The Four Quarters
Every person has four grandparents, and they are the honest unit of a family history: four separate families, four separate depths of evidence, and no reason at all for them to be equal.
These four were born within eight years of each other — 1920, 1924, 1925, 1928 — in three towns that had no connection whatsoever. Two of them are about six hundred kilometres apart. All four were in Queensland by 1954.
Four walls, four different reasons
Every one of these lines ends at a named person, and none of them ends because nobody looked. Each wall below was established by reading until the absence was provable — four complete years of marriages here, a province probed year by year there, a volume opened to find nine years physically missing. A wall established by reading is a finding. A wall assumed from silence is a shrug, and the difference is most of what this archive is for.
He is thirty-three when his son is born in December 1816, so his own birth and marriage are pre-civil at Scilla — and his elder son MICHELE was born at MESSINA about 1814, where registration does not begin until 1820.
His age comes from Scilla Nati 1816 atto 207, copied into his son's marriage bundle of 1844. The Messina wall was probed year by year across the whole province: 1815 nothing, 1819 nothing, 1820 three hundred and sixty-six volumes. Sicily had no Napoleonic period, so there is no earlier series to fall back on. FamilySearch's «Messina, Civil Registration (State Archive), 1820-1865» confirms the same start year from a different filming.
PARISH REGISTERS, Archdiocese of Messina or Diocese of Reggio Calabria.
Pizzo's registers begin in 1823 and he died in January 1829 — so he is reachable, but nothing above him is.
His death is Pizzo Morti 1829 atto 7, and the chancery's certified copy of it was filed in his grandson's Briatico marriage bundle of 1849 as the fede di morte of the «avo paterno» — which is what PROVES the descent rather than asserting it. Antonino Prostamo's own birth about 1781 falls before the register starts.
PARISH REGISTERS of the Diocese of Mileto–Nicotera–Tropea; or the 1837 cholera register, which survives only as an index of acts 209 to 325 and is not digitised.
He died on 13 January 1815, and ZAMBRONE'S DEATH REGISTER IS MISSING THE NINE YEARS 1813 TO 1821.
The gap is not an inference. The volume runs 1811, then 1812 ENDING WITH ITS OWN DEATH TAVOLA at images 37-38, then a printed title page — AND IMAGE 40 IS 1822. Three more people wanted by this archive died inside the same gap: ANNA MAROPOLI, FRANCESCO CICHELLO and VITTORIA MOLLO, none of whom appears in the death Tavole of 1822, 1823 or 1824.
THE SECOND COPY. Every act was written twice, one register for the comune and one for the tribunale, and Antenati holds the Archivio di Stato's. The chancery certified a copy of Domenico's act in 1849, so it existed then. The comune's own copy, at Zambrone, is the only route left — and it is a letter, not a search.
36 people no chart on this site can draw
Every chart here is drawn from Michael's export, so a person the family tree does not contain cannot appear on one — however good the act behind them. 34 ancestors and 2 children are proved by a register and invisible on every picture. The line below each name is where the drawing stops; everything under it is what the records actually say stands above.
This is not a flaw in the charts. It is the difference between what a family remembers and what an archive can prove, and it is the single largest gap left on this site.
The quarters are not equal, and that is the finding
One quarter reaches 1697 and eight generations. Another stops after three, at a man with no dates at all. This is not because one family was more important — it is because Calabrian civil registration survives better than Sicilian for these particular comuni, and because the Briatico line has been worked on by relatives in Italy and Argentina for years while the Sicilian line has not. Depth of pedigree measures the archive, not the ancestors.