SUMMARY

Contrary to popular belief, Italians are no longer immune to the current genealogy craze. They too are helping to swell the ranks of genealogy enthusiasts. In 2011, the Italian government launched its own portal for accessing digital civil records. At the same time, there has been a proliferation of institutional and individual initiatives aimed at facilitating remote research and procedures. However, the search for Italian ancestors remains tricky and all too often frustrating, due to the dispersal of archives that are useful to genealogists: documents predating Italian unity are not all the same or kept in the same places, parish registers are still in the custody of parish priests, and so on. Of course, most of the documents and resources available are written in Italian, but this constraint is not an obstacle: automatic translation tools and genealogy enthusiasts are not lacking to provide help to those who need it. This guide will therefore help people searching for their Italian roots to find the right answers, both by contacting the relevant authorities locally and by exploiting the various resources available online. It describes the organisation of the archives and the features relating to the history of the formation of the Italian nation, then goes on to describe step-by-step research. Finally, it also looks at research into the descendants of Italians who migrated elsewhere in the world.

AUTHOR

Nathalie Vedovotto: the daughter of an Italian emigrant, Nathalie Vedovotto set out to trace her ancestors from the Veneto region and her cousins who left for other parts of the world during the wave of Italian emigration at the end of the 19th century. An engineer specialising in research and analysis of scientific information, she has taken advantage of the digital tools and resources associated with genealogy and shares her knowledge here.