My first day at the Family History Library involved something I never thought I’d be doing – hunting for Italian ancestors. The reason I thought this experience would be unlikely is simply that I don’t have any Italian ancestors.<\/p>\n
I’m searching for these ancestors for a client who knows when and where her parents were born and\u00c2\u00a0the maiden names of their mothers, but little else.<\/p>\n
Fortunately, the Family History Library has microfilmed copies of the civil registration for Augusta, Siracusa, Italy from 1820 to 1929, and census records from 1682 to 1815, giving me coverage from 1682 to 1929!<\/p>\n
I spent the entire day yesterday searching through these records and was able to find records\u00c2\u00a0that listed my client’s parents, grandparents, great grandparents, and even four of her great-great grandparents .\u00a0 Even so, I’ve barely begun to look through the records.<\/p>\n
One\u00c2\u00a0important\u00c2\u00a0record set\u00c2\u00a0for researching Italian roots that I never knew about are the allegati. More about that at a later date.<\/p>\n
An important website I learned about for researching Italian genealogy is italia.indettaglio.it<\/a> .\u00a0In particular, since I was researching Sicilian surnames, I was able to follow links on this site to the Sicilian Surnames Search Engine<\/a> in order to confirm the spellings of the surnames I found in the records.<\/p>\n In that way, I was able to confirm that the surnames I found in the civil registration records were frequently encountered names in Sicily, and was even able to find the frequency of those names in the village of Augusta.<\/p>\n More tomorrow.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" My first day at the Family History Library involved something I never thought I’d be doing – hunting for Italian ancestors. The reason I thought this experience would be unlikely is simply that I don’t have any Italian ancestors. I’m … Continue reading