Italian Flag Shows Italy Nationality And Nation by Stuart Miles/Courtesy of Freedigitalphotos.net
Have Italian ancestors? Lucky you! The National Institute has two new courses to help you.
Italian: Language and Location
Understanding, or being able to decipher, the languages found with Italian genealogical documents is an essential skill needed to effectively research your Italian ancestors. While most records are in Italian, you will find other languages within the records depending on the history of the town or region you are researching. Emphasis is placed on reading the handwriting and how to translate and understand basic Italian records.
Locating places within Italy can be confusing until you understand the political and ecclesiastical jurisdictions. We review these jurisdictions and look at a variety of ways that will help you narrow your search for your ancestor’s town of origin. If you already know the town of origin, this section may help as your research expands as the research often leads into nearby towns, due to the practice of marrying outside a town’s populace.
To learn more about this course see our website.
Italian: Civil Registration-Part 1
Civil registration is one of the largest and most important record sets in Italian genealogical research. It is certainly the most accessible, due to the efforts of FamilySearch, and now the main Italian archive, in microfilming or digitizing these records.
In this course, we delve deeper into three main types of records: birth records [both regular and supplemental], marriage records [including marriage banns and marriage supplements], and death records [both regular and supplemental]. Each type of record has different challenges as well as differences in format depending on the time period and/or location of its creation within Italy.
We also delve more deeply into translating and abstracting these documents so that you can understand more fully how to find every piece of genealogically useful information they contain. You will learn how to spot discrepancies and information contained that is over and above what is generally given. Understanding the documents is the heart of the course and there will be much study required of the example documents.
You should have completed the Italian: Introduction to Research Outside of Italy and Italian: Language and Location courses, or have a good understanding of the content of those courses, before commencing this course.
To learn more about this course see our website.
