From the Foot of the Mountain

At eleven in the morning on 2 June 1845 a boy was born at Piedimonte Etneo, in the house his parents lived in, and the same day his father declared him before the sindaco, Antonino Grassi. The clerk wrote the father down as Mariano Mazza, aged thirty-six, by trade a bracciale, and the mother as Maria Catalano, also thirty-six. The boy was Rosario. The parish of the Chiesa Maggiore baptised him that day and sent the notice back at once.^doc

Their two ages are nearly all the papers give of their beginnings: both were born about 1809. Neither is in the family's tree. They are in this archive because a register named them, not because anyone remembered them.^inf

Bracciale is the register's word for a day-labourer. In his son's death act of 1924 he is remembered as a contadino, a peasant farmer. What he worked at, and on whose land, no paper says.^doc

He may have married in the same town in September 1836. The marriage indexes of Piedimonte, read for every year from 1820, when its civil registers begin, to 1845, hold one groom called Mazza in twenty-six years, and he is a Mariano: a bracciale of thirty, born at Piedimonte, son of an Ignazio and of Giuseppa Pulvirenti. His bride was twenty-eight, born at Macchia, and the act calls her Agata Catalano. Her age fits the mother of 1845, and so do the surname, his trade and his town. Her first name does not, and his age is three years out. The archive calls it probable, not proven, and so does this book.^inf to be confirmed

If the couple had other children, none was born at Piedimonte in the years around Rosario. The birth registers for 1844, 1845, 1846 and 1847 have been read entire, something over five hundred births, and Mariano and Maria appear once, as Rosario's parents.^doc

Twenty-six years later Mariano is in the papers once more. On 16 April 1871 the comune certified the banns for Rosario's marriage, and its printed form had a place for whether the groom's father was alive. The clerk wrote «figlio del vivente Mariano»: son of the living Mariano, bracciante, resident there. Maria Catalano was living too, and for the first time a paper gives her a trade: industriosa, the word these registers use for a woman doing piecework at home.^doc

After that, silence. No death act has been found for either of them. By 1924 both were dead: their son's death act calls them «fu Mariano gia contadino» and «fu Catalano Maria gia casalinga», the late Mariano, once a farmer, and the late Maria Catalano, once a housewife.^doc

At four in the afternoon on 30 April 1871 the sindaco of Piedimonte Etneo, Barone Mariano, married two day-labourers in the casa comunale. The groom was Rosario Mazza, single, born and living in the town, a bracciante. The bride was Leonarda Bonanno, single, born and living there too, and a bracciante in her own right. A shoemaker of thirty-eight, Salvatore Greco, and a labourer of forty-six, Antonino Di Lava, stood witness. The next wedding was entered at half past four: the registrar was working through a set of them that afternoon.^doc

Leonarda had been born on 7 November 1843, at eight in the morning, in her parents' house. Her father, Gaetano Bonanno, a bracciale of thirty-six, declared her the next day; her mother was Anna Cavallaro. In April 1871 her father was still living. Like Rosario's parents, hers are not in the family's tree.^doc

Their first son was born in February 1872, at ten at night, in contrada San Basilio, and Rosario went in person to declare him at noon the next day. They named him Mariano, which was Rosario's father's name. Eleven months later, on 5 January 1873, a second son was born in Contrada Terremorte, and he, Salvatore, carries the line into the next chapter. Whether the first Mariano lived, nobody has yet looked.^doc

The other children can be followed through the registers, though never in one book. Giovanni was twenty-seven when his banns were read in 1902, so born about 1875. Gaetano, with the name of Leonarda's father, was born on 5 May 1880 in via San Basilio, and Rosario, entered as a bracciante of thirty-two, declared him four days later. A parish book gives Santo, born about 8 April 1882, «ex Rosario e Leonarda Bonanno». Ignazio was twenty-three at his banns in 1910, and both his parents came before the clerk to give their consent.^doc

The family's tree gives Rosario three sons, Orazio, Ignazio and Giovanni, by a wife it calls only Leonarda. An Orazio Mazza was born at Piedimonte in October 1877, and one page of this archive counts him as theirs; another shows that his mother was a different Leonarda, living in a different street. Until that act is settled, Orazio is the tree's.^lore to be confirmed

Those sons are why the archive is larger than the line. The family's tree arrived in pieces, and one piece held a hundred and ten Piedimonte Mazza joined to the family by nothing at all. Register acts showed that its head, a Rosario with a wife called Leonarda, was this Rosario. The hundred and ten are the families of his sons, and a hundred and six of them come down through Orazio alone. The join is declared and argued in public, so that it can be attacked.^inf

The registers could not keep his name straight. In the Latin parish books he is Rogerius, and other entries for the same household give the father as Rosarius, Joannes and Gaspare. The archive's working rule for this town is that the given name is unreliable and the wife's name is the stable handle.^doc

The clerks wrote his age down again and again, and it drifts: twenty-eight in January 1873, thirty-two in 1880, fifty-three in 1898, sixty-five in 1910. His act of birth outranks them all. He was a bracciante when he married and when his sons were born; by the end the register called him a contadino.^doc

He died on 15 November 1924 at Presa, in the comune of Piedimonte Etneo, at seventy-nine. The death act names his father Mariano, his mother Maria Catalano and his wife Leonarda Bonanno, and it is the paper that made the deepest Sicilian generation of this archive a document rather than an inference. Leonarda was alive in 1910. When she died, no paper yet says.^doc

Their son Frank lives in Brisbane. He married Nancy Arena, of Brisbane, the daughter of Rocco Arena and Angela Polistena of Scilla, so that the two couples at Nudgee are his parents and hers.^lore

Their son, Michael Rocco Mazza, lives in Brisbane with his wife, Stefanie D'Arcy. The family's tree this archive was built from is his. Their two children, M. and R., are the youngest of the name, and the archive was made for them.^lore

All of them are living, and by this archive's rule the living are named with their relationships and their towns, and nothing more; the two youngest, by their initials only.^doc

So the name runs from a day-labourer who stood before the sindaco of Piedimonte Etneo in 1845 to a suburb on the far side of the world: Piedimonte, Mascali, Genoa, Wacol, Nudgee. Papers in Italian, Latin and English; a mother's surname spelled four ways; a grandfather named in two words, di Mariano. And two children in Brisbane, for whom it was written down.^doc