65 in the tree, and 44 the registers add

The Arena

The Arena of Scilla were sailors for at least four generations. The family tree has two of those generations and the wrong father at the top of them — the registers have the rest.

people called Arena in the tree

1819

the earliest with a documented birth

proved by record, absent from the tree

What the registers give

The line, as the acts have it

Every line below rests on an act that has been read. The first three rows are not in Michael Mazza's family tree at all — they cannot be drawn on any chart on this site, so they are written out here instead.

gen 8

Domenico Arlotta — dead before April 1854. Named only as «il fu Domenico», in his own son's words, in the birth act of his great-grandson.
Nati 1854 atto 76

not in the tree

gen 7

Filippo Arena × Domenica Costa — married by 1817. Filippo a marinaro.
Nati 1819 atto 186; Matrimoni 1851 atto 13

not in the tree

gen 7

Giovanni Arlotta × Maria Costa — Serafina's parents. Giovanni a marinaro, b. about 1779, son of the late Domenico; he came to the town hall himself, aged seventy-five, to declare his grandson.
Matrimoni 1851 atto 13; Nati 1830 atto 2; Nati 1854 atto 76

not in the tree

gen 6

Francesco Antonio Arena × Serafina Arlotta — b. 25 November 1819, a marinaro; she b. 13 June 1830; married 7 February 1851, celebrated on the 16th. Five children are now documented: Filippo 1852, Domenico 1853, Giovanni 1854, Giuseppe 1860, Rocco 1861.
Nati 1819 atto 186; Matrimoni 1851 atto 13; Nati 1854 atto 76

not in the tree

gen 5

Giovanni Arena × Concetta Russo — ROCCO'S BROTHER. b. 30 April 1854, a marinaro; married 29 October 1885; sailed 1899 bringing Rocco's daughter Anna, and was lodging with Rocco in Manhattan in 1900.
Nati 1854 atto 76; Matrimoni 1885 atto 86; Ellis Is. 1899; US census 1900

not in the tree

gen 5

Giuseppe Arena × Maria Martello — Rocco's brother. b. 5 March 1860, a marinaro; married 12 September 1885 — seven weeks before Giovanni. Her father was already living in America.
Nati 1860 atto 45; Matrimoni 1885 atto 73

not in the tree

gen 5

Rocco Arena × Generosa Costa — b. 20 December 1861, a marinaro; married DECEMBER 1888, and his own act names his parents; she a filatrice, daughter of Antonio Costa and ANNA ARLOTTA; four crossings to America.
Nati 1861 atto 228; Matrimoni 1888 atto 63; Nati 1893 atto 22; US census 1900

gen 4

Anna Arena × Giuseppe Arena — b. 17 January 1893 at Via Acquagrande 41; he b. 6 October 1892 at Via Grotte 75.
Nati 1893 atto 22; Nati 1892 atto 230

gen 3

Rocco Arena × Angela Polistena — b. 1924 at Scilla; married in Queensland; buried at Nudgee, plot V-1029.
Nudgee register

Five generations of sailors in a line. Domenico Arlotta's son Giovanni is a marinaro; Giovanni's daughter married Francesco Antonio Arena, a marinaro; three of their sons — Giovanni, Giuseppe and Rocco — are marinari in their own acts. Filippo Arena is a marinaro; his son Francesco Antonio is a marinaro; his grandson Rocco is a marinaro in 1893 and gives his trade as Seaman on the ship that took him to New York in 1892. Serafina Arlotta's father Giovanni is a marinaro too. The family tree records not one of them as anything.

A correction the charts now carry

Rocco and Giuseppe are not Orazio Arena's sons

The tree gives Orazio Arena exactly two children, Rocco and Guiseppe. The register gives Francesco Antonio Arena and Serafina Arlotta a Giuseppe on 5 March 1860 and a Rocco on 20 December 1861 — the same pair, in the same order, on the wrong father.

Five separate things now agree. The sibling pair itself. Francesco Antonio's first son being named Filippo, for his own father, exactly as Calabrian custom predicts. An Arlotta lodging with Rocco in New York in 1900. Rocco naming a daughter Serafina there in 1898. And the marriage act of 1851, which names all four parents at once.

Meanwhile Orazio Arena's own children — across four years of the register — are Teresa (1853), Domenico (1856), Domenico again (1859) and Maria Annunziata (1860). Neither a Rocco nor a Giuseppe among them. He is a real, well documented Scilla man who was handed another household's family. The acts →

What the name is, and why it proves nothing

Arena is sand — the Latin harena, the sanded floor of an amphitheatre and, long before that, simply a sandy place. As a surname it is topographical: a family from the shore, or from a place called Arena. There is a comune of that name in the province of Vibo Valentia, forty kilometres from Briatico, though nothing connects these Arena to it.

It is very common across Calabria and Sicily, and this archive can now put numbers on that rather than merely asserting it:

Rocco Arena

THE REGISTERS PROVE THE CAUTION RIGHT. Scilla holds at least TWO different Rocco Arena born three years apart: act 60 of 1858, son of SANTO Arena and Giovanna Gioffre, and act 228 of 1861, son of FRANCESCO ANTONIO Arena and Serafina Arlotta. The Ellis Island index adds four more Rocco Arena of Scilla, born about 1861, 1896, 1897 and 1898. The same town in the same years also produced a Rocco Arlotta, a Rocco Donato, a Rocco Polistena, a Rocco Costa and a Rocco Ciccone. Merging four tree records called Rocco Arena would have been a coin toss.

Giovanni Arena

RETRACTED, AND DOWN TO TWO. This archive argued that the Giovanni Arena of the 1854 birth act, the Giovanni Arena who married Concetta Russo, and the Giovanni Arena of act 230 of 1892 were THREE DISTINCT MEN. The marriage act of 1885 -- act 86, 29 October -- makes Giovanni Arena thirty-one, a marinaro, FIGLIO DI ANTONIO E DI SERAFINA ARLOTTA. Thirty-one in 1885 is 1854. THEY ARE ONE MAN: born 30 April 1854, married 1885, father of Giuseppe in 1892, sailing in 1899 to join 'brother Rocco'. The reason the archive could not find his birth is that it searched 1857-1860, on the strength of the 'thirty-three' in the 1892 act -- an age three years out. THE OTHER GIOVANNI ARENA IS REAL AND STAYS APART: the man who died at Scilla before 1885, husband of Natalizia Longordo, whose son Filippo married Clementina Furfari at act 94 of that year.

Domenico Arena

The best single example in the archive of why a name is not a person: ORAZIO ARENA AND GIOVANNA ZIRILLI NAMED TWO OF THEIR OWN SONS DOMENICO -- act 180 of 1856 and act 46 of 1859. The first child died and the name was given again, which was ordinary practice. One couple, one name, two people. A records-matcher would merge them without hesitating.

The full list of names left unmerged →

Everyone called Arena in the tree

Every Arena in the export is connected to every other by parent, child or marriage — one descent group, which is what makes this the cleanest line in the archive and the counter-example to the Mazza.

Name	Dates	Born	On the spine
Orazio Arena	1751–1830	Scilla	ancestor
Filippo Arena	1793	Scilla	ancestor
Giuseppe Arena	1794	Scilla	ancestor
Francesco Antonio Arena	1819–1901	Scilla	ancestor
Filippo Arena	1852	Scilla	ancestor
Domenica Arena	1853	Scilla
Rocco Arena	1861	Scilla, Reggio Calabria	ancestor
Giovanni Arena	1870	Scilla, Reggio Calabria	ancestor
Giuseppe Arena	1892–1984	Scilla, Reggio Calabria	ancestor
Anna Arena	1893–1962	Scilla, Reggio Calabria	ancestor
Antonio Arena	1895	New York, New York
Maria Arena	1895	—
Giovanni Arena	1922	Scilla, Reggio Calabria	ancestor
Rocco Arena	1924–1999	Scilla, Reggio Calabria	ancestor
Antonio Arena	1926	Scilla, Reggio Calabria
Clemente Arena	1929	Scilla, Reggio Calabria
Giuseppe Arena	1932	Scilla, Reggio Calabria	ancestor
Mario Salvatore Arena	1937–2012	Scilla, Reggio Calabria
Anna Arena	withheld	Brisbane, Queensland	ancestor
Anna Arena	—	—	ancestor
Anna Arena	—	—	ancestor
Anna Arena	—	—	ancestor
Anna Arena	—	—	ancestor
Annunciata Arena	—	—
Antonio Arena	—	Scilla
Auora Arena	—	—
Clemente Arena	—	Scilla, Reggio Calabria
Clemente Arena	—	—
Domenico Arena	—	Scilla
Filippo Arena	—	Scilla	ancestor
Fortunata Arena	—	New York, New York
Francesco Arena	—	—
Francesco Arena	—	Scilla, Reggio Calabria
Giovanni Arena	—	—	ancestor
Giuseppe Arena	1925	—	ancestor
Giuseppe Arena	—	—	ancestor
Giuseppe Arena	—	—	ancestor
Giuseppe Arena	—	—	ancestor
Giuseppi Arena	withheld	Brisbane, Queensland
Maria Arena	—	Scilla, Reggio Calabria
Nancy Arena	withheld	Brisbane, Queensland	ancestor
Peppina Arena	—	—
Rocco Arena	—	—	ancestor
Rocco Arena	—	—	ancestor
Teresa Arena	1943	—
Tina Arena	—	—
Virgole Arena	—	—

18 of the 65 carry a birth year. The rest are known because somebody else's record names them.

And the Polistena beside them

The other Scilla family. Rocco Arena married Angela Polistena , born in the same town within fifteen months of him, and they married in Queensland. Polistena is a toponymic — from the town of Polistena in the province of Reggio Calabria — so the name records a family that had already moved once, and was named for having done it.

The two families were together long before that wedding. On 11 September 1913 an Arena and a Polistena came off the San Guglielmo at Ellis Island on the same day, four frames apart on the same manifest — Rocco Arena, 52, and Rocco Polistena, 44, both of Scilla. The crossings →