Tracing your family history can lead to surprising revelations. When I started working in genealogical research, it was love at first sight. Having grown up on detective novels, I find genealogy similarly compelling: every time I’ve carried out an Italian investigation for Who Do You Think You Are?, it has involved piecing together clues until a small mystery has been solved or an unexpected aspect of an ancestor’s life has come to light.
Genealogical research is now more accessible than ever, but that ease can create the false impression that everything is online. In Italy, it is not. Research still means deciphering difficult handwriting and following clues through incomplete, often dusty archives. For anyone tracing family in Italy, the first challenge is that there is no comprehensive online database that makes the work possible entirely from home.
The nearest equivalent is the Portale degli Antenati, maintained by many Italian State Archives, but its coverage is incomplete. Centuries of political fragmentation also reshaped administrative boundaries, making research more complex.
How to find Italian family records
In Italy, there are two main sources for reconstructing a family tree: the State, through the Portale degli Antenati, and the Church. With the Council of Trent in 1563, the Church introduced the obligation for every parish to register births and marriages in the Liber Baptizatorum and the Liber Matrimoniorum (the Registers of Baptisms and Marriages). Later, in 1615, this obligation was extended to the Liber Mortuorum and the Status Animarum.
For beginners, major genealogy portals such as FamilySearch and Ancestry are a useful starting point, but their coverage is always partial. The best approach is to use them to gather leads and then verify those leads in the original parish, municipal, diocesan, or State archives, or through a local researcher.
Before searching in Italy, it helps to gather clues in the country to which your family emigrated, such as passports, marriage certificates, or census records. It is usually wise to investigate both maternal and paternal lines at the outset. Information about the family’s town of origin is essential, since place names may have changed and surnames were often respelled after emigration. Knowing roughly when your ancestors left Italy can also be very helpful.
Once you know who your ancestor was and where they came from, you can estimate a year of birth. If they were born after 1861, you can write to the Ufficio di Stato Civile in their town of origin for a birth certificate, though registrars are not required to carry out genealogical research and may send only a single document. Even so, that certificate can provide valuable information, including the names of your ancestor’s parents.
How to search Italian church records
If your ancestor was born before 1861, the search moves to parish registers. You can write directly to parishes (the addresses and the names of parish priests are available online for each municipality and either the parish priest or a volunteer will generally reply within a reasonable time), however, because the records are often difficult to decipher, a local researcher may be the best option, especially if you hope to follow the trail further in person.
Parish archives are often the most fascinating. Alongside registers of baptisms and marriages, they may contain notes, maps, or Processetti, the documents prepared before a wedding, which can reveal details of a couple’s intentions and circumstances. Another rich source is the yearly Status Animarum, effectively a parish census compiled during Easter visits. These records can show the composition of families over time and sometimes note ages and sacraments received.
Such documents are invaluable for reconstructing a family’s history, even if they are rarer and less complete than baptism, marriage, and death registers. Many of these registers were written in Latin until 1700 or later and are seldom available online. Research can also be frustrated by earthquakes, war damage, and the loss of parish archives, though some records survive in copied form elsewhere.
Researching Joe Swash's Italian roots for Who Do You Think You Are?
My research for Joe Swash’s episode of Who Do You Think You Are? involved a family from Senerchia, a southern town destroyed by an earthquake, leaving no parish archive behind. To continue, we had to look more deeply into the area’s history, which had long been associated with brigandage and the violence surrounding it. Between the 1700s and 1800s, armed bands roamed the countryside of central and southern Italy. The brigands were both political rebels and outright criminals; their actions led to violence and harsh repression with arrests, trials, severe sentences and executions by firing squad. Very many families, including Joe Swash’s, were both victims and implicated in the phenomenon.
A family’s story is embedded in the country’s historical context. In this case, we searched a list of trials with names of defendants on the website of the Central State Archive in Rome. We then had to visit the local State Archive to search and consult all the files with documentation from the various trials, the description of events (ambushes, kidnappings, daredevil escapes, clashes between patrols of soldiers and bands of brigands) and the testimonies of the protagonists. All this documentation is written in Italian and is easier to understand than the parish records.