I've had a genealogical break-through of sorts recently. This wasn't one of those eureka moments where I found a name leading to a hundred others going back in time, but it may eventually allow me to push my paternal linage back further than I thought possible. This discovery has also given me great historical background I never had before on my paternal grandfather's place of birth - San Giovanni in Fiore in the Cosenza Province of the Calabrian Region.
While using my grandfather's place of birth as a search term, I found a 1995 article titled A Social-Demographic, Isonymic and Genetic Investigation on an Isolated Calabrian Village, in the International Journal of Anthropology. This was both good and bad. The good news is the "Isolated Calabrian Village" in the title was San Giovanni in Fiore, but in order to access the information I had to buy it. Because I hoped it would provide me good info on my grandfather's hometown, and because I'm a sucker for spending money for genealogy reasons, I paid my $32 to download a 9 page article even though I had no clue what the title meant. Sometimes being a sucker pays off and this time it did. Copyright provisions won't allow me to reprint the entire article here, but what I found excited me.
From what I can tell, this is a study about the frequency of a G6PD deficiency (click on the link if you care to understand what this is) in San Giovanni in Fiore. Most of the article does not make any sense to me, but there are three parts of genealogy interest: A brief history of the town; the identification of a mid 1700s Italian resource I'd never heard of before; and list of the 27 most prevelent surnames in San Giovanni in Fiore from the mid 1700s compared with a list created during study sample interviews conducted in the early to mid 1980s.
Town History
San Giovanni in Fiore was founded in 1530 and was settled initially by three Spanish families with the surnames of Oliverio, Jaquinta, and Lopez. The initial intent for this town was to provide protection to people the surrounding area from the expanding Ottoman Empire. The town is located high in the Sila Mountains and provided a natural barrier to military attack. The interesting aspect of this short history are the three Spanish names - one of which, Oliverio, is in my family tree. I really never gave much thought to having Spanish ancestors.
Genealogy Resource
The genealogy resource this paper identified is called the Catasto Onciario. I had never heard of this one before. This is in effect a census performed by the Kingdom of the Two Sicilies, in the mid 1700s, to determine taxes due to the government. To me it appears similar to Griffith's Valuation in Ireland during the mid 1800s. This resource, in the form of books, is in the Archive of Naples and appears to cover most of southern Italy - to include the towns where both of my grandparents were born (Pedace, and San Giovanni in Fiore). FamilySearch.org has filmed some of these records, but from my limited research on the web, this is a relatively untapped resource.
Listing of High Frequency Names
One of the most interesting parts of the article is where the authors compare the frequency of surnames from the study in the 1980s to the names appearing in the Catasto Onciario for San Giovanni in Fiore in the mid 1700s. The top 3 names in frequency for both time periods are the 3 Spanish Names listed above (Oliverio, Jaquinta, and Lopez). The exciting part for me is 4 of these 27 names on the list are in my family tree (Oliverio, Romano, Spadafora, Barberio) and were present in San Giovanni in Fiore in the mid 1700s. Agazio/Aggazio wasn't in the top 27, but I'd bet it's in the Catasto Onciario for my grandfather's home town. I have asked for permission to use the table including these names, but haven't received an answer yet.
Buying that article didn't teach me much about G6PD deficiency, but there sure was a lot of other information in there I can use for genealogical purposes...now If I can only figure out how to request information from the Archive of Naples.
