Apart from discovering dozens of Monte San Giacomese families, researching the Sassano church archives has finally shed light on a few Latin turns of phrase that I had not understood when looking through the Monte San Giacomo Processitti documents.
Often names appear with an abbreviation : qm or sometimes qqm, when referring to two people (aka parents) — it was only until much later that I learned that that abbreviation signified that the people were dead (much like fú & furono do in Italian). It wasn’t until recently I noticed the word spelled out. “quondam”; meaning “once”. Like furono means “was”, it is an elegantly delicate way of referring to the deceased.
Likewise “Terre” — somehow I missed that it meant land and typically referred to another town. However dealing with the Latin names of towns is a bit tricky — Castri San Jacobi (Monte San Giacomo) and Saxani (Sassano) are pretty easy — but Bonatori (Vibonati) threw me for a loop until I saw a corresponding civil record.
All this to say is that I went back through all the processitti records and doublechecked for quondam and terre and made hundreds of adjustments to estimated death dates.
The other aspect of the Sassano archive that encouraged me to change the data was the evolution of names. Mostly this is what was vogue for how things were spelled (and there is a clear schism between church and civil records), but Monte San Giacomo had a seismic change in the early 1820s where virtually every name that had “di” (di Lisa) or “d'” (d’Amato), dropped it. Raciuoppo became Racioppi, Viceconte became Viciconte and so on.
When I recorded the data I did put the original name in, but for the sake of searching, I always added the modern variant. To help show that evolution, I have set the default name to the original, so you will see family trees where di Lisa becomes Lisa. I have yet to contend with Cervo/Cerbo/Ciervo and Branno/Brando/Branda but they are on the list.
Finally there is a modest update for the Marotta family (which intersects the previous updates)