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In May 2026, a brief progress update on the work being undertaken as part of the Castagniccia.
This is a long-term research project without dedicated funding, and it is therefore taking time. Nevertheless, this monumental undertaking is moving forward.
– All the municipality’s civil registration registers — giving priority to those held at the town hall, as they contain valuable marginal annotations, and supplementing them whenever possible with those held at the Departmental Archives — as well as…
– all the available parish registers from the Ancien Régime held at the Departmental Archives and in the Franciscorsa collection — maintained by a Franciscan association in Bastia —
have been reproduced digitally in their entirety. These reproductions, together with their archival references, form the GENS documentary corpus.
All the records they contain have been entered and transcribed into structured tables forming the GENS records database. This database also includes marriage records identified in other municipalities of the Orezza Valley when they concern a resident of Nocario. The creation of this documentary corpus and records database is described in GENS: Completion of the Systematic Examination of Nocario’s Registers.
We therefore have, roughly speaking, a complete record for the period from around 1770 to 1970 of all surviving and accessible births or baptisms — concerning approximately 2,000 individuals —, marriages — approximately 550 records — and deaths or burials — approximately 1,500 records — in the three hamlets that now form the municipality of Nocario.
– The systematic genealogical reconstruction — that is, the reconstruction of individuals’ life histories and of families — is well under way. It follows the international GEDCOM standard and forms the GENS genealogical database.
Each person identified during this reconstruction is assigned a unique and persistent identifier, their “GENS Individual ID”. This identifier is then entered into the records database for each documentary occurrence attributed to that person. This record linkage connects the different records concerning the same individual, provides direct access to the sources on which their identification is based, and enables the transcriptions and identifications to be checked continuously.
This work of reconstruction and record linkage is lengthy and meticulous because it is systematic. In particular, it involves recording the occupations given for each individual in the registers. A person may, for example, be described as a “propriatario” — landowner — at the time of their marriage, then as a “travagliatore” — agricultural labourer — at the birth of their first child, a “cochaiaro” — maker of wooden spoons — when that child dies, and later as a “blacksmith” at the birth of their third child, and so forth until their own death.
As of May 2026, we have identified and incorporated just over 1,000 individuals into the nexus formed by the Nucarinchi genealogies: inevitably, all these families intersect or become connected through marriage in multiple ways over the course of these two centuries.
Ultimately, more than 2,000 individuals will be included — more than the number of individuals recorded in all the birth registers. This is partly because a significant proportion of individuals were never entered in the Corsican birth registers, and partly because genealogies inevitably “recruit” people from elsewhere through marriage and migration, particularly from other municipalities in the Orezza Valley and, above all, from the two neighbouring municipalities of Verdese and Campana. Together with the hamlets of Nocario, these formed the querino, that is, the Ancien Régime parish of San Micaele — Saint Michael.
The work is made difficult by gaps in the data — for example, when missing births have to be reconstructed from biographical events recorded at a later date — and by homonymy: two or three surnames are overwhelmingly predominant, while marriages between people bearing the same surname, but who are “not from the same family” — according to the emic explanation — are common.
A further difficulty is the recurrent use of the same given names for both girls and boys, often passed down from a grandmother, grandfather or another ancestor. Because of high infant mortality and deaths that were not always recorded, the given name of a deceased child may also have been reused for the next child of the same sex.
Finally, the written forms of given names vary according to the language in which the records were drawn up, particularly between Italian — often Tuscan in tradition and sometimes Corsicanised — and French. The same person may therefore appear under several forms of name over the course of their life, while several contemporaries may bear exactly the same given name and surname. Identification cannot therefore be based on names alone: it requires dates, places, kinship ties, spouses, occupations, places of residence and every other available piece of biographical information to be cross-checked.
The work is nevertheless fascinating and reveals something of the intimate life of this rural island community over the centuries…
