Briatico

On 14 June 1849, before Antonino Bajoni, sindaco of Briatico, Domenico Prostamo married Giovanna Ventrice. The act runs to nine lines and every one of them was new.

He is di anni trentasei — thirty-six, so born about 1813, where the family tree says 1820. He is a marinaro. And he is nato in Pizzo: not Briatico, not Potenzoni, but a town eleven kilometres up the coast. He is figlio di ANTONINO, di professione marinaro, domiciliato DEFUNTO, e di MARIA FRAGALÀ, domiciliata al Pizzo.

That single clause does two things. It documents the fourth generation, which this archive has carried as untested — family tree only, no source — since it began; and the tree's name for him, Antonino, turns out to be exactly right. It also produces Maria Fragalà, who was not in the tree at all: a widow still living at Pizzo while her son had moved along the coast.

The bride is twenty-one and born at Briatico, figlia di GIUSEPPE, di professione bracciale, domiciliato defunto, e CATERINA CICHELLO, who came to the wedding and gave her consent in person. Two more names, both new.

And it explains the silence. Three complete years of Briatico births — 1818, 1819, 1820 — hold no Prostamo of any given name. Thirteen years of Briatico marriages hold none either. The reason is not that the register is thin. The Prostamo were not there yet. This act is the family's first appearance in the town, and the work now moves to Pizzo, whose registers this archive has never opened.

One more line is worth keeping. The groom produced la fede di morte del padre, e dell'avo paterno — his grandfather's death certificate. So the third generation was dead by 1849 and his death act exists. The tree, independently, puts Pasquale Prostamo's death at Pizzo on 4 January 1829. Two things agreeing is not a source, and the generation stays marked untested until that act is opened — but they agree, and they agree about Pizzo.

Every Italian marriage leaves a second file — the processetti, the loose papers the couple had to produce. Briatico's for 1849 survive, and the first bundle in the volume is Domenico Prostamo 's. It settles four things at once.

His father's death. On 20 May 1849 the archivist of Pizzo certified that, having searched the death register, «ha ritrovato in quello DI MORTI COLERICI dell'anno 1837 la seguente partitola» — and copied out act 327: «A dì 31 Dicembre anno milleottocento trentasette ad ore due di notte è morto ANTONINO PROSTAMO di anni 56, marinaro, domiciliato alla Ripa della Marinella, marito di MARIA FRAGALÀ del Pizzo.»

He died in the cholera, at two in the morning on the last night of 1837. Pizzo kept its cholera dead in a book of their own, apart from the ordinary Morti series — which is why he could have been hunted through those volumes for a very long time without being found. Fifty-six puts his birth about 1781, and that agrees with the thirty-two he gave when he declared his son's birth in 1814. Maria Fragalà outlived him by at least twelve years.

The descent. Filed beside it is a certified extract of Pizzo, Morti 1829, act 7 — Pasquale Prostamo's death — produced as the groom's fede di morte dell'avo paterno. So Pasquale was Domenico's paternal grandfather, which is to say Antonino's father. The link this page called untested that morning is a document by the afternoon.

And the groom had another name. The bundle holds his birth extract: act 285, born at eighteen o'clock on 2 April 1814 at Pizzo, alle Moli, to Antonino, 32, and Maria Fragalà, 27 — and entered in the register as ANTONIO Prostamo. So on the morning of the wedding he and four witnesses swore an atto di notorietà before the sindaco: the man registered in 1814 as Antonio «chiamasi effettivamente DOMENICO PROSTAMO, e questo è stato sempre il suo effettivo nome». There he is figlio del fu Antonino, di anni trentacinque — thirty-five, where the marriage act the same day says thirty-six.

The bride's side goes deeper still. Two Ventrice death extracts are in the bundle, exactly as the marriage act promised: her father Giuseppe Ventrice, dead at Briatico on 21 June 1831 at thirty; and her grandfather Domenico Ventrice, dead at Zambrone on 13 January 1815, a bracciale, husband of Anna Fama and son of the late Paolo Ventrice and the late Anna Pappa. Five names on the bride's side, none of them in the family tree.

Zambrone was opened for the original, and it is not there either. The comune has one pre-unification death volume on Antenati, Morti 1811–1839. It holds 1811, then 1812 twice — once for Zambrone and once for San Giovanni, a hamlet that kept a register of its own — and then jumps straight to 1822. Every year from there is in order, 1822 through 1839. The years 1813 to 1821 are simply not in it, and the portal's Zambrone holdings then stop until 1911. So for the second time in a day, the clerk's copy in the marriage bundle is the only readable text of an act.

And the bride herself now has a day. Briatico's births for 1828 hold her at act 12: on 23 June 1828, at nine in the morning, Giuseppe Ventrice, di anni trentatré, a bracciale, came to the town hall and presented a girl born that morning nella casa di loro propria abitazione to Caterina Cichello, di anni ventinove, and named her GIOVANNA. The parroco of San Nicola returned the baptism notice the next day.

Caterina Cichello was born about 1799. Giovanna was twenty at her wedding on 14 June 1849 — nine days short of the twenty-one her marriage act claims. And her father's age here, thirty-three, is at odds with the di anni trenta of his death act, which would put his birth at about 1801 rather than 1795. A man's own declaration outranks an age given for him by neighbours afterwards, so this archive carries 1795 and keeps the other figure beside it.

A correction, and it is mine. This page first gave that death as 21 June 1839. It is 21 June 1831. I read milleottocento trentuno in the 1849 chancery copy as trentanove; the original register settles it, and so does the 1839 register itself — its act 12 is the death of D.a Olimpia La Torre on 14 August, and that year's Tavola agrees. The original also names the second declarant Rosario Zungri where the copy has Sergi: the third Calabrian chancery copy caught drifting from the act it was copying.

Eight years changes the shape of the household. Giuseppe Ventrice died two days before Giovanna's third birthday — she was born on the 23rd of June, he died on the 21st — and Caterina Cichello was a widow for eighteen years before she walked into the Briatico town hall in June 1849 to give her consent to that daughter's marriage.

Zambrone's marriages were opened next, and they cannot hold the couple either. Domenico was about fifty-eight when he died in January 1815 and Anna Fama about fifty; their son Giuseppe was born about 1809. Civil registration began in Calabria in 1809 and Zambrone's marriage volume begins in 1811. A couple whose son was born in 1809 married before the register existed — so their marriage is in the parish books, which Antenati does not hold. It is the same wall this archive met at Pizzo with Pasquale Prostamo, and it is where the Calabrian line stops being testable online.

The volume is still worth reading, because every act and every annual index names the parents of both spouses — so the couple's other children would name them. Two years were read in full. 1822 holds six marriages and no Ventrice at all. 1826 holds six, and one Ventrice: Serafina Ventrice married Vincenzo Sorrentino on 9 August 1826 — and she is figlia di Francesco e di Caterina la Vessa. A second Ventrice household in the same small comune, and not ours. The remaining forty-odd indexes are mapped and unread.

And the copy is not clean. It crams two ages into one clause — sposo di Anna Fama di anni cinquanta … di anni cinquantotto, di professione bracciale. The fifty-eight stands beside his trade and is read here as his, which puts his birth about 1757; the fifty is read as his wife's. This page first said he was fifty. Where the original is gone, the ambiguity cannot be resolved — only recorded.

The register itself was looked for, and it is not there. Pizzo's deaths for 1836–1840 are on Antenati in one volume of 427 images. Its ordinary register for 1837 runs to act 207 and then stops, on 16 July 1837. From act 209 the town was writing its dead into a second book — and that book has not been digitised. What has survived into the volume is its index, bound in after the ordinary register: twelve openings listing acts 209 to 325 with names, ages, trades and quarters. Antonino Prostamo is act 327, two past the last line of it.

So the extract above is not a convenience copy of something better. As far as this archive can reach, it is the only readable text of act 327 — and it survives only because a clerk at Pizzo copied it out in May 1849 so that a sailor could marry at Briatico three weeks later.

The shape of the volume is its own evidence. A town's ordinary death register breaking off in the middle of July, and a second one opened behind it under a certificate dated at Catanzaro that August, is what an epidemic looks like from inside an archive. The surviving index holds a hundred and seventeen of the dead between July and the end of the year; the register it indexes would hold at least two hundred more. Searched for Prostamo, the index has none — it stops two short of him.

One correction, and it is mine. The chancery's copy of Pasquale's act makes him sessantacinque where the original register says settantacinque — ten years lost between an act and its own certified copy twenty years later. This archive carries the original's figure and records the copy's.

The marriage act said Pizzo, so Pizzo was opened. The family tree puts Pasquale Prostamo's death there on 4 January 1829 and gives no source, which meant the answer — if there was one — would be in the first few acts of the year.

It is act 7. On 14 January 1829, Nicola Nicchella, a porter, and Domenico Belvedere, fifty-six, a marinaro, came before the sindaco of Pizzo to say that the evening before, at twenty-four o'clock, Pasquale Prostamo had died — di anni SETTANTACINQUE, VEDOVO DI CATERINA MAJO, nato al Pizzo, di professione MARINARO, domiciliato al Pizzo, al Castello.

Three things follow. The death is on the thirteenth, not the fourth: the tree is nine days out. He is seventy-five, so born about 1753, where the tree says 1760 — the same six-or-seven-year drift this archive has now caught on five people. And he was a widower, which names Caterina Majo, who was not in the tree at all. (This page first said Muso. That was a misreading of my own, corrected the same day against the chancery's certified copy.)

So the men of this line were sailors for three generations at least: Pasquale, his son Antonino, and Antonino's son Domenico, who carried the trade eleven kilometres down the coast to Briatico in 1849.

What this does not prove. The act's two lines for Pasquale's own parents are left blank, so the generation above him is not reachable from it — and since he married before 1809, when civil registration began in Calabria, his marriage is in parish books that Antenati does not hold. The tree's first two generations, 1697 and 1726, may not be testable online at all. The descent, though, is no longer in doubt: later the same day a certified copy of this very act turned up in Domenico's marriage bundle, filed as the groom's fede di morte dell'avo paterno. See below.

This quarter has had no register work behind it at all. The Prostamo descent is eight generations deep in the family tree and documented in one of them — Domenico Prostamo, and only because his son's marriage papers named him. Everything above is marked untested because nobody had looked.

There was nothing to stop them. The Archivio di Stato di Catanzaro has five hundred and fifty-five volumes for Briatico on Antenati, with Potenzoni — where this family also appears — catalogued separately.

The gap explains something. Alfonso Prostamo married Caterina Melluso on 21 May 1887 — squarely inside the 1859–1910 hole — which is why this archive has that act from FamilySearch and not from Antenati.

And generations 4 and 5 are inside the civil era. Antonino Prostamo, born about 1785, and Domenico, about 1820, are both reachable in principle. That is the first time anything in this quarter has been reachable at all.

The first read: 1820, and the tree is wrong or the year is

The tree dates Domenico Prostamo to 1820 and gives no source. That year has now been read entire. Briatico is a small place — twenty-seven births in the whole of 1820 — and its annual Tavola is alphabetised by the child's given name, the same trap this archive met at Scilla in 1818, where a search under the surname finds nothing and proves nothing.

Read under D, the year holds exactly one Domenico: Insanni Domenico, figlio naturale, born 27 May. Not a Prostamo.

So the tree's 1820 is now a tested negative rather than an untested assertion — and by this archive's own audit rule, a year taken from an undocumented tree date has to be widened by at least five years before that negative means anything. 1818, 1819, 1821 and 1822 are next, and the whole run 1816–1830 costs about one image a year.

Briatico stands on the Tyrrhenian coast about ten kilometres north of Vibo Valentia, on the stretch Italians call the Costa degli Dei. The town the family left is not quite the town on the map today: old Briatico was wrecked by the Calabrian earthquake of 1783 and again in 1905, and the modern comune is a rebuilding, a little inland of the ruins. Its hamlets — Potenzoni, Mandaradoni, San Costantino — appear in this archive as birthplaces in their own right, which is how Calabrian registers recorded them.

That 1783 earthquake matters for a practical reason. It destroyed archives across the province, and it is one of the reasons a line that reaches 1697 here is unusual enough to be worth checking rather than assuming.

Every Mazza this archive has buried in Australia is at Nudgee. Searching the Prostamo across Australian cemeteries turns up six, and not one of them is at Nudgee. They are at Mount Gravatt on the south side of Brisbane, at Nerang on the Gold Coast, and — new to this archive entirely — in a Melbourne cemetery at Glenroy. The two halves of this family came to the same country and did not settle together.

Three sources agree on one couple. Maria Assunta lies in plot 607 at Mount Gravatt and Domenico Francesco in plot 608. The Commonwealth Gazette naturalised him on 1 October 1962 from 38 Park Terrace, Sherwood, and her on 4 July 1966 from 3 Frank Street, Graceville. The Queensland death index then gives her parents: Gregorio Melluso and Carmela Maria Borello.

So she was born a Melluso and died a Prostamo — the same two surnames that married at Briatico on 21 May 1887, when Alfonso Prostamo married Caterina Melluso . Whether the Brisbane couple descend from the Briatico one is untested, and is recorded here as a hint and not a descent. Her father's own death gives two more names, Gennaro Melluso and Maria Limardo; Limardo is a name out of the Potenzoni birth register of 1818, which at least puts that household in the right district.