Italian Ancestry Records
Italian Genealogical Records
Italian ancestry records for Italian-Americans studying their genealogy are going to be found in a number of different research centers and sources. The Italian diaspora took place from the 1860s until the 1960s, mainly because Italy remained largely an agricultural society where poverty was rampant. This caused waves of Italian immigration, especially to the United States.
Immigration from Italy to the U.S. in the latter parts of the 19th century and the early 20th century came through Ellis Island. For this reason, Ellis Island archives will be helpful to many people searching for their Italian ancestry records. Public records back in Italy may be a little more confusing, though the online archives and public records of the Roman Catholic Church might help to mitigate the difficulties of the search.
Compile Your Family Information
To begin with, collect as much information as you can from family sources. Look through old family photo albums, book collections and diaries. These will contain a wealth of information on the various families in your Italian ancestry, even if that information involves only names. You can make guesswork depending on the styles of clothing worn in the pictures, as well as the picture quality, to decide what era most photographs were taken. Books that belonged to certain family members will often have their names in them.
Get as much information as possible from talking to the older generation in your family, who should have names and anecdotes at least as far back as their grandparents, and likely their great-grandparents. Then sit down with a notebook and some paper and sketch out an informal family tree. Don’t mind if there are gaps in your Italian ancestry records. You can fill these gaps when you begin to research your family history. You’ll be able to get information on both sides of the ocean, though the information for Italian-American immigrants is going to be better and more uniform, because it is more recent and from a more unified country.
Ancestry.com and the National Archives
Italian ancestry records of those immigrants who came to America after 1870 are very good. You can search through the National Archives for ship registries, to see who the passengers on ships sailing from Italy to America were. Many of these can be found on Ancestry dotcom.
Ellis Island Archives
Also, the Ellis Island archives are easily accessible online, so you can search through their Italian immigration records to see when your ancestors arrived in the United States.
Consult U.S. Census Records
U.S. census records from the middle 19th century forward also will be a wealth of ancestry information. Because of the precision the census takers users to record the households in question, you should be able to find who lived where and at what time, at least within a ten year period.
Search the Italian Ancestry Records
When you have nailed down your family’s ancestry all the way back to the time they arrived in the United States, you can then search through the many archives of Italy, to see who were your descendants and where they lived prior to getting on a ship for the New World.
Searching the public records of Italy will also net information about your ancestors who lived in the Old Country. Keep in mind that Italy was not one country, but several states and kingdoms, before the Risorgimento in the 1850s and 1860s. A quick survey will explain what I mean.
Italian Records Before Unification
Southern Italy had been the Kingdom of the Two Sicilies (Naples & Sicily) in the early part of the 19th century and France had controlled this region for significant periods, including a kingdom under Napoleon’s cavalry general and brother-in-law, Joaquim Murat, and a Bourbon restoration from 1816 to 1848 and on towards 1860, except for a 16 month period in 1848 and 1849.
In northern Italy, the Austrian Empire under the Habsburgs controlled the Lombardy Plain and Venetia, as well as the region around Venice, until 1859 and 1866, respectively. The central portions of Italy were the Papal States, controlled by the Vatican and defended by France, until France’s defeat by Prussia (Germany) in the Franco-Prussian War of 1870-71. Meanwhile, large portions of Northern Italy were controlled by Piedmont-Sardinia, a kingdom that would be pivotal in Italian Reunification.
The House of Piedmont-Sardinia would unite Italy in the north through two wars with the Austrians, in concert with France in 1859 and Prussia in 1866 (with the tacit approval of France’s Napoleon III), after an unsuccessful revolt against Austrian rule in the Europe-wide revolutions of 1848. Meanwhile, republicans led by Guiseppe Garibaldi freed the Kingdom of the Two Sicilies, eventually declaring himself for the King of Sardinia and marching on Rome.
This second action was less successful than the first, due to French intervention. The incorporation of the areas controlled by the Pope into this new Italian kingdom would occur in 1870, when France was facing defeat at the hands of unified Germany. Sardinia-Piedmont’s reigning family would become the reigning family of a new unified Italy.
Despite the promise of unification, poverty was still rampant throughout the new Italian nation-state. Millions of Italians in the south of Italy and Sicily immigrated, either north to the industrial cities of the new Italy, or overseas to America. This became the mass wave of Italian immigration that made its way to Ellis Island starting in the 1870s. Despite unification, many Italians saw a better life in America than in Italy or Sicily.
Long story short, though, when you’re searching for Italian ancestry records before 1870, you’re going to be searching through the records of a number of kingdoms, republics, cleric-run provinces and smaller duchies. The result is somewhat uneven expectations, since there were wildly different policies for record keeping in these different Italian regions.
Look Through Church Records
Any Italians who were Roman Catholic should have public records in the archives of the Catholic Church. Baptisms, circumcisions, Confirmation, weddings and funerals will all give you information on your ancestors, as well as clues (if not outright facts) about their date of birth. Since baptisms and confirmations happen at specific ages, these should give you solid birthdate information, at least to the year. Funeral records will obviously provide you with a time of death.
Italian Ancestry Records
You’ll need to do a little bit of working when researching your Italian roots, but there should be plenty of sources of information when searching through Italian ancestry records. Remember to confirm as much of the ancestry information as your can, since that way, you can remedy any human error or confusing information that you find in your Italian genealogy research.
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This entry was posted on Tuesday, November 24th, 2009 at 7:13 pm and is filed under Genealogical Records. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.
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