Italian Flag – Courtesy of Wikipedia

I won’t pretend researching Italian and Sicilian ancestry is easy. It isn’t, but if you do your ground work in much the same way as you build a house, from solid foundations you will be off to a good start.

So here are a few top tips to consider:

• You will need to know the exact town your Italian or Sicilian ancestors came from
• Track those with the same surname or those that hail from the same place.
• Remember, in Italy women use their maiden name.
• Understand the history, economic, political and social aspects of researching in Italy & Sicily
• Understand the part that religion plays in the lives of your Italian ancestors
• Explore whether your place has been the focus of a thesis or other work.
• Become familiar with naming patterns – it is not fool proof but might help!

Before you start researching in earnest start reading and discovering the country; read books about the history and culture, explore the religious festivals. By doing these things you are building your research foundations. You are exploring your ancestor’s country, their religion and what was important to them.

If your ancestor arrived in the UK, then you very likely have family members that migrated to the United States also. You perhaps know or have an idea of when your family entered the United States. Perhaps you have searched passenger lists but cannot find them. Here are a few more considerations:

• Did they enter through Canada and travel down into the United States?
• Did your ancestor eventually end up in the United States, but where were they previously? People do not always migrated in straight lines. That might mean they travelled as far as the money would allow and meant spending time elsewhere, prior to arriving where in the final destinations. Perhaps they never arrived in the intended destinations – perhaps they fell in love or changed their mind because of other circumstances.
• Look at the surname, is that the surname that left the homeland with? Yes, on occasions names changed in the new country. Play with the name. The sister of my grandmother, Rosanna Licata entered the US under her maiden name, despite being married to Giralomo Mancarella who was often recorded as Mangarella or Mancarelli. Explore the possibilities and record your positive and negative results.
  • Look at the surname distribution site gens.info – where does the surname appear?
    

    Distribution Map from Gens.Info for the surname for Torella

• Perhaps the passenger list has your ancestor but the place of residence is simply recorded as Italy. What now? Look at others on the vessel. Whilst it is not absolute, it was common for people to travel together from a town rather than travel alone. Perhaps there was a migration scheme and a number of people from the same town went together.
• Be mindful that our ancestors might have sailed from the cheapest port, rather than the nearest port.
• Once you have found them on the passenger list look to see who the person was they named as a contact. They are probably a relative or a friend of another relative. Remember Italians are all about family!

In the First World War, Italy was an allied nation, meaning that Italians were called to arms, whether that meant joining the military in the United Kingdom, United States or even returning to Italy – you can read about the way Italy commemorated those that died as a result of the First World War HERE.

I have frequently mentioned the place my family hailed from, a small place called Sutera in Caltanissetta. Sutera is a rural community which meant the pool of people that an individual could marry was pretty small. What I found is that the same surnames kept popping up as individuals married and upon researching further I would discover the same surnames appearing in my research. Ironically my maternal line does something very similar in England!  Marrying family members or marrying into the family of in laws meant that what assets there were could be retained within an extended family group.

Over a decade ago I discovered that Sutera had been the focus of a thesis by an academic in the United States. I ordered the book and eventually it arrived. I also contacted the author and asked her for any insights and did she have any material that had not made it into the published works. She did and since then we have corresponded several times. Explore that possibility. While Sutera is not large, it has been included in a number of books. Explore every possibility.

The biggest challenge is the language unless of course you are fluent. I find researching my Sicilian ancestry takes me three times as long as my English research, but I also yield more information from records. FamilySearch has done a sterling job of getting records online, for some I cannot see the actual record, but a transcription. I can then search for the record on other sites and read it, using the established transcription as a way of checking and double checking my reading.  I have been reasonably lucky and between three sites I can often research and fill in the gaps.

Important sites for Italian and Sicilian research include:

• FamilySearch – and there is also some great material in the learning center.
• Ancestry – this is linked to the Italian site, but I find also searching the complete Ancestry suite of sites especially helpful. I located a Licata relative in the US before I had actually any proof he had migrated because I searched by removing the surname completely and inserting Sutera. The relative was located because I specified Sutera, he was actually recorded as a Licata.
• Ancestors – Archives for Master Search – this is an amazing site and has material from 51 Italian state archives. It has many of the records that are on FamilySearch for Caltanissetta.

For my own research I regularly move between the data on FamilySearch, Ancestry and the material located at Ancestors. The Ancestors site does have variable material depending on the region in Italy.

Reach out to others that are either researching the same names or the same places or both. You never know where an email conversation will take you. Also consider a DNA test. Does a project exist? While surname DNA projects only exist at FamilyTree DNA (FTDNA) explore your options. Upload the results to Gedmatch. Italians are not especially interested in DNA, so it is not going to be a quick win, but test, because you never know!

Look for a naturalisation record. Sometimes they can be a font of information. The naturalisation record for Giralomo Mancarella confirmed that his wife, Rosanna died in New York in 1922, despite Rosanna death being recorded in Sutera. From that information I was able to send for her death certificate.

Here are a few of my favourite resources:

• Italian Genealogical Records: How to Use Italian Civil, Ecclesiastical and Other Records in Family History Research by Trafford R. Cole
• Our Italian Surnames by Joseph G Fucilla
• Finding Italian Roots by John Colletta
• Sicilian Genealogy & Heraldry by Louis Mendola
• Italian American Podcast by Dolores Alfieri & Anthony Fasano
• Italian Research at FamilySearch & the FamilySearch Wiki
• Seeking Sicily by John Keahey
• Italian Surname Distribution Maps
• Guild of One-Name Studies
• Ganino Database for Italian Surnames
• Researching Surnames by Julie Goucher (published 2019 Guild of One-Name Studies)

Good luck getting started!