Historical Place Names

Thank you so much for doing this. My great-grandmother Francesca Paola DiFranco and my Passarello relatives were from Villadoro, Sicily or Villa d'Oro. (Village of Gold)
In the past, Villa d'oro was named Passarello . It was a fiefdom. I am interested in this village. I am also interested in Agira or D'Agiro. I am uncertain if my SanFilippo ancestors once lived in Agira. I know they lived in Leonforte which is near Agira. Agira Castle is located in Agira. Castello di Agira is where the first San Filippo may have come from Valencia, Spain a long time ago. Grazie Mille

Sant'Anna in Agrigento province used to be a separate comune but then was merged into Caltabellotta. I normally use present day names in my tree, but for events that occurred in Sant'Anna before the merger I use a separate name. Then there are a number of places where the name changed, such as Terranova (Gela) and Castrogiovanni (Enna).

@Pete Latino,
My Father and Grandfather came here from Contessa Entellina, Palermo, Sicily. My Grand Mother came from Bisacquino, Palermo, Sicily. I was able to trace them to the mid 1600's. I would like to learn more about them and their region of Sicily.

Dr. ADAM Norten

I cleaned up the place names for Villadoro, Agira and Leonforte. If you type in those names it will now pop up a selection with year ranges that you can choose from if you'd like.

Thank you for your help John.
"The Passarello fiefdom has old origins, the town began to be built as early as the mid-1600s.

There were numerous changes of title on the fief until in 1698.
The toponym Villadoro appears for the first time on a map drawn up in 1718 by the cartographer of Calascibetta Daidone Agatino, recently published together with other maps within the Imago Siciliae volume."

Malcolm Schreiber

I have now set up historical place names for Sant'Anna, Caltabellotta, Terranova/Gela and Castrogiovanni/Enna.

(and I know somewhere along the way for some of these places I will also get caught where comunes change provinces, but I can fix that sometime)

For Sant'Anna, am I seeing that it is a frazioni of Caltabellotta when I quickly look on Wikipedia? When I view Sant'Anna on Google Maps it shows no mention of Caltabellotta in the place name. Unless it makes sense to stray from Google's standard (and I'm on the fence still) I set it up Sant'Anna places without mention of Caltabellotta.

DORIS Latino

I have now set up historical place names for Contessa Entellina and Bisacquino

Sant'Anna is now a frazione of Caltabellotta, but it used to be a separate comune. I'm not sure when it was incorporated into Caltabellotta but it as sometime in the 20th c.

Thank You John. Pete Latino

Agree - thank you for all your hard work on this. My ancestors are from Bagheria and I've seen it written Bageria in older documents and wondered how they could spell the name of their own town incorrectly!. Leah Ducato Rudolph

Private User

You're welcome. It looks like one range of Bagheria years was missing, but I added it. Yeah it's always interesting when it seems they just started spelling it differently on records...and then combine that with other spelling, especially with some of the Latin spellings and it sure scan be confusing. I've learned a lot more simply trying to understand the place names sometimes.

A little dilemma with Bagheria is that Geni only displays 5 to choose from. So if you type in "Bagheria" or "Bagaria" you don't see one of the ranges to choose from. The only thing i came up with was to add a search key "bagheria2" to one of them to basically get to a second page. I wish Geni would display more, but they currently don't...

This is great, thank you for doing this! Can you also do:

-- Villafranca /Villafranca Sicula: The town was named Villafranca (literally "free villa") because of the absence of taxes. In 1863, the appositive "Sicula" was added, to distinguish it from the other six homonymous towns spread all through Italy.

--Chiusa/Chiusa Sclafani: The town had called only Chiusa until 1862 in honour and to remember its founder Matteo Sclafani Count of Adernò, later it was added Sclafani.

THANK YOU!