Italy Genealogy

Guide to Italy ancestry, family history, and genealogy: birth records, marriage records, death records, census records, parish registers, and military records.

Country Information
Italy is a country in Southwestern Europe bordered by France, Switzerland, Austria, Slovenia, San Marino, and Vatican City. It became a unified country in 1861. The official language is Italian.

Getting Started


Locating Town of Origin in Italy
In order to research your family in Italy, it is essential that you have identified the place where they came from. You must know the city, town, or parish that they came from. A few records are indexed, but many records will require going directly to photocopied local records, which are only available by town name. It will be difficult to identify the place of origin by going directly to Italy sources. Therefore, you will need to search in United States (or other country of arrival) sources first. See Italy Gathering Information to Locate Place of Origin to learn how to search for the Italian place of origin in United States records.

Italy Clickable Map
Genealogy records are kept on the state, province, and local level in Italy. Click on a province or use the list of province links under Jurisdictions.

Regions
Italy is subdivided into 20 regions (regioni, singular regione). Five of these regions have a special autonomous status that enables them to enact legislation on some of their local matters, and are marked by an asterisk (*). It is further divided into 109 provinces (provincie) and 8,101 municipalities (comuni). Records are kept at the town level.

More Italy Research Strategies
Research strategies give guidance on how to research or what records to search for first. Below are additional research strategy Wiki articles for Italy.
 * Interpreting Italian records
 * Finding Records of Your Ancestors, Italy 1809-1910
 * Locating Italian Birth Records: 1520-1808, 1809-1865, 1866-Present
 * Locating Italian Marriage Records: 1520-1808, 1809-1865, 1866-present
 * Locating Italian Death Records: 1520-1808, 1809-1865, 1866-present

More Italy Research Tools
Research tools can include resources that assist in locating correct records to search and determining the correct locality to search in. Below are links and Wiki articles to research tools in Italy.


 * Italian Occupations List
 * Italy Websites
 * Translation of printed civil marriage forms
 * Translation of printed civil death form
 * Italian names in the 1841, 1851, 1861, 1871, 1881 and 1891 England censuses. (Anglo-Italian Family History Society)
 * Family History Research Outline - contains many out-of-date links

FamilySearch Resources
Below are FamilySearch resources that can assist you in researching your family.
 * Facebook Communities - Facebook groups discussing genealogy research
 * Historical Records
 * Family History Center locator map
 * Related FS blog article

Italy Research Tutorials

 * You Tube Wiki Wizard in Italy: Thirteen instructional YouTube videos on research in the church and civil records of Italy.
 * Basic Italian Research: Many online records became available after this tutorial was created.
 * Reading Italian Handwritten Records:
 * Lesson 1: The Italian Alphabet
 * Lesson 2: Words and Phrases
 * Lesson 3: Reading Italian Records