The trees
Four Italian families, four different depths of proof, each drawn in the form its 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. Four quarters, four different depths of proof.
Our line, drawnThe line this archive is about, as a chart — every generation it can name, and every place it stops.Open the chart →Nine straight generations born, married and buried in one small Calabrian town without leaving it. Franco Antonino of 1697 is the oldest person any of the seven archives can name.
And the top of it is a family chart, not a register. Briatico's books have not been read; the solid evidence starts far lower down.
Briatico, and what is being tested →Civil acts read image by image off the Antenati films. Each one carries the father's age, which is how a birth year is recovered for a man with no birth act of his own.
Piedimonte Etneo →A fishing town on the strait, with a castle on a rock. In 1892 two Arenas married each other here, which is what a town of that size does to a family tree.
Scilla →Two of the four quarters come out of one Calabrian town and did not know it until the acts were read side by side.
Antonino Polistena's crossing was missed for years because the Australian index had filed him under a shortened version of his name.
Scilla →Born in three towns that had never heard of each other, and buried side by side in the order they died, nineteen years between the first and the last.
Nudgee →The form is checked, not asserted: a line counts as drawn only where this archive actually publishes a chart of it. Prostamo reaches 1697 on a family chart; the Sicilian acts reach 1877 on paper. The difference between those two numbers is the whole job.