Nudgee

Nudgee Cemetery, beside Holy Cross church at Banyo, has been the Catholic burying ground of northern Brisbane since the 1860s. It is run by the Archdiocese, not the city council, which is why it does not appear in the Brisbane City Council grave search and why the family tree recorded the cemetery but never a plot.

The Archdiocese keeps its own register, and it was read on 10 September 2026. It supplies a plot, a register number, a date of birth, a date of death and a date of interment for 19 people in this archive — and it corrects the family tree in 6 places.

Four plots in a row

Michael Rocco Mazza's four grandparents were born in three towns — Piedimonte Etneo on Etna, Briatico on the Tyrrhenian coast, and Scilla on the strait — about six hundred kilometres apart, in families that had never met. They arrived in Australia between 1949 and 1953 on four different sailings. They are buried in four consecutive plots.

Two married couples, side by side, in the order they died: Rocco Arena in 1999, Sebastiano Mazza in 2002, Domenica Prostamo in 2010, Angela Polistena in 2018. Nineteen years between the first burial and the last, and the plots were held.

6 corrections

A burial register is a contemporary administrative record made by the people who did the burying. A family tree is a recollection typed in later. Where they disagree, this archive believes the register — and shows you both, so you can disagree with it.

One of these is not a mistake but a format. The tree gives Venera Cavallaro 's death as 9 June 2013; the register says 6 September 2013. 9/6 and 6/9 — a date written day-first and read month-first, or the reverse. It is the commonest single error in transcribed genealogy and it is worth checking every time a date in this archive looks a month or two out.

The nineteen

Brisbane Catholic Cemeteries deceased register (Nudgee), searched 10 September 2026. Women appear under their married names — Domenica Prostamo is entered as Domenica Mazza, Angela Polistena as Angelina Arena — which is why a search on a maiden name returns nothing and why the archive matches on the spouse's surname too.

The Falco lie here too

This archive keeps meeting the same ground from a different direction: five Falco of Arienzo are buried at Nudgee, and that archive found them independently, in the same register, using the same endpoint. Two families with nothing whatever in common in Italy — one from Campania, three from Calabria and Sicily — inside the same fence in Queensland. That is not a family connection. It is what a migration looks like from the outside.

Buried elsewhere

Arneytown, New Jersey: one soldier, one grave

The tree records three Polistena at the Brigadier General William C. Doyle Veterans Memorial Cemetery. The VA's Nationwide Gravesite Locator records two people, in one plot:

Joseph Polistena served as a Private First Class in the United States Army in the Second World War — that is the service that earned the plot. Santa is entered as wife of, in the same site.

It also settles two things this archive had open. The tree's "Joseph A Polistena" and "Joseph Polistena" are one man — which is exactly what the build's middle-initial merge rule concluded from the shared death date, before the VA confirmed it. And Santa's death, given in the tree as 9 August 2008, is 8 September 2008: the American 09/08/2008 read day-first. That is the second date-format error found in this archive today, after Venera Cavallaro 's.