Your Guide to Finding Italian Ancestors

There are twenty regions in Italy; within each region several provinces and within a province, communes, a political grouping of villages, towns and hamlets. Think of it as states (regions) counties (provinces) townships (communes) and cities or villages and hamlets (frazioni)

Italian Cities and Towns: Information and statistics on Italian Regions, Provinces and Municipalities. All Cities, Towns and Villages in Italy. Official site, zip codes, phone prefix, population, useful links.

Guides to Doing Italian Research: Books and on the Web

Books and Articles

Finding Your Italian Ancestors: A Beginners Guide. Suzanne Russo Adams. Ancestry. 2009 (find in a library)

Italian Genealogical Records: How to Use Italian, Civil, Ecclesiastical & Other Records in Family History Research. Trafford Cole. Ancestry. 1995 (find ina library)

Finding Your Italian Roots. John Philip Colletta. GPC. 2nd ed., 2009 (find in a library)

A Genealogists Guide to Discovering Your Italian Ancestors. Lynn Nelson. Betterway. 1997 (find in a library)

Our Italian Surnames. Joseph Fucilla. GPC. 1996 (find in a library)

Research Guides On the Web

To begin your work in the LDS library, use their Research Guide for Italy. (not pdf version available for printing, top right corner)

The Family History also offers an online video of a 1 hour class on Italian Research . It is accompanied by a very useful class handout.

Maps

Map showing the regions -- click on any region to get a map of that region.
Regions of Italy -- outline map
Large map of Italy
Italy 1882 (click on it to make it larger)
Italy 1921 (click on it to make it larger)
Family History Library maps of Italy

All-Italy Websites

Italy GenWeb -- A WorldGenWeb site. As with all GenWeb sites, coverage is uneven.
- Some provinces need a volunteer host and have almost no information, some are nicely covered. And there are some bad links... but play around with it (by clicking links) to find helpful pages.
Italian Genealogy Home Page-- Some advice, some databases online.... and it also includes links to non-Italian information. Check it out.
Use the FamilySearch Research Wiki for Italy to find information on doing research on each of the 20 regions. (uneven coverage of regions; but keep checking back. It's a WIKI and will be updated over time)

Societies, Libraries and Archives

Language Aids

Family Search Research Wiki: Italian Letter Writing Guide
Italian Records Extraction: an Instructional Guide -- created for volunteers who are extracting records, this is a great tutorial for anyone working with Italian records.

Finding and Using Records

Newspapers

Italian Newspapers

Queries and Help

More Links

nformation on the state and provincial archives

Italian Ancestry is a good place to begin your research.

Also check out the Italian-American Network for genealogy

The Years 1880-1920 were record years for Italian immigration to the United States; most came from Southern Italy. Italian immigrants often identified closely with the town or province from which they came. Italian records will be in Italian(civil) and Latin (church), but you may find records in Spanish or other European languages, depending on which nation dominated a particular area at the time the records were created. The earliest civil records begin in 1804, although not all regions began keeping records this early. Civil records are kept in the archives for that state. Civil records at the national level began as early as 1860 and as late as 1871, but in most areas around 1866. Church records, of course, began much earlier than civil records.