The enquiry that I received about two weeks ago was the catalyst for this series. The enquiry was about the surname of Magro Malosso.

My Great, Great, Great Grandmother was Maria Giuseppa Magro Malosso. She was born in Sutera, Sicily in 1838, married Pietro Orlando and died in Sutera in 1904, aged just 66.

My correspondent and I descend from two different Magro Malosso families in the same Sicilian town, but these two families were linked, of that I am absolutely sure. It was that message that I relayed in the reply, and I stressed the point that I was working on a hunch. I was so excited by the communication I have done little else, but live and breath the surname of Magro Malosso!

The second catalyst for this series was the results of a search of World Profiler:

Long term readers of this site will have seen me refer to this site, Gens.info which is a great surname distribution site. Here is the results for Magro Malosso:

Those results concur with the World Profiler map.

Variants: Magro Molosso and the dropping of the Malosso name completely and simply being recorded as Magro which I have confirmed by a document from Sutera and a passenger list for one of the Suteresi Magro Malosso’s.

To be completely honest, I am much in the dark about the origins of the surname as I was two weeks ago, although I am more sure than ever that the surname is very specific to Sutera. The surname deserves much more research and if you are indeed researching the surname Magro Malosso whether in Sutera or the United States, I would be very delighted to hear from you.

I wrote an article for the Journal of One-Name Studies in January 2018 and mentioned a Detto, which is not a nickname, it is more than that. A Detto is a name that is used in addition to the main surname, but is not hyphenated. Detto’s are used in official records which is not typical of nicknames and Detto’s are also used across more that one generation.

With that in mind I visited Gens.info again and inserted separately Magro and Malosso into search box, those results are below:

I do have a hunch, but I am going to leave that for another day! but if you do have any thoughts or comments please do leave them below.