The Four Quarters
Every person has four grandparents, and they are the honest unit of a family history: four separate families, four separate depths of evidence, and no reason at all for them to be equal.
These four were born within eight years of each other — 1920, 1924, 1925, 1928 — in three towns that had no connection whatsoever. Two of them are about six hundred kilometres apart. All four were in Queensland by 1954.
The quarters are not equal, and that is the finding
One quarter reaches 1697 and eight generations. Another stops after three, at a man with no dates at all. This is not because one family was more important — it is because Calabrian civil registration survives better than Sicilian for these particular comuni, and because the Briatico line has been worked on by relatives in Italy and Argentina for years while the Sicilian line has not. Depth of pedigree measures the archive, not the ancestors.