Trip to Italy 2007 - Research First
 

Hello,

My wife and I are planning our first trip to Italy next year. This will be our 10th wedding anniversary and we will be spending three weeks there. For now, what cities to visit are not that important.

My family is originally from Naples, but unfortunately I do not know any of my relatives still living there. What I would like to do is to find out how to search the family name in Naples and to potentially make contact with any family memebers before arriving.

My father (who was my only connection to family in Naples) passed away in 2001. I have never met any of my relatives from Italy, so I can't just pick up the phone and call someone. Additionally, my father came here as a young boy and my grandparents didn't keep in good contact with family members back in Italy. So even if I wanted to call or write, I don't have names or addresses.

I know I'm making this difficult. If anyone has any suggestions, I would appreciate the help.

Thank you.

Presumably you might start with the Naples white pages.
http://en.comuni-italiani.it/063/049/telefono.html

Depending on how common the names are you might get lucky.

Try some googling. If you know any first names at all that might be helpful.

And anybody who's got much of a web presence likely won't mind you contacting them via email and inquiring as to a possibly relationship. My husband's been contacted in this way and was happy to provide help.

Hi TD,

Also google "genealogy".

((I))

There is a local branch of "Friends of Italy" in my small town.

Perhaps you could find a group near you that you could contact with questions.

VS :-"

Hi Tri Dude,

There is a link for family searches on the initaly.com web site.

Also, the LDS (Mormon) church has an excellent web site for geneology that is available to all. If you are first generation American, you should really not have much trouble finding relatives as long as you have some names to go on!

Buona fortuna!

Thank you everyone for the information so far.

The white pages link was a great start, now I only need to learn speak Italian so I can call =)

I have done the email route, but have not gotten back any replies. I have been told it could be due to my letter was in English and many Italians don't know how to read English, so the emails went unanswered.

I will keep plugging along. I have contemplated the Genealogy website, didn't know how helpful that would be for people in Italy.

Thank you again. I'll keep you posted on my progress.

My husband located family in Italy by the white pages because we knew the city that the family was from. He sent letters to them in English and translated in Italian. We included our email address. We did receive a response back through an email in Italian which we then translated through Alta Vista translation. We have made trips to see the family 7 times now since 2000. What a great connection. By the way, the family in Italy do not speak English but they have a friend in town who speaks fluent English and with our broken Italian, we seem to manage. Best of luck to you.

http://babelfish.altavista.com/
Use this to translate your English into Italian and vice versa when sending letters or emails.

Tri Dude,

Don't hesitate to use the Geneology web site - you will be amazed by the records available for all over the world. It is the resource with more information than any other in the world. (I wouldn't be surprised if they even have the CIA beat...)

We were lucky enough to have had family members who kept in touch with family in Italy since the 1920's...on my husband's side. But my family was another story. We only had some old letters and knew only that they were from Avellino.

What we found out in our initial searching was that so many immigrants said they were from Naples but they were really from surrounding provinces, i.e., Caserta, Benevento, Avellino, etc. So you may need to expand your search beyond Naples.

An interesting site to try is www.ellisisland.org. You can search all the ship manifests for names of relatives which may lead you to the exact town your family is from. It does help if you have a first name to narrow down your search.

Even if you don't have any relatives left in the town, you may still want to visit, as we did, just to know where your ancestors came from.

Good luck...if you succeed, you will be so pleasantly surprised.

Lorac1127,

Thank you for the Ellis Island website. Strangely enough, neither my Grandfather, Grandmother or Father show up on the registry. I know they were citizens, because I have seen their citizenship papers. I even checked similar spelling variations and nothing.

I don't know if this is interesting or disheartening. I guess it would have been possible for them to come into the coutry (1949-1950) illegally, but how? Through Canada, maybe?

I'm going to use the Genealogy website to keep looking.

Thank you again everyone for your advice.