto gradu consanguinitatis — by dispensation from Gregory XVI for kinship in the fourth degree. The couple were third cousins, and the parish knew it.
• And one Falco married a Falco. Francesco Falco and Raffaela Falco buried their son Clemente, aged five, in August 1855.
• Children die. Maria Angela, baptised February 1802, was buried in March 1805 aetatis suae annorum 3 circiter. Giovanna was buried the same year. Giuseppe, son of Crescenzo, lived a few days. The name Maria was given twice, in 1789 and again in 1790.
• The same women recur. Cecilia Martone appears as midwife or godmother across some twenty years of these registers; Gelsumina Ruggiero stands godmother to Vincenzo's children. A parish is a small number of people doing the same offices for one another.

Before Matteo

The line proper begins with Matteo Falco in the 1760s. But Falcos are at Arienzo long before that, and one early household has something none of the others do — a stated place of origin:

Anno Domini 1714 … infanti nato ex Francisco Falco Casalis Paulisii et Antonia Loffreda filia Dominici … imposui nomen Joseph.

Casalis Paulisii — of the hamlet of Paolisi, the next comune east and over the provincial border into Benevento. Francesco Falco was an incomer. He and Antonia Loffreda baptised three children at Sant'Andrea: Giuseppe in July 1714, a son on 20 September 1717 whose name the machine reads only as "Mart…es", and Domenico in February 1726.

Is he Matteo's ancestor? The dates allow it — Matteo was an adult by 1759, so he could be Francesco's grandson, or just possibly the son of 1717. No document joins them, and this archive will not join them for the sake of a tidy line.

Further back still: a Tommaso Falco and Marta Mara baptised a daughter Lucretia at San Felice a Cancello in 1637 — the entry written in Italian, not Latin. And an index page of 1654 already lists Falcos among Crisci, Morgillo, Martone, Rivetti, Carfora, de Lucia and Porrino: the whole in-law network was in place before the Restoration.

A footnote with a long echo — in 1896 a Pasquale Falco of Arienzo, a carrettiere, married Mariangela Attanasi born at Paolisi. The traffic ran both ways for two hundred years.

Where it stops

Matteo Falco's marriage to Francesca Crisci — which would name his own father and settle whether Francesco of Paolisi belongs above him — should fall in the Arienzo marriage register between about 1760 and 1766. It has been searched for across 2,056 transcribed marriage and death pages and not found: either it is not among the transcribed leaves, or it is not filmed. His baptism would fall in the gap the baptism register leaves between 1738 and 1761.