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In May 2026, a brief progress update on the advancement of the Castagniccia, Orezza (Corsica) project].
This research project is a long-term endeavor without dedicated funding and therefore progresses at its own pace. Nevertheless, the work—titanic in scope—is moving forward.
– The entirety of the civil status registers of the commune (prioritizing those preserved in the municipal archives, as they contain valuable marginal annotations, and supplementing, where possible, with those held at the Departmental Archives), as well as…
– the entirety of the parish registers from the Ancien Régime available at the Departmental Archives and in the Franciscorsa collection (a Franciscan association in Bastia), have been transcribed into a database.
We thus have, roughly speaking, for the period between 1770 and 1970, the complete set of birth/baptism records (approximately 2,000 individuals), marriage records (approximately 550), and death/burial records (approximately 1,500) for the three hamlets of the commune of Nocario.
– Systematic genealogy—that is, the reconstruction of individual life trajectories and family lineages—is well underway. It follows the international GEDCOM standard. The process is lengthy and painstaking, as it is carried out systematically, including the recording of occupations as noted in the registers for each individual. For example, a person may be recorded as a “propriatario” (landowner) at the time of marriage, then as a “travagliatore” (agricultural worker) at the birth of their first child, later as a “cochaiaro” (wooden spoon maker) at that child’s death, then as a “blacksmith” at the birth of a third child, and so on, up to their own death.
As of today (May 2026), just over 1,000 individuals have been identified and integrated into the nexus formed by the nucarinchi genealogies—inevitably, all families intersect or intermarry in multiple ways over these two centuries. Ultimately, more than 2,000 individuals will be included, exceeding the number recorded in the birth registers: partly because a non-negligible proportion of individuals were never officially registered at birth in Corsican records, and partly because genealogies inevitably “recruit” from elsewhere through marriage and migration—preferentially from other communes in the Orezza valley, especially the neighboring villages of Verdese and Campana, which, together with the hamlets of Nocario, formed the querino (the Ancien Régime parish) of San Micaele (Saint Michael).
The work is painstaking due to incomplete data (for example, reconstructing missing births from later biographical records), the prevalence of homonyms (two or three surnames are highly dominant, and marriages between individuals sharing the same surname—though considered “not of the same family” from an emic perspective—are common), and the recurrence of identical given names (for both girls and boys), often those of a grandmother, grandfather, or other ancestor. These names are frequently reassigned to a subsequent child of the same sex, especially in a context of high infant mortality (and deaths not always recorded).
Despite these challenges, the work remains deeply engaging and reveals aspects of the intimate life of this insular rural community over the centuries.