The Fourteen Pieces

Open a GEDCOM in any family-tree program and it draws every person on one canvas. That canvas is a rendering choice, not a finding. Underneath, the file is a graph — and this one falls into 10 disconnected pieces with no edge of any kind between them.

Naming the pieces is not pedantry. The largest holds 577 people; the next holds 7 — the Mazzitelli of New York, every one of them dated, attached to this family by nothing but having been typed into the same tree. A Piedimonte Etneo kindred of a hundred and ten was a separate piece too, until it was argued onto the line rather than assumed onto it — and the difference between "they are probably related" and "they are related" is the entire discipline.

577 people — Briatico, Vibo Valentia, Calabria

This component grew by a hundred and two people on 10 September 2026. The second piece of the export — a hundred and ten Piedimonte Etneo Mazza attached to nothing — was proved to descend from Rosario Mazza, and joined here. The argument →

17 people in this component were born at Buenos Aires — the branch that went to Argentina rather than Australia. They are inside the main tree, not a fragment beside it, and they remain the least documented thing in the archive: a generation of names with a city and a year and no act behind any of them.

7 people — New York, New York

The Mazzitelli of New York — 7 people, all 7 of them dated, 1886–1926, and attached to this family by nothing but having been entered in the same tree. They belong to the first emigration.

8 people joined to nobody at all

Entered in the tree with no parent, no spouse and no child. Usually a note-to-self somebody made and never finished — but each is a real name, and dropping them would make the archive look tidier than the source is.