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 509 across 119. Calandriello and Petrizzo hold at 26 marriages, still the single most common alliance documented anywhere in the tree. The top of the table is steady: nothing in the top twenty pairings changed this update, with Calandriello and d'Amato at 24, Calandriello and Rubino at 21, and Calandriello and di Brizzi and d'Amato and Petrizzo at 18. The number of marriages counted rose from 6,381 to 6,393 as new records were added, and the number of distinct surname pairings from 3,212 to 3,221. Among the individual surnames, Calandriello (522 across 106 partners) and Petrizzo, third (421 across 103), hold, while d'Amato adds one (509 across 119). di Bella adds two (241 across 88), Pellegrino adds one (225 across 100), Florendino adds one (192 across 77), and Ferro adds one (205 across 78), which lifts it past di Luca (204 across 78) into sixteenth place. 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.