The trees
The Falco spine and the families of the Valle Caudina it married — each drawn in the form its own evidence supports.
A tree with invented joins in it is worse than no tree, so none of these has any. Each line is drawn in the form its own evidence supports. Here the difficulty is not depth but identity: the registers are rich and the names repeat.
Our line, drawnThe line this archive is about, as a chart — every generation it can name, and every place it stops.Open the chart →Born, married and buried in the same parish under the hills near Naples, for nine generations. On 24 October 1767 a priest wrote Pasquale Falco into a book, and that page still exists.
Depth here is a fact about paper as much as about people: the registers of Arienzo survived, and that is why this line is nine deep and its neighbours are not.
The spine →Each of these is a family in its own right, recorded in the same registers. Between them they are most of the 549 people this archive holds.
None of them is charted. There are enough people in each to draw one, and nobody has.
The families →Most names in this archive are worn by more than one person — «Pasquale Falco» alone names seventy-nine records across sixty years and is certainly several men. So the register is a web of records, not a tree of people, and the name pages never merge them.
Every name →A husband, a wife and a little girl of about two. The Australian file that records them arriving is still sitting in the National Archives, unopened.
Australia →The form is checked, not asserted: a line counts as drawn only where this archive actually publishes a chart of it.