I never thought I would find ancestors from Calabria, but tonight I discovered 4!

1. Gregorio di Grigoli / di Gregoli
born Reggio, Reggio Calabria , died 27 May 1618 Carini Sicily

2. Battista Conigliaro
born 1570, Rosarno, Reggio Calabria died 1633 Carini Sicily

3. Pietro Bergamino
born 1568 Casali, Cosenza, Calabria
died 19 Jan 1625 Carini, Sicily

4. Domenico Sabella
born abt 1540 Panaio, Catanzaro, Calabria
died 1608 Carini

All 4 of them seemed to leave Calabria and traveled to Western Sicily around the same time (about 1600)

Well it's about time!! lol

Haha - now we can call you a hard head too!

WOW! Congratulations! That is so far back! It's great you could find that! And so far back. Cosenza and Catanzaro! WOO HOO

Jim: now you are our Calabrese paesano!

James, great finds! What type of records did you find!

These places of origins came from Carini church records of Marriage and Burial. In Carini, when a man was not a native of the town, his native place was listed when he married and died, even as far back as 1538!

I've scanned and copied all of the church records from 1538 and put them on my website, my cousin Michel in France has been extracting them into a gedcom. He recently finished another section of extractions and after importing the file I did a "Place list" within the database... I even have ancestry from Greece/Albania and Savoia (northern Italy) via Carini.

www.cariniexchange.com...ge_005.htm

actually I was lucky enough that the documentation was done already for the family (Norcia) I descend from, once I connected to it in the Carini records. I found a 1651 Marriage record for my Carlo Marciano to Mattea Norcia which states she is from Plane Grecorum (Piana degli Albanesi currently).

Matteo Norcia was one of the men (her grandfather) who was part of this group mentioned on The Piana site

"In 1534 another group of families, known as Coroni, settled in the village. They were Arvanites, who came from the town of Koroni in the Morea region of southwestern Greece. The quasi-national anthem of the Arberesh of Piana degli Albanesi is the song "O e bukura Morea", which talks about the bereavement of leaving Morea behind for Italy. King John II of Spain and Sicily allowed the original refugees to occupy the present place and to preserve their Orthodox religion, which was identified as Greek, so that the small town had the name of Piana dei Greci."

as far as how I got access to these early Sicilian Church records.. the LDS filmed them in 2003-5. I copied and scanned every single page and put them up on my website 1538-1910. Took me 3 years of intense work but well worth it.