About

Italian Ancestry is a set of practical guides for people researching family history in Italian records. The pages are written and edited by Matteo Micheletti. They explain how to move from a story or a U.S. document to a town in Italy, how to use the free portals, and how to read or request the acts.

What this site will not invent

Record coverage changes. A statement such as "every town in this province is online" would be false the week it was written. Where a guide does not know the current holdings of an archive, it says to check that archive's own list. Dates, fees and quotes appear only when they come from a page we can link. There is no invented traffic number, no invented "success rate," and no sample family presented as if we had found their documents.

A museum that is not this website

Roasio, in the province of Vercelli, has a volunteer museum of local emigration, the Museo dell'Emigrante, in the frazione of Sant'Eusebio. The town's site and the museum's own pages describe a collection of photographs, documents and objects from people who left that town. Public write-ups name Velia Micheletti as the founder and Marta Micheletti in connection with the museum's current work. This website is a separate project. It does not speak for the museum, take its bookings, or reproduce its collections.

Readers who want the museum itself should use the contacts published by theComune di Roasioand by museoemigranteroasio.com. A short biography of the editor, in his own words, is still to be added. Until that paragraph exists, the byline means he is responsible for these guides, not that he holds an office at the museum.

How the guides are meant to be used

Start with records created where the family lived after leaving Italy. Take a town name from those records. Confirm the town in a gazetteer. Then look at the Portale Antenatiand at FamilySearch's Italy wiki. Write to a comune or a parish only for the gap that is not online. Log every reply. That order is repeated because skipping it wastes the office's time and your fee.

Corrections are welcome. If a linked tool has moved, or a sentence overstates what a record says, write to the contact address.