Researching Your Italian Ancestors

A look at Italian censuses across time and how to use them-- from parish censuses to tax censuses and finally to municipal censuses. This is an in-depth look at how to navigate and utilize a variety of censuses for Italian research.

Why did your Italian ancestor have five cousins all named Joe? Why did married women travel under their maiden names? Was Sally really Serafina? This presentation explores the factors that pushed and pulled Italians to emigrate, what they found when they arrived, Italian naming patterns and name changes, and how to start your search. Knowing what their life was like in Italy helps us to understand their choices and behavior when they emigrated: why they were slow to naturalize, why the family was the most important institution, and why food was a source of celebration.

This session will discuss the civil marriage process in Italy and the marriage banns and files (allegati/processetti) created to supplement the marriage of couple. These documents have the potential to sometimes extend a family 3 generations pushing back into pre-civil registration era and right into Catholic Church records.

The presentation will discuss researching in baptismal, marriage and burial records of the Catholic Church in Italy. Tips for reading Latin and a brief case study will also be presented. Understanding these principals for Italy can also help with Catholic Church research worldwide.

Learn how to make the most of online Italian records, and learn methods for searching the unindexed, digital images to find your ancestors.

This lecture discusses some of the more advanced records within Italian civil registration: Allegati [birth, death, and marriage supplements/attachments], Cittadinanza [citizenship records] and Atti Diversi [Diverse Acts]. Students will learn how these records can help to fill in the details of an Italian families’ history as well as track them…

This webinar focuses on the reasons for researching your Italian ancestors, the historical background and political structures that affect what records were created.

A broad overview of research in Europe - a continent spanning more than thirty countries which has been subjected to wars, political unrest and border changes. Europe is a Continent with different languages, cultures and religions, all of which play a part in family history research. This presentation looks at…

Notarial records are a valuable resource in those areas of the world where civil law notaries recorded all legal transactions. Property deeds [land, personal, or agricultural], mortgages, wills, dowries, late birth registrations, marriage permissions, and many other types of documents can be found within this record set. These records often…