Open Questions

Closed the day the archive was built.

The Archdiocese's own deceased register gave a plot, a register number and exact dates for 19 people here, corrected the tree in six places, and showed that all four grandparents lie in consecutive plots V-1026 to V-1029. The register →

Not in nine indexes across three comuni. A negative, and a useful one.

Nine annual indexes read — Piedimonte Etneo 1877, 1878, 1879, 1880, 1881, plus Mascali 1879 and Giarre 1879. Five Mazza births in all of them: Antonino and Grazia (1877), Rosaria and Venerio (1879), Gaetano (1880); none in 1878, 1881, Mascali or Giarre. No Salvatore anywhere. The two 1879 acts were transcribed in full and document three Mazza men — Pasquale (b. c.1829), Salvatore (b. c.1845) and Antonino (b. c.1844), all braccianti of Via Terremorte. The registers →

Yes. He was Sebastiano's elder brother.

The Queensland death index gives Michali Mazza, 14 November 1926, registration 1926/C/3983, father Salvatori Mazza, mother Maria Lecota — the index's rendering of Nicotra. The same search returns Rosario Mazza, born 1899, whose parents are given in full as Salvatore Mazza and Maria Concetta Nicotra. So the sixteen-year-old who landed at Brisbane on the Palermo in 1925 and died nineteen months later was Sebastiano Mazza 's brother, and the family followed him to the port he had landed at. The Queensland register →

One soldier and his wife, in one grave — not three people.

The VA's Nationwide Gravesite Locator gives Joseph Polistena, PFC, US Army, Second World War, 29 January 1917 – 15 February 2012, Section O3 Site 8647 — and Santa Polistena, 17 December 1920 – 8 September 2008, entered as wife of, in the same site. That is the service that earned the plot. It also confirms the build's merge of the tree's two "Joseph" records into one man, and corrects Santa's death from 9 August to 8 September — the American 09/08/2008 read day-first. Nudgee and Arneytown →

Yes. The archive's largest question, closed.

Salvatore Mazza's act of birth — Piedimonte Etneo, Nati 1873, atto 3 — names his father «Rosario Mazza di Mariano», aged 28, and his mother Leonarda Bonanno di Gaetano. Three marriage proclamations (1898, 1902, 1910) and two further birth acts give the same couple sons named Salvatore, Giovanni, Orazio, Gaetano, Santo and Ignazio. The tree's unattached Rosario has a wife called Leonarda and sons Orazio, Ignazio and Giovanni. One man. All hundred and ten are the families of Michael Rocco Mazza's great-great-uncles. The argument, and what would overturn it →

The couple the tree names is real. The two children it gives them belong to somebody else.

The tree makes Rocco Arena, born 1861, the son of Orazio Arena and Giovana Zirilli, and gives Orazio exactly two children: Rocco and Guiseppe. Act 45 of 1860 gives FRANCESCO ANTONIO ARENA and SERAFINA ARLOTTA a son GIUSEPPE on 5 March 1860; act 228 of 1861 gives the same couple a son ROCCO on 20 December 1861. The same sibling pair, in the same order, on the wrong father. Meanwhile Orazio Arena and Giovanna Zirilli are documented across four years of the register — 1856, 1858, 1859, 1860 — with Domenico, Domenico and Maria Annunziata, and neither a Rocco nor a Giuseppe ever appears. An Ellis Island manifest independently makes Rocco 39 in March 1900, consistent with a birth at the end of 1861.

The test: ANSWERED, 13 September 2026. What remains is above Francesco Antonio, who act 228 calls 'figlio di Filippo' — so FILIPPO ARENA is a documented generation the tree does not have at all. And a lead worth recording: Orazio Arena's first son is Domenico, twice, which on Calabrian naming custom makes HIS father a Domenico Arena. That is custom, not a record.

Where: Antenati — Scilla; every ark 1816-1865 is in data/scilla-arks.tsv.

Four consecutive years of the register have been read in full and he is in none of them.

Act 230 of 1892 makes Giovanni Arena thirty-three in October of that year, which puts his birth between October 1858 and October 1859. The Scilla Tavola annuale — which names both parents, so a whole year's Arena households read off one opening — has now been read for 1857, 1858, 1859 and 1860. Two years either side of the window, and there is no Giovanni Arena born in any of them. What those years DO contain is a Giovanni Arena who is a FATHER, married to Maddalena Longordo, with a Filippo in 1857 and a Domenico in 1860: an adult born in the 1830s, and not this man.

The test: His marriage to Concetta Russo. An Italian marriage act names the groom's comune of birth outright. Their eldest recorded child is Giuseppe, born October 1892, so the marriage is about 1890 — inside Antenati's Scilla marriage coverage only if that series reaches back that far, which it does not: Scilla marriages run 1905-1913. So: the Reggio Calabria processetti, or the margin of act 230 itself, or a death record.

Where: Antenati — Scilla; every ark 1816-1865 is in data/scilla-arks.tsv.

The export gives Orazio Arena two wives with the same rare surname and effectively the same forename.

@I374@ is 'Giovanna Zirilli', born 1827, mother of Guiseppe Arena. @I455@ is 'Giovana Zirilli', undated, mother of Rocco Arena. Both are married to the same individual record. That is the classic signature of an accidental duplicate — and act 46 of 1859 shows a single couple, Orazio e Zirilli Giovanna, having children at Scilla. THIS ARCHIVE HAS NOT MERGED THEM, and the reason is worth stating: surname endogamy at Scilla is not a theory but an observed fact. The 1913 marriage index alone has Bueti marrying Bueti, Cambareri marrying Cambareri, Larizza marrying Larizza and Vizzari marrying Vizzari. A man taking a second wife of the same surname is exactly the sort of thing that happens here.

The test: Find Rocco Arena's actual birth act. It will name his mother, and either it says Zirilli Giovanna — in which case the two records are one woman and the merge is documented — or it does not.

Where: Antenati — Scilla; the same sweep as the question above.

Born about 1856, not 1851 — and the surname is absent from Scilla births in three sampled years.

The D section of the 1851 Tavola runs entries 65 to 75 — seven Di Franco, two Dormi, one De Marco, one De Alessandro — bounded by the last C at 64 and the first F at 76. The block is complete and there is no Donato in it. Act 162 of 1892 explains it: Michele Donato is THIRTY-SIX in July 1892, so born about 1856. The tree is five years out and the archive had been reading the wrong volume.

The test: DONE, AND NEGATIVE. 1856 was read (both volumes: the acts are an_ua2002917, the Tavola is bound separately as an_ua2002920) and so was 1859. Neither has a Donato, and neither did 1851 — three complete D blocks across the whole window his daughter's act allows. Meanwhile 1892 has two Donato households. The surname appears to ARRIVE at Scilla between 1859 and 1892, which makes the next move his MARRIAGE rather than his birth: a marriage act names the groom's comune of birth outright. His eldest son was born 1878, so the marriage is about 1875-77 — outside Antenati's Scilla marriage series, which starts at 1905.

Where: Antenati — Scilla; arks for every year 1816-1865 are in data/scilla-arks.tsv.

Nine were named on 10 September 2026. Nine are still open.

Sebastiano Mazza sailed on the Toscana out of Genoa, arriving 4 October 1949; Antonino Polistena on the Surriento out of Naples; Francessco Prostamo on the Roma; the sixteen-year-old Michele Mazza on the Palermo out of Messina in 1925. But Domenica Prostamo — who followed her husband in March 1951 with a son not yet three — is not in the index under Prostamo or under Mazza, and eight others are still unnamed.

The test: She would have travelled under her married name and may be indexed under a misspelling; the index is transcribed from handwritten manifests. Try the voyage instead of the person: find the item for a Genoa sailing reaching Fremantle in March 1951 and read the manifest for the whole family group.

Where: NAA RecordSearch, passenger arrivals index 1898–1972; series K269, Fremantle inwards.

The deepest point of the archive, and it stops at an assertion.

The Prostamo descent at Briatico runs eight generations and is the best thing in this tree — but nothing above 1697 has been looked for, and the 1697 date itself carries no source. Italian civil registration begins in 1809; before that the record is parish, and the Calabrian earthquake of 1783 destroyed a great deal of it.

The test: The parish registers of Briatico held by the Diocese of Mileto–Nicotera–Tropea, and the Catanzaro state archive's pre-unification series. First, though: verify that the 1697 birth is a document and not a family estimate.

Where: Antenati — Catanzaro; diocesan archive, Mileto.

Twenty-three Argentine events and not one crossing.

A branch of the Briatico Prostamo was in Buenos Aires from at least 1903, with children born there into the 1960s, and Giuseppe Prostamo died there. Nothing records how or when they went, or how they relate to the Brisbane line beyond the tree's assertion.

The test: CEMLA's Argentine immigration database, and the Buenos Aires civil registry. The Lerena archive has already worked this ground.

Where: CEMLA; Registro Civil, Buenos Aires.