What this archive rests on — and, for every line of it, whether the document itself has been read or only an index to it.
Read this page with the method beside it. An index entry is a real source and a weak one: it proves a name was written somewhere, and it does not show you the handwriting, the parents, the ages or the address. Every row below says which it is. Of the 39 sources named in the family's own export, only 11 individuals carry a citation at all — which is why so much of this archive is now resting on registers the export never mentioned.
12 of the 25 link to the thing itself. The rest are the indexes the tree cites and this archive has never opened — left unlinked on purpose, because a link would say they had been reached.
Exported 9 September 2026 from the Defranceski family site. 614 individuals, 212 families, 133 photographs. Contributed by Michael Mazza and relatives.
Used for: The spine of this archive, and the thing every other source is being used to test.
Stato civile napoleonico 1809-1815, restaurazione 1816-1865, italiano 1866-1943. 327 volumes listed here.
Used for: The Arena spine from Rocco back to FILIPPO ARENA and SANTA UNGARO in the 1720s; the Arlotta, the Costa, the Donato and the Polistena.
Twenty-two volumes, 1810-1865. Each bundle holds the BIRTH EXTRACTS of both spouses and the DEATH ACTS of dead parents, copied out of the parish books.
Used for: Filippo Arena's baptism of 25 March 1793, Domenica Costa's of 16 June 1787, and Giovanni de Costa's death of 29 March 1790 -- the oldest dated event in this archive.
457 registers, 1820-1893, plus nine volumes of Riveli di anime e di terre from 1714 and 1747-1752.
Used for: The Mazza spine to MARIANO MAZZA and MARIA CATALANO, born about 1809; four more children for Rosario and Leonarda; and the absence of any Mazza in the town's 1747 household census.
The Calabrian side. Briatico has 555 registers of which this archive has listed 80.
Used for: The Prostamo to 1697, the Ventrice, the Cichello and the Melluso -- and the 1849 marriage bundle that proved three generations at once.
Some comuni have their acts indexed BY NAME with parents and spouse: Scilla deaths 1911-1943, Pizzo births 1868-1903, Catania deaths 1911 onward.
Used for: One query replaces a volume sweep where it exists. Five of the eight comuni this family touches are not indexed at all.
Internee dossiers, aliens registration, naturalisation, immigration correspondence. The item TITLE carries the particulars even when nothing is digitised.
Used for: Three men interned in the Second World War; Maria Nicotra's arrival at Sydney on 20 April 1962; the ships behind five family crossings.
Births 1829-1926, marriages 1829-1951, deaths 1829-1996. The index carries the MOTHER and PARENT columns.
Used for: Twenty-eight registrations, including the one that names John Nicotra and Venera Cassaneti -- and the sweep that showed «Cassaneti» appears exactly once in the whole index.
The interment register, searchable by name, with plot numbers.
Used for: Thirteen burials, several of them adjacent, and the married names that identified four women the tree had lost.
Used for: The 1906 and 1913 arrivals of the Melluso, Anile and Arena.
Six separate index series.
Used for: Maria Rosa Melluso's New York birth, 14 October 1907; the Anile marriage of 21 December 1907 at Manhattan; and four Arena children born at Manhattan 1896-1902.
Used for: The American households of the first wave.
Used for: The Polistena servicemen buried at Arneytown.
Used for: American deaths and naturalisations.
Used for: Michele Donato, 11 March 1908, out of Palermo.
Used for: Francesco Melluso, Miami, 18 June 1961.
Used for: Queensland deaths.
Used for: The Nudgee burials. NOTE: Find a Grave will index one person at two cemeteries when the names resemble each other.
Used for: Addresses and occupations after arrival.
Used for: The 1925, 1949, 1950, 1951 and 1957 arrivals -- several of which the NAA index has since corrected.
Used for: Briatico burials.
A relative's compiled research, cited in the tree without a reference.
Used for: Parts of the Melluso descent at Briatico. UNVERIFIED, and named here so that nobody mistakes it for a record.
A six-day trial, swept systematically rather than browsed.
Used for: Its Italian births, marriages and deaths sets DO NOT COVER SCILLA -- zero Polistena in all three. Recorded in full, negatives included, so that nobody pays to discover it again.
The National Library of Australia's newspaper archive.
Used for: A WALL, not a nil: its own vendor bundle throws on a storage API this browser lacks. A free NLA API key would settle it.
Free JSON, no key.
Used for: Swept for this family and it is not there. The empty-202 throttle reads as zero results, which is how a wall gets mistaken for a negative.
This section used to begin “No Italian civil register has been read for this family. That is the largest single gap.” It was true on the day the archive was built and it is kept here, struck, because an archive that quietly deletes its own old headline is harder to trust than one that shows the correction.
What is actually missing now is narrower and harder.
Each of those is a row. The work list →