I want to find my Family in Italy!?

Question

is there a site that is completely free in order to find them?

Answer 1

You need to trace your ancestry starting with yourself and working back.

Talk with living family, particuarly your senior members,and get as much info from them as possible. They might be confused on some things. Tape them if they will let you. What might seem to be insignificant story telling might be very significant.  Find out if anyone has any old family bibiles.  Ask to see and make copies of birth, marriage and death certificates and another great source are Catholic records. Ask to see and also make copies of baptismal, first communion, confirmation and marriage certificates.  They usually contain parent information.

Your old folks might say, "Oh, I don't know anything" but once they open up and start telling stories they have heard, all too frequently those stories have a lot of facts. That is why you need to tape them.  You might not think what they are saying is all that important.

Genealogy websites are not a good place to find information on living people as it is an invasion of privacy and can lead to identity theft.  

I believe Ancestry.Com is the best for its records. They have all the U.S. censuses through 1930. The 1940 and later are not available to the public yet.  They have immigration records, military records, indexes of vital records from many states.

One night I was able to locate an entire family for a person in the immigration records. She just wanted her great grandmother but the original ship's manifest was on Ancestry.Com along with a photo of the ship.  It gave the town they all came from.  It's not free but your public library might have a subscription to it.

I have a friend whose mother came from Calabria and father from Sicily, she said she has found a lot of information at the Naitonal Archives in Washington, D.C. She said when you first go there you have to go through a lot of rigamarole to get signed up and get a name tag, but once you get that name tag anytime you go back all you have to do is to show it to them and you are in.

CyndiList.Com might also be helpful. She gives lots of websites.

If you find any of your family lines in any of the family trees on any of the websites, whether it is free or not free, be very careful about taking as absolute fact everything you see.  They are subscriber submitted and mostly not documened.  Even if you see the same info repeatedly by many different subscribers, that is no guarantee it is correct. A lot of people copy without verifying.

Answer 2

The simple answer is that Italy isn't releasing very many of its records for free or otherwise on the Internet. Their National Archives is one of many that refuses to release records to Internet search companies.

They don't have a wealth of records before 1900. ISTAT is the equivalent of their Census Bureau. It wasn't created until 1926. Italy only unified in 1861 and it wasn't until after WWI that they looked for national cohesion. So most of their records are held in regional archives based on the previous national capitals of all of the principalities and duchies that became Italy. You can find some of their records through the LDS Family History Centers, but really there's nothing free about Italian research. You really have to write to them for the records that you want, one generation at a time.

If you want to play with ISTAT's website, here's the link: http://www.istat.it/