Starting a family tree in Italy: where to find the records

In a shoebox lies an old passport with a stern photo and a stamp from Naples. Under place of birth, in faded ink, is the name of a small town you have never heard of. Without knowing it, you are holding the key to an Italian family tree. This article shows you where to search next, and what of it is free online.

The short answer

Find the name of the town first. Italian records are kept by comune, and without the town you are searching a whole country. Then open the Portale Antenati, where the Italian State Archives show civil registers online for free, in the south often from 1809 and everywhere from 1866. Before that, the parish registers take you back to the late 1500s. More recent records you request from the comune.

Step 1: start at home, and find the town

The best sources are often in the house: passports, letters with an Italian postmark, prayer cards, naturalization papers, photos with a note on the back. Ask the older relatives what they remember, including nicknames and the name of the village. For each person, write down what you know for certain and where it comes from. A tree without sources can no longer be checked later.

If your family emigrated, the town is often on the passenger list or the naturalization papers. Our guide on finding emigrant ancestors through the Red Star Line, Ellis Island and Canada shows you where to look. The Ellis Island arrival lists from 1892 to 1925 are free on FamilySearch.

Step 2: the Portale Antenati

The Portale Antenati (antenati.cultura.gov.it) opened in 2011 and is run by the Italian State Archives. It shows free scans of civil registers, digitised together with FamilySearch. You can search in two ways:

• Search the registers (Cerca nei registri): choose the comune, the type of record (births, marriages, deaths) and the year, and browse the register as it was written.
• Search by name (Cerca per nome): only a minority of the registers has been indexed by name so far. If you cannot find someone, browse the registers yourself.

A tip for browsing: start with the annual and ten-year indexes that the registry offices compiled themselves. They list all the records of a year or a decade alphabetically, so you find the right page quickly.

Record	Shown on Antenati after
Birth	at least 100 years
Marriage	at least 70 years
Death	at least 70 years

Step 3: civil registration, region by region

When Italian civil records begin depends on where your family lived, because Italy was only unified in the nineteenth century.

• Napoleonic period (1806 to 1815): civil registration came with French rule. The marriage files of this period often include papers naming the parents of the bride and groom, which can take you back to the late 1700s.
• The south: in the former Kingdom of the Two Sicilies, roughly southern Italy, civil registration continued without a break from 1809. In Sicily it began in 1820. The same continuity from 1809 applies to the Duchy of Modena and Reggio.
• Tuscany and the Kingdom of Sardinia: a mixed system in which parish priests kept the records under state supervision, from 1817 in Tuscany and from 1837 in the Kingdom of Sardinia.
• All of Italy: Italian civil registration began on 1 January 1866 in every comune. In Rome and Lazio it began in 1870, in Veneto and Friuli in 1871 and in Trentino Alto Adige in 1918.

Each register was kept in two originals. One stays with the comune; the other went to the court and later to the State Archive. The scans on Antenati are mostly that second copy.

Step 4: before civil registration, the parish registers

The Antenati portal itself advises you to use the parish registers for everything before 1866, back to the early 1600s. The church generally began keeping registers in 1563, after the Council of Trent, and most parishes have them from about 1595. Almost all are still kept by the local parish, with some duplicates in the diocesan archive. Expect Latin: Joannes for Giovanni, Josephus for Giuseppe. Look out for the stati delle anime, the church censuses that list every household member with their age.

Requesting records from the comune

Records that are too recent for Antenati, and all official copies, come from the civil registry office (Ufficio di Stato Civile) of the comune where the event took place. Two words help: a certificato is usually a short summary of the most important details, an estratto gives you the complete information. Images from Antenati have no legal value, so for Italian citizenship you need a certified copy from the comune or from the State Archive that keeps the original.

Other sources

• Military records: draft lists (liste di leva) and service records (fogli matricolari). Many are at the State Archives, some also on Antenati. Records not yet handed over are with the military record centres (Centri documentali).
• FamilySearch: free with an account, with Italian record indexes and a wiki that explains the sources region by region.
• Population registers (anagrafe): kept by the comune, which you contact directly for information and certificates.

A program for your family tree

Gramps is free and open source. Whichever program or website you use, make sure it exports to GEDCOM, the exchange format for family trees. If you have received or made such a file, thememorypalace.ai/gedcom shows you, for free and without an account, how many generations it covers, who the earliest known ancestor is and where the gaps are. The file never leaves your device.

From records to people

A birth record tells you the day a baby was brought to the town hall, not the song his mother sang to him. That lives in the photos, the stories, the letters someone kept. In The Memory Palace, the family tree comes in as GEDCOM and each generation gets a place next to its photos and stories, so that names become people again.