Want to look up family history..where do I start?
 

Visiting Ischia Italy next Spring which is where my father's family is from. I would love to be able to look up my family history. I've heard there are many on the island with my last name. Where would I start? Is there a "Hall of Records" or something in that order? I only have 2 days so the more I can get accomplished before, the better. thanks

Have you done a google search on something like "genealogical records Ischia"?

There are many genealogy boards, and a travel board may not be the best place to start, though the people who post here are knowledgeable on a very wide range of subjects!

I know the US, Australia and the UK have many genealogy societies. You'd be best off getting in touch with one of these first. The have many resources, including for other countries, and many members who can provide expert advice. You may be able to do some research before you go on your trip and then you could maximise your time in the town once you get there.

I use the following website for UK searches, but don't know how much information is available for Italy:

http://www.familysearch.org/

You could also simply google the surname with one or two other words (ie "family history" or the town name) and see if anyone has uploaded their own website on that family.

If your surname is common in the place your family come from, you have two choices:
- do something equivalent to phoning (or googling) everyone in the area with that name. This might work with lots of time, but you'll spend a lot of time dealing with people who'll put you on totally the wrong track. My name's quite rare where my grandparents come from - but that still means there are 35 listings for it in the town one grandfather was born in - and none are related to me.
Practically all "ask about it on the internet"-style answers to this question are like this. You might strike lucky: but the overwhelming odds are you won't

- work backwards, methodically, from the earliest ancestor in your country for whom you have birth or marriage details. Detailed, practical advice on this for people with Italian ancestors is on the Family Search site at http://tinyurl.com/muzck. The site is run by the Mormon church. Should you be unfortunate enough to have an anti-Mormon bias, suppress it. No-one's going to send you emails trying to convert you: Mormons simply believe people ought to know more about their ancestors, and devoted immense resources to making national and local archives, throughout the world, more easily available to all of us.

The Mormon site has an immense amount of information that's free for everyone. But its free country-specific guides are THE best aids around to searching ancestors in a disciplined way. The processes they recommenmd take time and real attention to detail. But short of paying for a professional genealogist, their methods are overwhelmingly the most reliable

PS: The key is to do as much research as possible at home, before going abroad. You can then arrive in the country knowing that your gg grandfather Giuseppe married Maria on July 15 1876, get that record and work back to their parents etc.

Without such research, you'll spend all your time in Ischia looking through lists of hundreds of indistinguishable Rossis, without any kind of clue about how to move on from there

Where do you live, Gipsy? If it's the US, then, yes, I second the Mormon church website, as flanner mentioned.

Also check out ancestry.com. You have to pay per month (but I think they have a free trial), but it's worth it. All the census records are there, as well as the ship's records (passenger lists).

Usually, if you work backwards, you can follow the census records back until they arrived in America, making sure you have the right lineage.

There are many geneological societies that could help you, too, as has been mentioned, so you can get all your facts straight before you delve into Ischia's records.

If you don't speak Italian, make sure you bring someone along who can translate for you!

Best wishes.

I'll second the above advice - start at yourself and work backwards, doing as much as you can before you go. Details about your parents, grandparents, etc. Birth place and date, marriage place and date, death place and date. Second marriages. Sometimes you find out that the person you called Grandpa all your life is your grandmother's second husband - or that you have a half sister. Interview the oldest family members you know - uncles, aunts, great grandmothers, etc.

Write it all down, and try to verify as much as possible with documents. Uncle Frank may believe your grandmother was born in April 4, but the birth certificate says May 4. Death records are usually the least accurate - grieving widows are poor interview subjects for this data, but are usually all that was available at the time.

I've been doing research for about 20 years. There is a great deal of online resources available, but be careful - many people do NOT verify their data, they simply post what they've heard. Then others rely on that data, etc.

www.familysearch.org is the LDS church website, and has a great deal of data (with microfiche if you want!) online. Ancestry.com has info, but it's not all free. Again, verify verify. The rule is, if you can find three independent resources, you can take it as true (i.e., not three other researchers who mooched off eachother).

Good lucK!

Be aware that the familysearch.org website has only a tiny fraction of the information held by the Mormon church in its research facility in Salt Lake City. In many cases all you will find on the website is the INDEX to the data.

Fortunately, everything that the LDS holds in Salt Lake on microfilm is available to view for a nominal charge at a Family History Center. There are tons of these around the country, usually in the larger regional churches. Don't worry, they don't bite! The volunteers who staff the Centers are actually very helpful, and will show which microfilm rolls you need to order.

The quickest way to work backwards, if you are lucky enough to have your family correctly represented in the census, is to use Ancestry.com. The census is only useful for most people back to 1850; before that, people are listed by head of household only, with rather unhelpful tick marks for males and females in various age ranges.

If you can't afford Ancestry.com's steep rates, check your local library; your card may allow you access through their website, either from home or from a terminal in a branch. Or, if you live in or near one of the cities with a branch of the National Archives, you can visit them -- they have all the censuses and indexes on film, and the staff are wonderful.

The other indispensable source is newspapers. Once you get some birth, marriage, and death dates, you can look them up in the regional papers (US papers, not Italian). The notices, obituaries, etc. usually have all kinds of helpful info. Almost all of these newspapers will be on microfilm as well. Check your local university library for the best selection in most cases, if they will allow you to use it.

If your family is like most, they will have moved around the country extensively, and local papers won't suffice. In that case, you need to ask a librarian about inter-library loan (ILL).

I have no idea what Italian record-keeping is like, but be aware that in many countries local records, like church registries, birth and death certificates, etc., are no longer held in the localities themselves but in some central facility in the capital. For Scotland, you really have to go to Edinburgh to get the good stuff, NOT the village they were from. Italy may be the same. Nothing beats seeing the countryside for atmosphere, though.

Another thing you need to do is read some history and geography, so you get an idea of what the place is like, what it was like then, what the possible causes for emigration were, what they were likely to have done for a living, and so forth. Oh, and get a good map!

The part that people are often disappointed to hear is just how little of everything is online, and easily accessible. Researching your family history is extremely fun and rewarding, but you will spend more hours than you thought possible staring at a crappy microfilm reader!

Fnarf is right on - been there, done that! Boy, does my neck ache, too :)

I’ve done a lot of genealogy research, so hopefully I will be able to steer you in the right direction

1. Start by interviewing all the older relatives that you have, their stories will be invaluable even if they don’t know details, sometimes it’s the little tidbits that can be the clue that you need to make the next step in your research.

2. Get copies of your parents birth certificates. If you can get the grandparents Birth Certs if they were born in the US as it will have the birthplace of their parents.

3. Check the US census which were done every 10 years with the 1930 ( this is that latest one available to find your parents and grandparents. This will give you a clue as to where their parents were born and when they may have immigrated to this country. This is available for a fee at http://www.ancestry.com , but the information you get will be invaluable in your search.

4. If they went through Ellis Island you can easily check the records at this site http://www.ellisisland.org/default.a...FVB1OAodhwQg8Q it’s a free search and you can find out when your ancestor’s arrived and on what ship.

5. If they came before 1892 they may have come through Castle Garden Ellis Island’s predecessor http://www.castlegarden.org/

6. Once you have some of this basic information you can also visit the local Mormon family research center or check their site for free online. These genealogy centers are available to the public free or for a small donation for their help.

7. You might also check to see if your local library has a membership to some of the genealogical research sites. Some libraries are lucky to have on staff a librarian whose hobby is genealogy who can walk you through the research techniques and resources available.

Good luck, if I can help, please just let me know.

Celticharper

Just want to chime in to say that I absolutely agree with the others. Start your research at home - family interviews, web databases, local genealogical libraries. Then you can target your search when you are in italy. Otherwise, you will likely spend a lot of precious vacation time without much to show for it.

Nothing is more heartbreaking that to spend hours and hours (even months) researching a family line, only to discover that it isn't yours, but ANOTHER John Jackson born in 1830 in Indiana.

Lots of great advice here already. I would encourage you to see if the is a Latter Day Saints research center in your area. They have so much information and people who can help a lot. One of the research tools that I found so helpful was the microfilm (and maybe this is on CD now). I was researching for Swiss records and knew the town name. The LDS center was able to order the microfilm of the church record book from the town my ancestors came from. The church record book included births (including both parents names, birthdates, place of origin), confirmation records, marriage records (including the parents' names, birthdates, place of origin) - so I was able to get a ton of information. I'm sure this record-keeping was not unique to Switzerland. I am lucky that my surname is not very common in the US, and slightly more in Switzerland.

Having just returned from the Abruzzo province of Italy a few days ago (trip report coming soon) and my 3rd trip to research my family history, a few tips.

As others have said, start your research at home. Gather as much information as you can before you try to do any of it in Italy.

Focus especially on marriage records or marriage dates and locations as they will yield the most information. While it is fairly easy to find birth and death records, a marriage record (required in historical Italy) is much more valuable. In Italy, the marriage record contains the names and dates of birth of not only your ancestors but their ancestors as well. They also tell you what (if anything) they owned. It was through a single marriage record that I found the abandoned house in a rural part of Italy that my great-grandfather was born in. I also found information going back 2 generations from that one record as well as how many goats and cows they owned. By continuing that process, I’ve now taken my family back 6 generations, all in Italy.

In Italy, there are two sets of records. The first are in the state archives. Locate where the state archives are kept for Ischia and plan your first trip there. I'm not sure about other regions but in Abruzzo, the records in the state archives in Chieti date back to about 1800. Check the open hours of the archives – usually they are open in the morning and later in the day but generally closed on Wednesdays after 1pm. They are open for some hours on Saturdays.

The second, and more treasured sets of records, are kept in the local churches. During my trip last week, I found family records that dated back to the mid-1500s, all in the local churches. To gain access to those, you need to get advance written permission from the Archbishop and you need to make an appointment with the local priest.

Remember that everything back to a certain point are all in Italian and the further you go back, they are all in written in Latin. If you can’t read either very well, I’d suggest you hire someone to assist since they are all hand written, usually poorly or very aged, and sometimes hard for even an expert to translate.

Also, allow more than enough time. I have now made three trips totaling about 10 days spent in 3 different churches and 1 state archive and I still need to plan another trip to keep going. The research takes much longer than anticipated so don’t think of it like doing a Google search in the US. While you might think you know where someone came from, unless you are absolutely sure, be prepared to look in a lot of locations. In a small area, there might be numerous different villages (communes) and you might need to research each one. Think of where you live and imagine moving to the next suburb. It’s like that and if you’re in a bigger city, you get the idea of how many suburbs you might need to look at individually.

While this might all sound daunting, it’s really not too bad and I can’t begin to tell you how exciting it is to hold in your hands a record, hand written shortly after the time that Columbus discovered America, that tells you about your ancestors. With good advance planning, and a lot of patience, it’s worth the effort.

If you need some suggestions for professional researchers, let me know. I’ve now used two in Italy and while they focus in certain areas, if they can’t handle Ischia, they might be able to suggest someone that can. The professional researchers are not as organized in Italy as they are in other countries (taking that from what they have told me) but with the right person, a good amount of time, as much background as you can provide and patience, you’ll find some amazing discoveries just as I have.

Good luck with it!

WoW!
Looks like this is going to be a big project. I'll be really happy if somehow I do find out some info on my family background, even a tidbit.
I do have something my aunt gave to me years back & it tells of the town both my grandparents came from. I also know that the family owned a rather large winery at one time. Not sure if this is out of the ordinary since it is Italy & I'm sure many may have had a winery at one time.
I've done the Ellis Island search & came up with 2 different people with the exact names & origins so I can see already what some of you mean by spending time on the wrong ancestors.
Thank you all for the links & suggestions. I will start with the Morman site.

http://www.italymondo.com is a company that helps with research and trip planning to find your roots...I have noting to do with this company...but I was in email contact with Peter and he seems very helpful - his own family is from Campania, as well, I believe.
Nicole

GreenDragon, did the microfilm readers ever give you the spins? I'd get up from three unbroken hours of total attention on the pages -- scroll, stop, scroll, stop, scroll, stop -- and the world would be scrolling. Very disconcerting.

Definitely, fnarf - and I was usually at the local LDS church, alone, in the dark... no one else frequented the place in the evenings when I went after work. It was a very small one :)

I did, however, find my father thanks to the records at the LDS church. I had his birth certificate and had gotten his parents certificates, so could trace back to my great-grandparents. I found their information in someone's submitted family tree in their records. I wrote to the submitter, who turned out to be a distant cousin - she forwarded my dad's phone and address to me. She also mentioned that, if my dad couldn't or wouldn't acknowledge me, that I was to know I had cousins in MINN that welcomed me into the family :)

Made me cry.

Wow -- that's a pretty inspirational family history story. Mine is much more mundane -- but fascinating nonetheless. I really enjoyed making direct and personal connections to American history.

My connections to Europe are much more problematic. I have successfully followed one branch back to Strachur, in Argyll, Scotland. But the Thorntons (my last name) are much tougher, because there are so many of them. Which brings up a pitfall that many fall into -- the Daughters of the American Revolution.

The DAR did a huge amount of genealogical research at the beginning of the last century. Unfortunately, much of that research is wrong -- oftentimes deliberately so. The organization's primary reason for research was to "prove" pre-Revolutionary connections for themselves, and if none could be found, well, one could be made up.

My connection to Matthew Thornton, signer of the Declaration of Independence (a particular prize to the DAR) is one of these. If one examines the chart, one sees that my forebear was forcibly inserted there by a much later descendant -- his place of birth isn't where those Thorntons ever lived, and his date of birth comes just a couple of months after another child of the same woman, which seems unlikely!

Which leaves me back at square one. I'm sad, because that connection would have taken me back to Ireland (Londonderry), which would be a fascinating place to be from -- and also Signers tend to have more written about them than random farmers, which makes research easier. Instead, I'm stuck looking at pages and pages of undifferentiable Thorntons in New York, Rhode Island, and Vermont. Oh well.

Even if you never find the precise connection, gipsy, you can have a lot of fun with the hobby, and the ties you form with (one of) your ancestral homelands can be very rewarding. Be sure to allow your historical research to cover all periods, not just ancient times. Ischia was apparently attacked by the British as recently as 1806, and Truman Capote wrote an essay about it in 1948 that appears in his collection <i>Local Color</i>. I'll bet your library system has it.