17 October 2023

4 Must-Have Resources for Your Italian Family Tree

Once in a while you'll find a document for your family tree with a new last name or place name you can't quite read. When that happens to me, I know exactly which free websites to go to.

Here are the 4 Italian genealogy bookmarks I use to solve a mysterious last name or place name. Two can help you decipher a last name and two can help you find a place on the map.

One quick note about using these websites. You'll usually see a pop-up ad before you can proceed. To dismiss the ad, click the button that says "Chiudi" (Close).

1. Map of Italian Last Names

Use the "Cognomix" website at https://www.cognomix.it/mappe-dei-cognomi-italiani to confirm the spelling of a last name. The site's main purpose is to show you all the places in Italy where you'll find any given last name.

That's very handy when you want to see if a last name is still found in a certain town. But another important use of the site is to check the spelling of a last name. I have one ancestor who came from a different town, but raised her family and died in one of my ancestral hometowns. Her last name was hard to decipher. I found it on more than one document, but that didn't help me. It looked a little different each time.

To figure out the right spelling, I went to the Cognomix site to try out different spellings. To use the site, scroll down a bit until you see a black bar that says "Mappe dei cognomi italiani." Beneath the bar is a blank box with the heading "Cognome," Italian for surname or last name. Type a name in the box and click the "Cerca" (Search) button.

First you'll see a map of Italy showing you how many families have that name and in which regions. Click any region to see how many families have that name in different provinces. Click any province to see the number of families with that name in different towns.

But—before you click the Cerca button, see if any suggested names pop up below the box where you're typing. If there are no suggestions, you're likely to find no results when you click Cerca. And you may find a better suggestion.

Can't read that Italian last name? Bookmark these free websites and solve the problem.
Can't read that Italian last name? Bookmark these free websites and solve the problem.

I used Cognomix to figure out the ancestor whose name was new to me. The first writing of her name looked like Gajdia. (Note that sometimes in Italian words you'll see a j instead of an i.) When I type Gajdia in the Cognomix box, there are no suggestions. When I change it to Gaidia, there are still no suggestions. But one time, her name looked like Gasdia. When I type that into the box, Gasdia comes up as a suggestion. Now I can click Cerca to see where the name Gasdia comes from. I expect her to come from a town very close to where she lived after her marriage.

I discovered this uncommon name comes mostly from the Campania and Campobasso regions. That works for my family. By clicking a region and then a province, I can narrow down her likely place of birth. There's a good chance she came from either the city of Campobasso or the town of Fragneto Monforte.

My ancestor was born too early to find in vital records. If she'd been born later, I could try to track her records down in one of these two towns.

2. The Italian White Pages

The Pagine Bianche at https://www.paginebianche.it shows you exactly where to find a last name in Italy today. Look for a search area front and center on the website. Click the "Privati" button to search for a person by name (the default is to search for businesses). Then put the last name you want in the box that says "Nome, Cognome." In the second box, you can enter the town or province you want or make it blank (the default seems to be Roma).

If you get no results for a name, you may be spelling it wrong. When I put in Gasdia, I get 16 listings. One is in Campobasso and one is in Fragneto l'Abate, which borders Fragneto Monforte.

You can use the Italian White Pages to see if anyone with your last name still lives in your ancestral hometown. I find 3 people with my maiden name still living in my grandfather's hometown. I know exactly who they are. But there's another man with my maiden name in a neighboring town who I'd like to meet.

3. List of Italian Cities

The website at http://en.comuni-italiani.it/alfa is very important to my family tree research. Let's say I'm looking at marriage records from one of my ancestral hometowns. I see that the groom comes from another town, but I can't quite read the name of it. I think it starts with Mont and ends in an o.

The List of Italian Cities page divides all the country's towns into 98 groups (if I counted right). You do need to make an educated guess about the first letter of the town name. Then you can click the right group to get started.

I'll click the MONT–MONZ group to look for towns that begin with Mont and end in o. Once you click the group, scan the alphabetical list of town names to see if any seem like a possibility. You can click each possibility to see where it is on the map. That may help you rule out some towns because they're too far away.

Can't understand that Italian town name? Bookmark these free websites and find that place on the map.
Can't understand that Italian town name? Bookmark these free websites and find that place on the map.

When you find a town that seems like the right one, compare its spelling to the original handwriting. Do you feel confident in your choice?

This website has come through for me time and time again.

4. The Parishes in Italy

If I have a baptism record for someone from another town, I like to add the address of the church to my family tree. But what if I can't quite read the church name?

That's when you need the list of Italian parishes at https://italia.indettaglio.it/eng/parrocchie/parrocchie.html. The main page of the website divides the country into regions. Click a region to find a search form with 3 categories:

  • Province
  • Town
  • Village

Use the most specific of the 3 that you can. For instance, I'd like to find the parish name for a town in the Avellino province called Santa Paolina. I can choose Santa Paolina from the Town list and click the Search button.

The results page tells me that Santa Paolina Vergine is the parish for this town. It evens tells me how many people belong to the parish. And it gives me the address, Piazza Novembre IV, that I can use in my family tree for baptisms and marriages. If I enter that address in Bing Maps or Google Maps, I can see the church for myself!

You may want to create a folder of bookmarks just for Italian genealogy, as I've done. That way they're handy when you need them. As you work on your family tree, turn to these 4 tools to help you figure out a hard-to-read last name or place name.

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10 October 2023

Free Italian Military Records for WWI and WWII

In 2018 I walked into the state archives building in Benevento, Italy. I armed myself with a couple of sentences in Italian stating what I wanted. I had the exact book and record number for my grandfather's military record, and that's what I wanted to see.

This was the highlight of that particular trip to Italy. A woman brought me to a big room filled with tables and chairs. She asked me to fill out a request form for the record. While I filled out the form, my back to the room, someone brought in the book and placed it on a table.

The woman pointed me to the book. I was ecstatic! I quickly turned to the right page and scanned the details. I found exactly what I'd hoped to find: the name of the prisoner-of-war camp where the enemy held him for a year. In my previous research, I narrowed down the possible camps to two places in Austria. One of them was correct! They held him at Mauthausen in northern Austria, a long way from the fighting near the Italian border.

The Italian prisoners from World War I were largely starved to death. My grandfather once mentioned eating rats to survive. A larger version of Mauthausen also served as a concentration camp in World War II. Seeing the 2018 movie "The Photographer of Mauthausen" left me shaken knowing my grandfather had been there earlier.

At the archives in 2018, I took photos of my grandfather's detailed military record to study later. While I was doing this, a young man brought me another book. It was the 1891 birth register, which he'd opened to my grandfather's record. I'd seen this image online, but seeing it in person made me very emotional. The size of the book was quite a surprise. We see these little images online and try to make out the small handwriting. But the book was huge! I would guess it was 15 inches wide and 25 inches high.

You have two main choices for viewing your relative's Italian military record. You can visit the archives in Italy or find the record online. Don't expect the record to be online if your relative lived through the war. But you can still find useful information.

Your Italian ancestor's military record holds a tremendous amount of details.
Your Italian ancestor's military record holds a tremendous amount of details.

Method 1. Visit the Archives

This isn't an option for everyone, I know. But if you do get to visit Italy, you'll need to go to the appropriate provincial archives. My ancestors all came from either the Benevento province or the Avellino province. If you know your ancestor's hometown, look it up to see which province contains their town. To find the address of your provincial archives, go to the Antenati website and click your province name. You'll find a map and a link to the archive's website for more information.

Another option is to search Google for one of these phrases, filling in the blank with the province name you want. The quotation marks will help you get better results.

  • "indice onomastico di ____"
  • "ruoli matricolari di ____"
  • "liste di leva di ____"

You'll have an easier time getting your ancestor's military record if you know their book and record number plus the year they were born. This makes it very easy for a worker at the archives to retrieve the right book of records.

Check your province's archives website for a link called "Ruoli matricolari" or "Indice onomastico" or "Liste di leva". Many of the archives websites don't have this information, but you're sure to find something of interest. If you can't find military record information, be sure to see Method 2 in this article and the Resource List.

On the Benevento archives website it's easy to enter your ancestor's last name (cognome), first name (nome), town of birth (Luogo di nascita), and year of birth (classe). The fields are not all required.

When I search for my grandfather (Leone, Adamo, Baselice, 1891), the results screen includes two new bits of information:

  • Registro 67 (book number 67)
  • Matricola 21728 (record number 21728)

I gave these numbers and my grandfather's name and birth year to a clerk at the Archivio di Stato di Benevento.

If you can't find your person's book and record number online, it will be helpful to have their full name, hometown and year of birth.

Method 2. Find the Record Online

On the Benevento website it's easy to enter your ancestor's last name (cognome), first name (nome), town of birth (Luogo di nascita), and year of birth (classe). The fields are not all required.

To find Italian soldiers who died in World War I:

When I enter my maiden name of Iamarino in the box, I find that only one man with that name, Alfonso Iamarino, died in the war. The search result tells me Alfonso's date and town of birth, and his father's first name. There's a blue button next to the results that says Apri (open). Clicking that shows only a brief listing about the soldier. Here's what it tells me about Alfonso Iamarino:

  • Alfonso Iamarino is the son of Pasquale.
  • He served as a soldier in the 156th infantry.
  • He was born on 15 Feb 1892 in Colle Sannita.
  • He died on 10 Apr 1917 in Mira (near Venice) of illness.

That's a lot of information from a two-line entry on a page in a book. Since Alfonso came from Benevento, I can search for him on the Ricerca caduti (search for fallen soldiers) page of the archives website. The results page gives me only a little more information:

  • That he died in a military hospital.
  • The book and record numbers for his military record.

But there's also a link to a PDF, and this is the military record itself!

The military record has his mother's full maiden name and his detailed physical description. In the main body of the page there's a list of dates and a description of what happened. Some examples:

  • On 9 Sep 1912, Alfonso answered the call to arms (chiamato alle armi); on the 19th he joined the 42nd infantry regiment.
  • He got his younger brother Carmine to take his place, delaying his own service.
  • On 15 Jan 1915, Italy was in a state of war, and Alfonso could no longer delay his service.
  • On 1 Jun 1916, he joined the 156th infantry regiment.
  • On 10 Apr 1917, he died of illness in a military stage hospital in Mira.

My grandfather's military record fills the page completely. He answered the call to arms many times, and there's a note that he didn't report for duty in 1914 because he was in New York. I learned from his record that:

  • The Army promoted him to corporal on 1 Jan 1917.
  • He became a prisoner and wound up at Mauthausen on 6 Nov 1917.
  • They freed him on 6 Nov 1918 (a whole year!).
  • The Italian Army gave him unlimited leave on 21 Aug 1919.
  • He returned to New York on 2 Apr 1920. (Lucky for me.)

Military service was mandatory starting in 1865 for Italian men beginning at age 20. (This wasn't abolished until 2005.) The lack of any record for my grandfather's brother leads me to believe he died in his teens. Some day I hope his death record will be available.

Resource List

I don't know if any of the provincial archives websites are as useful as Benevento. (Again, lucky for me.) But here are several great resources for you to try. If you put these URLs into Google Translate, you can see a translated version of the page. Sometimes these Italian websites are unreachable. If that happens to you, try again later.

Let me know if you find any other Italian military record resources to add to this list. I find it very helpful to be able to learn what became of some young men from my ancestral towns. Many had wives and small children when they died. At least now I know what happened.

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03 October 2023

How Can You Build Your Family Tree? We're Talking Practice!

While visiting my mom last June, we had some time to pass one afternoon. I pulled out my laptop to work on one of my genealogy projects. I was renaming a few downloaded Italian birth records to make them searchable. My format for renaming these files is:

  • the document number
  • the child's full name
  • the word "di" (that's "of" in Italian)
  • the father's first name.

For example: 1 Emiddio Pennucci di Nicola

With this format, I can easily search for every child of Nicola Pennucci. It's very powerful.

I gave my mom a peek a my computer screen. These were not the neatest vital records, but they weren't giving me any trouble. I showed her a birth record and pointed out the key facts. "Here's the baby's name and the day they were born. Here's the father's name and age, and over here is the mother's name and age. This column has the baptism date, and this part is their home address."

Her mouth dropped open. "How can you read that?"

"I learned," I told her. "It's all about practice."

Learn By Doing, Over and Over

The amount I've learned purely through practice hit home a couple of weeks ago. I was doing a document-by-document review of vital records from Grandpa Leone's hometown. Most of the people in these records were already in my family tree. I reviewed them all to see who I'd missed.

Spend time with lots of vital records from your ancestral hometown to become a pro at reading them and gathering the facts you need.
Spend time with lots of vital records from your ancestral hometown to become a pro at reading them and gathering the facts you need.

I found a few mistakes I'd made many years ago when I had my first look at this town's vital records. I thought they were silly mistakes. They were a little embarrassing. But I was completely new to Italian records back then, and viewing them on bad microfilm. I was lucky to make out any of the details.

Some of my earliest work included misspellings of names that are second-nature to me now. When I first learned Italian numbers, there were a couple that took me longer to memorize. (Numbers are important because they wrote dates and years in longhand.) So sometimes I got a date wrong.

Don't Miss Out on the Adventure!

Here's a hard truth. You can't join a Facebook genealogy group, say your family names, and expect someone to hand you your family tree. I see these requests every single day! No details. Just, "Here are my grandparents' names. Can anyone tell me about them?"

So here's my question for those who haven't done any research, and those who ask for a translation of every document they find. Why aren't you putting in the effort? You can—and will—learn so much by doing the work.

Family-tree building is a journey. Genealogy research is an intellectual exercise that will teach you many things. Isn't it better to walk the path and experience wonders along the way than to be dropped at the destination and sent straight home?

Take the First Step

If you don't know exactly where your ancestors came from, finding out is your first task. Putting your ancestors' names out there and hoping to find a relative with all the answers is folly. When you discover their hometown, you can search for vital records to help you understand their lives.

If you don't know their hometown, and you've already asked your entire family if they know, you can:

  • Search for your ancestor's paper-trail of documents. For an immigrant, a ship manifest or naturalization papers may say where they came from. A census will almost never have the answer, but draft cards and applications may.
  • Take a DNA test and see where your closest matches' roots are.
  • Search Ancestry or FamilySearch for your ancestor's last name and see where others with that name came from.

I'm lucky that both my grandfathers told us where they came from. When a cousin-in-law told me how my 2nd great grandmother pronounced her hometown, I used a favorite trick to figure it out. She had a common last name, Caruso, that comes from many places in Italy.

I searched Ancestry passenger lists for any Caruso arriving in America in the early 1900s. Then I scanned the results for their hometowns. When I spotted the right one, I said it aloud. I had no doubt I'd found her hometown!

When her hometown's vital records appeared on the Antenati website, I found my 2nd great grandmother's birth record. I discovered she was a twin, but her twin brother died immediately. Now knowing her parents' names, I searched for and found all her brothers. Then her aunts and uncles. And their families. And generations of ancestors.

Her hometown was the key to EVERYTHING.

Learn Enough of a Language to Get the Goods

Don't let the sight of a foreign vital record overwhelm you. You don't need to translate every single word on the document. Have you ever filled in a standard form? Do you need to read every single word or do you just start entering your name and address?

Vital records are like a form-letter where there's a bunch of standard wording. It's the unique facts that you want. Who cares who they mayor was when your ancestor was born? You want to know baby's name, the date, the place, the parents' names and ages, and maybe check out the witnesses.

The FamilySearch Wiki gives you the genealogy keywords to look for on vital records in tons of languages. Thanks to the Wiki, I can read Latin records, but I keep that Wiki bookmark handy.

Ancestor's birth record in another language? Relax. You don't have to read every word.
Ancestor's birth record in another language? Relax. You don't have to read every word.

Last week I translated the important parts of an Italian vital record for a stranger on Facebook. The handwriting was quite neat. When I gave her the translation, she asked, "How did you do that?" The answer is practice.

I spend so much time looking at Italian vital records from my ancestral hometowns that:

  • I know the town's names so well I can overcome bad handwriting.
  • I literally dream of translating documents. That's why I like to say I can translate the records in my sleep.

There's no reason you can't learn what you need to translate your ancestors' vital records. Sure, some documents are notoriously hard to read. When that happens, maybe you'll want to reach out to the genealogy community for help. Or maybe you'll figure it out for yourself.

One time I discovered a new ancestor who came from another town. Her unique last name was impossible to read. But I had a few options, and I did figure out her name.

Now you've got to ask yourself what you want. Do you want a stranger to hand you a family tree that may or may not be yours? Or do you want do actively discover your ancestors? You. Can. Do. This.

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