Once you have done some basic research, you’ll be primed and ready to continue discovering more and more about your Italian heritage. The following are some valuable websites for researching records to discover more about your Italian ancestors.
- Italian Civil Registration Online (FamilySearch.org/italy).FamilySearch.org and the Italian government have gone to great lengths to digitize, preserve, and make accessible millions of Italian birth, marriage, and death records.
- “Italy Genealogy” on the FamilySearch wiki (FamilySearch.org/learn/wiki/en/Italy_Genealogy).
- “Finding Records of Your Italian Ancestors, Part A” (pdf).
- Italy Resources in the FamilySearch Learning Center.
- FamilySearch Italian Records Online (FamilySearch.org/search/collection/location/1927178). These are documents available in the Records section of FamilySearch.org.
- FamilySearch Family History Library Catalog. Some records are only available through the catalog on film or digitally converted film.
- Portale Antentati (English, Italian). This is a family history website sponsored by the Italian government.
Italian Civil Registration Online
If you know your ancestor’s place of origin in Italy, you are in luck. FamilySearch.org and the Italian government have gone to great lengths to digitize, preserve, and make accessible millions of Italian birth, marriage, and death records. For more information about the project, see the following:
As part of this collaborative project, the following records, among others, are being preserved.
Civil Registration (Stato Civile Napoleonico—SCN, 1806–1815)
Napoleon introduced civil record keeping in Italy as early as 1806 in some areas of Italy, and this record keeping continued until he was taken out of power in 1815. Thus, the Napoleonic records, as a general rule, span the time period 1806–1815.
Civil Registration (Stato Civile della Restaurazione—SCR, 1815–1865)
This period is sometimes also called “Stato Civile Borbonico” (at least in southern Italy) because the Bourbon king Ferdinando IV of the Kingdom of Naples dictated changes to Napleon’s civil records and how they should be kept. Napoleonic style civil registration was introduced to the Kingdom of Naples in January 1809 by Gioacchino Murat and was reintroduced in the Kingdom of Naples in 1816 by the Bourbons. However, this style of record keeping was not introduced in Sicily until 1820.
Civil Registration (Stato Civile Italiano—SCI, 1866–present)
The official civil records of unified Italy began in 1866 and continue to the present. The records of Italy from 1866 are generally in handwritten form because printed forms were not always provided. In 1866, these civil records began to be kept more uniformly throughout Italy and its islands. This is the official year that the stato civile Italiano (or the records of the Italian government) began. Around 1875, printed forms were prevalent, and many of the names of jurisdictions in Italy began to change. The province of Rome did not begin keeping records until 1871.
