Surnames of Italy
Italians are finally catching up with the rest of the world in the realm of surnames. 350,000 surnames can be found in Italy, the highest number of different surnames in one country in the world. In Italy up to 2016 it was not legally possible to have more than one surname. I can hear the … Continue reading
Indexes – how accurate are they and what to do if the name isnt there?
Let’s discuss first the indexing currently underway by Family Search and Antenati. This indexing is being done by volunteers who may, or may not be familiar with the elaborate handwriting of our Italian ancestors. You should try your search on both sites and on Ancestry.com. I have a feeling Antenati is not sharing this project … Continue reading
Italian Passports – a good source of information? Not always.
Anyone who is lucky enough to have their Grandfather’s Italian passport would expect that the name, parents’ names, date and place of birth would be as accurate as it could get. And yet, in the past couple of years I have found this not to be the case. From 1869, passports were required to leave … Continue reading
Sins of the father….the story of Anna
Stories about women are rare so I would like to take a few minutes of your time to focus on a kind of heroine. One who went against the culture and traditions of the time. A young woman whose true story we will never know, but one that we can imagine, based on various documents … Continue reading
Finding Achille
Alistair Goold came to me with a desperate plea for help. With the help of an Italian lawyer he had exhausted all known avenues to locate the birth record of his GGFather without which he could not get his Italian citizenship. He sent me a list of the archives they had searched without success. Filomena … Continue reading
How to search the Antenati site
The ‘search’ function on Ancestry, family search and the Antenati site is a place to start but don’t be discouraged if it doesn’t produce any results. The indexing project is far from complete and even though ‘your’ names may appear to come up in the search it doesn’t mean they are the right family. Sometimes … Continue reading
Connecting families in San Donato Val di Comino
Susan writes: Thanks, Ann, for all your help. If not for you identifying Pasqualino as close a relative, we wouldn’t have been able to connect. Facebook also made it easier since I was able to chat with him beforehand and let him know we were visiting. When we got to the square where we were … Continue reading
UPDATE: Military District of Frosinone – Indexing project – Foglio Matricolare
Il Portale – the website of the Italian Beneculturali which is publishing civil records from all over Italy – yesterday published the information that the digitization of the registers of the ‘Ruoli matricolare’ for the military district of Frosinone was still in progress but that 106,000 records were already accessible. They are still working on … Continue reading
Clerical (or other) errors on civil records.
Often there is a story behind it all. Here is my interpretation of events on a recent research puzzle covering several towns and the associated document errors. ‘His legitimate wife’ or was she? This week I was researching a family in the early 1800’s; Carmine, his wife Giovanna and their son Angelo. I noted that … Continue reading
Using Facebook for Genealogy
There are many Facebook pages that focus on Italian Genealogy and there are lots of people helping out with translations and giving guidance on where to find the records. Antenati – il portale del SAN is the Facebook page for antenati and they try to keep us updated with their uploading progress. Unfortunately the text … Continue reading
