User:Trnardo/Sandbox

Title in the Language of the Records
Stato Civile di Messina, Italia

Overview
The general purpose of a road map through Italian Civil Registration records is to provide a guide through the multi-year collections. Tables below list the starting image and ending image for each year's entries, along with the image number associated with the index for that year. Color changes within each table highlight a transition from one image collection to another. By general convention greens are used for births (Nati), yellows for marriages (Matrimoni), and reds for deaths (Morti).

This particular road map is intended to provide a guide through the multi-year records files for Gioiosa Marea.

Index Order
Index pages for Gioiosa Marea's vital records vary in their ordering technique, sometimes from year to year and sometimes from one type of record to another for the same year. Records for each year are sorted within each index as follows:


 * Chronological order:
 * Births: 1866, 1868, 1870-1872, 1874, 1888
 * Marriages: 1866, 1868, 1870-1874, 1881-1882, 1884-1894
 * Deaths: 1866, 1868, 1870-1872, 1874, 1885.
 * First letter of given name; chronological within each letter:
 * Births: 1867, 1869, 1873, 1875-1877, 1880-1887, 1889-1895
 * Marriages: 1867, 1869, 1875-1877, 1879-1880, 1883, 1895
 * Deaths: 1867, 1869, 1873, 1875-1877, 1880-1883, 1886-1895
 * First letter of surname; chronological within each letter:
 * Births: 1878-1879, 1896-1910
 * Marriages: 1878, 1896-1910
 * Deaths: 1878-1879, 1896-1910

Marriage records, when alphabetically arranged, are placed in order by the groom's name.

When ordering is done by surname, persons with a "Di" prefix attached to their surname are generally alphabetized by the actual surname. Persons with dual surnames (e.g., Roltino Sciammetta) are generally sorted by their first surname. Dual surnames pose the additional difficulty that, in some cases, one of the names may be omitted; e.g., Felicia Roltino Scimmetta might be found as Felicia Roltino or Felicia Sciammetta.

Finally, there are instances where names are given in transposed order; e.g., in an index listing surnames first, one or more entries might appear with a person's given name first.

Incomplete Records
Over the course of time, pages have evidently become detached within the various record books. Several pages have merely been misfiled in the wrong place. Others, however, at the time of this writing have not been located. While several of these records have been identified, researchers are cautioned that there may be other missing pages not yet noted on thsi road map.

The largest section of missing records is the set of birth records for the year 1877. It is possible that these records have been filed in one of the other record sets for the Province of Messina, in a manner similar to that of the 1877 marriage records for Patti finding their way into Gioiosa Marea's books, but as of this writing a search of those records has not been conducted.

External Records for Galbato and Patti
Prior to 1868, Galbato and Gioiosa Marea were treated as separate Comunes. This is more clearly evident in the records for Italy, Messina, Civil Registration (State Archive), 1820-1865; however, vestiges of this may be found within these records as well.

As noted in the section above, the 1877 marriage records for Patti have been found in the books for Gioiosa marea. These images are noted on the tables below.