Italian Genealogy

Italian genealogy is my specialty because all of my direct ancestors came from the same province in Italy. That's like saying all of your ancestors came from the same county in America.

I spent about five years researching my maternal grandfather's hometown in Italy (which I've documented extensively in my Families of Baselice blog), and poring over those thousands of documents became second nature.

Here are some of my favorite Italian genealogy resources:

• Italian State Archives: My new #1 resource, provider of some mind-blowing new information from the birth records of my grandfathers, their parents, and so much more! NEW: Download GetLinks to quickly and easily download all the vital records you want.
• Italian Civil Records: You can use Google to translate into English. "Trova i Nomi" lets you search for a last name.
• Italy Gen: Provides some history of Italian last names and explains how you might use various Italian archival documents.
• Italian Occupations: Italian vital records often include a person's occupation. This list will help you understand most of the Italian words for jobs. Note: This list used to be available from rootsweb, but that site's been offline for months. This is my version. I took their list and added more occupations that I've found.
• Italian Last Names: Enter your family's last name in the box where it says "cerca un cognome" (search a last name) and click the "Trova" button (search) to see where that name typically comes from.
• Italian Ancestry: A wealth of resources including information on dual citizenship.
• Italian Genealogy Group: I've volunteered several times to help this group digitize records and beef up their searchable database. They decided long ago to index all New York City vital records, whether or not the people were Italian. It can be a tremendous time saver to use this site to find the document number of, let's say, your grandparents' marriage record. When you visit the New York City Municipal Archives with that number in hand, you can go straight to the document and skip the tedious indexes.
• ItalianGenealogy.com: A valuable source of articles about Italian history, families, customs, politics, and more.
• Enchanting Italy: Your guide to Italian regions, provinces, comunes (neighborhoods), history, and much more.