Which families married which.

Two surnames sit at the center of nearly everything: Calandriello and d'Amato. Between them they appear in a huge share of the tree's marriages — Calandriello alone shows up in 522 marriages across 106 different partner surnames, d'Amato in 506 across 119. Calandriello and Petrizzo hold at 26 marriages, still the single most common alliance documented anywhere in the tree, and the top of the table did not move this update: Calandriello and d'Amato stay at 24, Calandriello and Rubino at 21, d'Amato and Russo at 15, and Calandriello and Pinto and d'Alessio and d'Amato at 14. The number of marriages counted rose from 6,356 to 6,369 as new records were added, and the number of distinct surname pairings from 3,195 to 3,203. Among the individual surnames, Calandriello holds at 522 marriages across 106 partners, Petrizzo, third, adds two (421 across 103) and d'Amato adds one (506 across 119). Feminella adds two (316 across 100), Russo four and two partner surnames (279 across 96), Pinto a partner (226 across 84) and Libretti one (198 across 93). Trotta (299), di Miele (235, whose most frequent partner is now Calandriello at 11 marriages rather than Trotta) and Stavola (183) each lose one or two marriages. Di Luca adds a marriage (204 across 78) and draws level with Ferro (204 across 77), which takes it from seventeenth back up to sixteenth and Ferro down to seventeenth. Same-surname marriages hold at 100; the leaders are unchanged, with Calandriello on 16, d'Amato on 12, Petrizzo on 8 and di Brizzi on 6.

That's not a coincidence of a couple of prolific individuals — it shows up at every level. Calandriello is also the most common marriage partner for a wide swath of major surnames — di Brizzi, Rubino, Arnone, Pinto, Russo, di Bella, Libretti, Ferro — meaning if a family in Sassano married outside its own name, Calandriello was disproportionately likely to be on the other side of that marriage. d'Amato plays the same role for Feminella, Pellegrino, Trotta, and Florendino. Between them, these two families functioned as something like the connective tissue of the whole town's marriage network — the families everyone else was likely to marry into sooner or later.

Same-surname marriages — two people who already shared a family name marrying each other, which in a town this size usually means some degree of relation even before you trace the exact connection — happened 100 times across the tree. Calandriello leads that list too, with 16, followed by d'Amato at 12 and Petrizzo at 8. For the exact blood relationships behind marriages like these, see the cousin marriage analysis — the two pages are looking at the same underlying pattern from different angles.

Worth noting: almost none of the top surname pairings show a Chicago connection directly — these are overwhelmingly historical, Sassano-based alliances from before the migration, which makes sense given how much deeper the tree's Italian branches run compared to its American ones.