Where to Find Your Ancestors

The story of your surname and the story of your family are two different searches. The first is about everyone who carries the surname: where it comes from, what it means, where it spread. If yours is one of the surnames we’ve written about, the booklet has already done that work for you.

The second one goes through birth, marriage, and death records, one generation at a time. To get started, you need the town your ancestors came from and at least a rough year. These are the three places to look in Italy, all of them free, plus one paid site that helps on the American side.

Portale Antenati

antenati.cultura.gov.it is the Portale Antenati (the Italian State Archives’ genealogy portal), run by Italy’s Ministry of Culture. It puts online the photos of the civil registration records (stato civile) kept in the State Archives: births, marriages, and deaths, in many provinces going back to the 1800s. You can see births from at least 100 years ago, and marriages and deaths from at least 70 years ago. The site is also available in English.

When to use it: it’s the first place to look if you know the town.

FamilySearch

familysearch.org is a free worldwide genealogy archive run by a nonprofit organization. For Italy, it largely has the same registers as Antenati, because FamilySearch took many of those photos in the first place, plus some parish registers and many records already transcribed and searchable by name. To view some of the images you need an account, which is also free.

When to use it: to search by name when you’re not sure of the town, and to follow relatives who emigrated abroad.

Archivi di Stato

There’s an Archivio di Stato (State Archive) in almost every provincial capital: 102 offices, plus 31 branches. They keep the civil registration records and many other useful papers: draft lists and military service records, land registers, notarial deeds. Addresses and contact details are on the website of the Direzione generale Archivi (the Italian archives administration).

When to use it: when a register isn’t online, and when you need a certified copy of a record, for example for Italian citizenship. Images from the online portals have no legal value.

Ancestry

ancestry.com is the place to start if your family’s story picks up in the United States, Canada, Australia, or the UK. It has passenger lists from Ellis Island and other ports, census records, naturalization records, and military records. These are often where you find the exact town in Italy your ancestors came from, which is the detail you need to search Antenati.

Ancestry is a paid subscription with a free trial, and many public libraries offer free access in the library. For the Italian records themselves, the free sources above, Antenati and FamilySearch, remain the main ones. Ellis Island passenger lists are also free on FamilySearch.

Records you won’t find online

Births from less than 100 years ago, and marriages and deaths from less than 70, are requested from the town’s registry office (anagrafe). For records older than civil registration, which depending on the area began between the early 1800s and 1871 (in Trentino-Alto Adige, in 1918), you need to write to the parish or the diocesan archive.

In these records you’ll also find the surnames of your great-grandmothers and of the branches that don’t carry yours. Look them up in the surname catalog or in the three volumes, each with three hundred surnames, grouped by region of Italy.