Or at least, how did I do it?
Finding my Italian ancestors was a struggle. The first thing you have to do is talk to family members, especially the older ones and note down everything they know and remember. Even the smallest details can be important.
I was 18 when I started being interested in the theme, and still had all grandparents alive. The problem is that the memories were not consistent, all of them were born in Brazil (my “first Italians” were great-grandparents), no one had the actual Italian documents of their parents or knew the exact place they came from. I had some “guesses” from what they remembered their parents talked about and some initial research a grand-uncle had been doing.
It is also important to point out that this was a long time ago, in a time internet was dial-up and not widespread at all, so the available information on-line was limited.
To cut a long story short, after years of searching in the wrong places, I was able to find through a military list, the actual place where my great-grandfather (from my mother’s side) was born.
The initial problem that made this discovery hard was that he was born in one place and lived in another before migrating to Brazil, so, every time he mentioned Italy he would mention “Mantova” where he lived and not “Modena”, where he actually was born…
When I finally solved this mystery I found the exact place, the “Comune” where he was born and where I should request a copy of his birth certificate and move on with my Citizenship.
To go through all this process of research is not easy, but let me break down the important parts:
Names – you need, of course, the complete name of your relative, but you also need their parents’ names as the creativity for kids names in Italy was not great. Babys would have the name of a random saint or the saint of the day they were born in and the last names are also remarkably similar, so I found more than 10 men with the exact same name of my great-grandfather and had to sort it out via approximate dates considering his age when he died (I had the death certificate) and his parents’ names. Otherwise, it would be impossible.
Variations of names – Sometimes the family names were “adapted” to Portuguese (in Brazil, of course, but I believe this might have happened in other places) and also some Italians were not alphabetized when arriving in the new country so they could not spell their last name correctly or the immigration officer could not understand it and so on. That said, you need to cast a wide net of last names variations with double letters, different letters with the approximate sound… (Mine, as an example, I searched for Facci as “Facci, Fassi, Faci, Fasi, Fati, Fatti).
Variations of places – Again, the immigrants sometimes referred to what is called a “Provincia” in Italy (the State/Region) and not the specific, often small, city they were born. So if you have the reference “Mantova” you probably will need to search in all “Comuni” (cities) within “Mantova” province. In my case this wasn’t even enough and I had to dig deeper to discover it was not even in Mantova, but a neighboring province and go from there.
Data for research – Sometimes you will not have the information you need in the civil registers in Italy, as before 1866 there was no consistent civil register and all you will find are the church baptism registers, but they are acceptable for citizenship requests, so you will need to check the church data of the area you are searching for.
Here are some useful sites where you can research Italian ancestry and documents:
Antenati (antenati.cultura.gov.it) –
FamilySearch (familysearch.org)
Portale della Storia degli Italiani (portale.famiglia.governo.it)
Archivio di Stato (archiviodistato.beniculturali.it)
Ancestry (ancestry.com)
Regione Lombardia Beni Culturali https://www.lombardiabeniculturali.it/
That is it, in general lines. I hope it helps, and I wish you good look in your research, and will come back for the next steps soon.