Back matter · Provenance

The hands this volume passed through before mine.

A catalogue gives a book its provenance: the chain of hands it passed through, and — stated just as plainly — the links no one can account for any more. This is mine, three times over: a table of descent, the way an engraver would have cut it; nine bound volumes, one life each; and the same nine laid on real time, where the thing a family tree always hides finally shows — when, and for how long, and how briefly any of it overlapped with me.

Great-grandparents

  1. Not yet
    recorded    Lambiase line
  2. Not yet
    recorded    Lambiase line
  3. Not yet
    recorded    Vigorito line
  4. Not yet
    recorded    Vigorito line
  5. Not yet
    recorded    Vaccaro line
  6. Not yet
    recorded    Vaccaro line
  7. AntonioDi LandroMother's mother's fatherb. 23 March 1912335 words
  8. AmaliaApicellaMother's mother's motherb. 6 July 1920311 words

Grandparents

  1. VincenzoLambiaseFather's fatherdates unrecorded405 words
  2. Raffaella RaffelinaVigoritoFather's motherliving385 words
  3. AntonioVaccaroMother's fatherb. 27 September 1943553 words
  4. Gelsomina AnnaDi LandroMother's motherb. 11 September 1944 · d. 19 November 2023772 words

Parents

  1. Antonio NinoLambiaseFatherliving361 words
  2. CarmelaVaccaroMotherliving374 words

Here

  1. VincenzoLambiaseThe present handb. 200574 words
Tab. Ithe direct line, four generations — every hand a bound volume, numbered as genealogists have numbered since 1590: I am 1, every father is double his child, every mother one more. Rest on a name to light its descent; take a volume down to read it.
The line, entered9Two parents, four grandparents, three great-grandparents and me. Six more seats stand empty, drawn anyway: an empty seat is a fact.
Years the record spans93From my mother's mother's father, born 1912, down to me. Three lifetimes end to end, and it is already everything there is.
Grandparents I can count the years with2Of four. For the other two nobody wrote down when they died, so the time we shared cannot be counted at all — only guessed at.
Still here to be asked3My mother, my father, and my father's mother. Nearly every blank on this leaf is in one of their heads.

The same nine, on real time

A table of descent answers who. It is silent on the only question that turns out to matter — when. Here is the same line laid on one scale: a hundred and thirty years, nine lives, each drawn solid where the record holds and left open where it stops.

  1. Antonio Di Landrob. 1912, death unrecorded unknown
  2. Amalia Apicellab. 1920, death unrecorded unknown
  3. Antonio Vaccarob. 1943, death unrecorded unknown
  4. Gelsomina Di Landro1944–2023 18 years with me
  5. Antonio LambiaseFather · birth year not recorded 21 years with me, and counting
  6. Carmela VaccaroMother · birth year not recorded 21 years with me, and counting
  7. Vincenzo LambiaseFather's father · birth year not recorded not recorded
  8. Raffaella VigoritoFather's mother · birth year not recorded 21 years with me, and counting
  9. Vincenzo Lambiase2005 — still being written me
Tab. IIone hundred and thirty years, nine lives. Solid where the record holds; open where it stops. The royal is the part we shared.

And one more thing the dates give away

Every birthplace this record holds — Tramonti, Maiori, Salerno — sits inside twenty kilometres of the same coast. Four generations, one bay. Whatever else is missing from this leaf, that much is on it: nobody left. I am the first one on this table who is trying to.

What this leaf prints, and what it keeps

The dead are here in full: dates, villages, trades, the way they talked. They have no accounts to break into and no consent left to give, and remembering them properly is the whole reason for this page.

The living are here by name and by story, because both are theirs and both are already plain — their surnames are on this table twice over. What is kept back is narrower and it is deliberate: no full date of birth, because a name and a full date and a birthplace together rebuild an Italian codice fiscale, and that is a key rather than a fact; no address; no private letters or messages. Their three leaves are also kept out of every search engine. Anything they hold publicly under their own name — an office, a published role — is not a secret and is printed.

The complete record, full dates and all, exists as a printed family edition that never goes on the web. That is where a family record has always survived best: a server has an owner and a bill, a printed book has neither.

A standing request

This table is not finished and is not meant to look finished. It is kept in public on purpose: an open record gets corrected, a private one only gets lost twice.

If you are family, or you knew any of these people — a date, a trade, a photograph, a house, the way one of them talked — it belongs here. I would rather have it wrong on the page and corrected than right in someone's memory and gone.

Write to me ↗

or read how corrections are handled here.

Back matter ❦The Author ❦The colophon ≡The Frontispiece