Hello there today I’m going to try and help some of the Italians living abroad how they can trace back some of their ancestors back to Italy. I’M going to talk you through some useful pointers, some free online tools that you can use and also I’m going to point out some of the gotchas out there. Of course, there are a lot of professionals and a lot of companies out there. That will help. You do all this stuff um, but this is more if you feel like a challenge, and you want to do the research yourself. This is how I would start a bit of background before we start there was significant immigration in the late 19th and 20th Century, from both Sicily and Italy and people traveled to Europe and the Americas.
So you need to bear in mind that in this period Italy wasn’t always a single country, but a group of independent states and I’ve probably bought some of you to death with some of the history of this. So it’s really important. You understand the context of this. What this means to you is that Italian records are based on a specific town or locality. Does it matter well it might a recent estimate say that over five percent of Americans can claim Roots back to Italy, so this could affect a lot of people. First steps.
There’s a bunch of preparation: you can do that’s going to really help you before you start at the beginning, there’s a bunch of immigration documents and Naturalization processes out there in the destination countries. I’M not going to go into any of this because obviously it’s too diverse, but you know your family’s history. I would start their first and the things you’re looking for are the names dates and specifically, if you can find any town or District in Italy. Your family immigrated from this is really important because the Italian records are based by locality and they’re, not indexed, whereas the immigration processes in the destination country May well have a database and an index involved things I’d look out for. Do you know by any means which town your ancestors originated from in Italy or Sicily? This is really important step.
Two looks for any identity documents. You’ve got people, birth, deaths, marriages, military service, travel documents, passports, naturalization, school, all this good stuff, you’re, looking for names, you’re. Looking for dates, you’re looking for potential spouses and and don’t miss out things like immigration, Naturalization passenger records, because these are your ways in to know where to look in Italy, because otherwise it’s quite hard. It’S like a needle in a haystack, don’t overlook any older relatives. You may have any names they can give. You can really help you. Another thing is: if you’ve got old, correspondence like envelopes are really useful.
If you’ve got a postal stamp on any of those, they might actually give you a name. I mean my late father gave me some documents that originated to him and to me, which gave me a good idea of where my records are kept and so look out for anything like that. Any old, old sort of group of documents that might have been left. They can really help you, okay, continuing with this any basic familiarity you have with Italian language is going to help you a lot things that are really useful, is being able to recognize numbers in Italian, because they’re often written as words rather than numerals so 1880, Is written as a word, if you know roughly the date range you’re looking at you can use Google Translate to look at those numbers, so you know what it would look like. It was spelled out in Italian. Um.
Also: keywords like births deaths those kinds of things. If you’ve got any kind of keywords to look out for like that, that’s going to help you before you get into the Italian archive talking about the Italian archive. Let’s stop talking about it! Let me show you it okay. So, let’s start with a quick demo of the annotate site up here, I’ll put the URL in the description. So, this is the land page. The first thing I’d recommend you do is check which language you want to use. So I’m going to put it into English. You can use all this if you want, but my suggestion the way I’ve used. This is the following: brows archives.
Now, as I said, the all the data sources are by region, so I’m going to click on Sicily, and this is where it breaks down the data sources by a geographical area, and this is why the preparation you’ve done already to know where to look is going To help you so I’m going to click on Catania, which is where my dad was born. First thing you do is discover the archive. What this tells you is it’s complete, so some of the areas, the data records – are not completely indexed, so they’re not complete, but this one is which is good, go back and so here back into Catania, then you want to click search the registry.
So, this is to look up the records, I’m going to try and look up one of the later ones, because some of its typed and some of its handwritten now, one of the really difficult parts of this is understanding the handwritten information. So, let’s start before we look at this. This is the archive you can look by area. This is where the local areas you’re looking at location typology. This is births, deaths, weddings. I don’t know what that means do and then this is mixed. So these are the kind of things with Google translate. You can work out what they mean and then years as well and obviously with your prep you’ll know what year you’re looking for and what kind of document you’re looking at. So I’m going to look at in within Catania. This is the sort of District via Grande, so in the district of via Grande in Catania, I’m going to look at the birth records in 1893.
So hey, we sit, that’s where we are Catania, so the first thing I always do is look at the last page. Is it indexed? No there’s no indexed, okay, but you can scroll through and you can make it bigger or smaller as you go along. So now that’s the overview. I’M going to give you I’m just going to talk you through one of the records now. Okay, so I’m going to show you a record. I look through a few. It’s nothing to do with me this record, but it’s one where I can actually read what they’re saying so, let’s each and each record is pretty much the same structure, so let’s put it on screen, so this is just an index number for them.
I think this is the record of the person who’s recorded the birth so the year 1893 1893, the date quindoxin de chambra, 15th December hour minute in front of me, Luigi Platania, or something like that Cinder called. So that’s his name and his role oh, come on it right via Grande, quite formal language. This is right. So the person reporting the birth is Jose per Caro of age, 33. Profession, Panettieri, which I think is a baker domiciled in Via Grande so living in that area, has recorded to me um. This is the date tradition Al right now this is important. So, this is the address of the people. Recording uh reporting the birth.
So that’s via. I can’t read that Paola strain at number, so this is the street name and the house number if they’ve got it, that Maria something d’Ivoire. So that’s the name of the person reporting it that’s the name of the wife. So this is we’re now getting to the interesting stuff here so is born a child of sex female by the name of Angela. Then it talks about um Witnesses Salvatore, something his age profession.
I think it says macleaya, which is Butcher, I think, and Giuseppe sapiens or something like that with age, Quaranto to, 48 consulate – I don’t know, and then you’ve got signatures as well. So that is a birth record, so you can see with the later versions some of it’s typed, some of it’s handwritten. The difficult thing is actually understanding the handwriting.
That’s the hardest thing, but if you’ve done your prep, you know the names you’re looking for you know the years you’re looking for, and you know, um the districts you’re looking for your well on the way. So, I hope that demo gives you an idea of how easy or hard it is to look through this um. Look through these Italian records.
A few things to consider I’ve learned really when you’re looking at these documents always check the back first, sometimes and if you’re lucky the there is an index at the back, not always, but it’s certainly worth checking. Otherwise, you have to go through each page and that’s why it’s really important. You know the location, the locality in Italy and the year anything like that will really help you you’ll have noticed from My Demo. The handwriting is sometimes really hard to read. I can only really give you a gist of how the records are structured and there’s going to be a little bit of luck and judgment about this, and you may be better at reading some of the handwriting than I am so other useful things.
Um there’s a Facebook group called Gene genealogical translations.
So that’s where people can’t recognize handwriting and whatever you might be worth joining, that Google translate comes in two flavors there’s the web version, which you’re probably familiar with but there’s another one which I didn’t actually know about, and it’s the smartphone app. So, you can you, you can point your camera at something, and it will try and translate for you with different versions of success and obviously there are other versions and flavors of this. That’s all fine going off at a slight tangent.
If you are researching people, who’ve died in military service, there’s a whole range of other options, um some that I might be able to help you with if it’s the British and the Allies in certain Wars, but it could be in others, but there’s a whole other Range of sources, you could look up if you’re looking at someone who died in action or even with injured in action, once you’ve identified a specific address on some of these documents, you can then look on Google Earth or Google Maps for free, where you can see The pictures to see what that address looks like if it even exists still is ancestry.com includes for birth, marriage and death records for Italy by region.
Now they do free weekends at certain points, so that’s worth looking out for I’ve also actually used them um on some of the military and transport uh research, I’ve done historically as well. That can be quite useful right.
This is the fun part, the gotchas and the final caution. One thing to look out for is Italian: women do not change their surname when they marry, they didn’t then, and they don’t do now, so don’t be thrown by that. Secondly, passenger lists do not Overlook them. I tracked back an English part of my family, who sailed from and to Australia back in 1910, just using the free access to ancestry.com. I think it was. I think it was them. So really you know, and it and it listed the whole family on there and their ages and all that good stuff. So that’s really helpful.
The third thing is not gotcha, but something you should consider because it kind of bit me when I came across it. There is a risk when you look back through time. You’ll find something that’s quite surprising, shocking or even quite dramatic, and I could I’m an example of someone who came across something stuff, some dirty laundry that no one knew about and so bear in mind when you’re rooting around in history be careful what you say And who you say it to some things have been deliberately left in the past and might be best left there as well. I want to thank Richard Perler for the inspiration.
He’s no um he’s not a relation, but he asked me some questions about this. Finally, I want to wish you better luck with your search as well. Well, thank you for watching the video. I hope you enjoyed it. If you did, please like this video and subscribe so that others can see it click here for some more videos, you may be interested in.
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