The 1680 Lipari marriage record of Antonino Licciardi and Bartolomea Petruzzo. He is from "Terre Piraini Regni Sicilie" - the land of Piarino, kingdom of Sicily. "Ricciardo" is a significant name variation of the current day surname, Licciardi. |
The Licciardi family of Ustica rank 10th in size making them one of the larger families descended from the island. They are a first family of Ustica showing up in the very first year of the Ustica church records in 1763 with the baptisms of children of two Licciardi families. The descendants of Angelo Licciardi and Francesca Cassarà account for 24% of all the Licciardi of Ustica and their descendants in the US. The lion's share, however, go to descendants of Antonino Licciardi and Caterina Cappadona, who account for 57%.
Angelo and Antonino Licciardi were brothers, both married on Lipari in the 1750s and both having children on Lipari before coming to Ustica.
In Lipari, the Licciardi brothers trace back to the 1680 marriage of the their grandparents, Antonino Licciardi and Bartolomea Petruzzo. The father of Bartolomea Petruzzo is from Gioiosa Marea, a city in the "hot spot" for immigrants to Lipari on the northeastern coast of Sicily just south of the island of Lipari. Our ancestral Licciardi grandfather, Antonino, was from Piraino, a smaller municipality just to the west of Gioiosa Marea.
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The 1680 Lipari marriage record of Antonino Licciardi and Bartolomea Petruzzo. He is from "Terre Piraini Regni Sicilie" - the land of Piarino, kingdom of Sicily. "Ricciardo" is a significant name variation of the current day surname, Licciardi. |
It's at this point in the Lipari church records that the ancestry of the Licciardi family becomes unclear. Records from the early 1600's are very poorly written (handwriting - not content) and there are too few records for the Licciardi family to confidently piece together the most ancient lineage. Surname variations also add uncertainty. The surname in Lipari records always ends in the letter "o", Licciardo. It is not until the 1780s in the Ustica records that the modern day form, Licciardi, is consistently used. The substitution of the letter "R" for the letter "L", Ricciardo, appears to occur randomly but is more concentrated in the earliest of the Lipari church records. The true uncertainty, however, comes from records from 1561 to 1629 where the surnames is missing the second letter "i", Liccardo or Riccardo. It seems unlikely that this is a different family since this variant does not occur after 1629, though there are no examples of the same family using both variants. It could also indicate that the surname evolved from the Spanish given name, Ricardo, but again there is insufficient evidence to back this up. For the Ustican community, the Licciardi lineage clearly traces back to town of Piraino. However, there is a history for the larger Licciardi family, that may never be fully revealed. Use the family charts at the Ustica Genealogy Homepage to discover your path back to the ancient origins of the Licciardi family of Ustica.