Method

The companion Falco archive names living relatives and publishes nothing else about them at all. That rule was tried here first and it failed badly: the test it rests on treats a person as possibly alive unless the tree records a death — and 414 of these 596 people have no death recorded, because most of this tree is undated, not alive. Only 68 people in it have a death anywhere. Suppressing seven-tenths of an archive makes it unreadable without making anybody safer.

So this archive uses a narrower rule, set by David on 10 September 2026:

Anyone who would be 80 or younger today, and whose death is not recorded, has their dates withheld. Their name, their places, their family, their photographs and their records are all published. Only the dates are held back.

That covers 133 people. It deliberately does not cover anyone the tree records as dead: a death date is a documented fact about a person with no remaining interest in privacy, and withholding it would gut the archive — Mary Rosa Mazza died at sixteen, and an archive that will not say so is not telling the truth about this family.

The withheld dates are stripped in the build, not hidden by the page. They are not in the HTML, not in the JSON the page loads, and not recoverable from the published site. Both rules are switches in tools/build.py — SUPPRESS_LIVING and AGE_THRESHOLD — so either can be tightened in one line and a rebuild.

A removal request is honoured within days, without argument and without requiring a reason.

The export contains four men called Rosario Mazza, four called Giuseppe Arena, three called Orazio Mazza and four called Maria Mazza — most of them with no date of any kind. In three southern Italian towns where the same fifteen forenames circulate for two centuries, and where a grandson is named for his grandfather by rule, that is exactly what you would expect.

An earlier version of this build merged people on name and name alone. It fused four unrelated Rosario Mazza stubs into one man and produced an eleven-generation Mazza descent that no record supports — a pedigree manufactured by a bug. The rule now is:

A shared name is not evidence. Two records are the same person only if they give the same birth year, or if they sit in the same place in the family — the same parents, or the same spouse and children. Anything less is recorded as an open question and left as two people.

Under that rule 18 genuine duplicates were merged — including the whole of Frank Mazza's household, which the tree holds twice — and 58 shared names were left standing apart. The archive would rather be visibly incomplete than invisibly wrong.

And one way the rule was too strict

A rule that keys on the exact name is defeated by a single middle initial. The tree holds Joseph A Polistena and Joseph Polistena as two men — same wife, same full death date, 15 February 2012, same grave at Arneytown, New Jersey. It also holds Michael Mazza and Michael Rocco Mazza, same parents, both born 1988. One man each time, and the first version of this build refused to join either.

So names are compared a second time at a looser key — surname plus first forename, middle names and initials dropped — and because that test is weaker, the corroboration demanded is stronger: an identical full death date, or identical parents and identical spouse, or the same birth year plus one of those. Across the whole export that widened rule found exactly two further people, and both are named on this page rather than merged quietly.