It’s 9:00 a.m. on Monday morning, and already the Italians are gathering. One by one, they arrive at the Sun River Family History Center in St. George, Utah: DeeAnn Lubers, Paul Bottino, Susie Tasso, and Dave Biasi. They are united in one purpose: to find their Italian ancestors.
When DeeAnn looked at her first Italian microfilm, she knew she needed help. “I went to the Institute at Dixie College and begged for a returned missionary from Italy to read the old Italian documents,” she said. “Now I’m learning both the research process and how to read the records. I finally feel like I’m on the right track.”
Dave Biasi, the “ringleader” of the group and a family history consultant, loves Italian research and delights in mentoring others. After spending many years and many dollars hiring professional researchers, he decided to learn the process himself. In 2000, he traveled to Italy and microfilmed three parishes with his own camera. Instantly, he was hooked. “In the past ten years, I’ve gone to Italy maybe 20 times,” he reflected. “I’ve photographed over 35 parishes and personally extracted over 80,000 names.”
Now he shows others how to do what he has mastered. “I introduce people to the right resources, and then teach them how to extract the whole parish and link families together,” Dave explained. “Here’s the process: you extract 20-30 years of baptisms and 20 years of marriages. Then you can begin linking families together. Once you finish that group, you go back to the baptismal records, pick up where you left off and go back another 20-30 years.”
This method has worked perfectly for Susie, who is researching her husband’s Tasso line. Her current goal is to document every name in the Baldissero Canavese (Torino) parish from 1850 to 1940. The records extend back to the 1500’s, so this will be a lifelong labor of love. “I had hired someone to start this research for me,” she related, “but then learned that his work was not legitimate. I saw Dave’s name on a bulletin board and talked to him about my problem. He said I could either hire another researcher or do the work myself. Having had one bad experience, I decided I would learn.”
“If someone wants to learn, I can teach them,” Dave expressed confidently. “Everyone has a different situation. DeeAnn’s records come from the south, which are reconstructed civil records. Paul’s family is from northern Italy, and he is working with parish records written in miserable Latin.”
The work in these old records is hampered by poor quality microfilm, time gaps within collections, and almost-undecipherable handwriting. “In early years, only 3% of the people could write. Priests would mix Italian and Latin,” Dave explained. “So I connect my students with ItalianGenealogy.com, which is a foreign-based site staffed by professional researchers all over the world. They help with surname searches, handwriting issues and place locations.”
Paul is making good use of this resource. “I’ll take a picture of a record, save it in a .jpeg format, upload it to imageshack.com and then post a link from it to ItalianGenealogy.com,” he explained. “I’ll get a response within hours, often from Luca, who has helped me a lot. He will write out the record in Latin, and then do an Italian translation.” With help from Luca, Dave and others, Paul has been successful in extracting Forno Canavese parish records from the 1860’s back to 1837.
Although Italian families are generally quite close, they, like many others, are sometimes reluctant to respond to requests for information. It can be frustrating when trying to work with those who are suspicious and refuse to answer questions, or with “greedy genealogists” who have answers but refuse to share. “The great news,” Dave enthused, “is that you don’t have to try to get information from your relatives. You can get it right from the records. And chances are, the records you need have been microfilmed or digitized.”
Records can teach us much more than just names and dates, as Susie attests. “I was ignorant of Italian customs when I married my husband,” she said. “His family is the most loving, giving family on earth. What I learned from the records is that this characteristic is ingrained in Italians.” Citing an example, she explained that she would often see the words genitori incogniti, meaning “parents unknown” in baptismal records. Often, mothers who were too poor to raise a child or unwilling to keep an illegitimate baby would take it to a church or convent. The problem became so severe that many early Catholic churches and convents constructed a “Foundling Wheel” which was a revolving wooden cylinder where, in anonymity, a mother could leave her baby in the cylinder, turn the wheel and then walk away. A bell would ring inside the building to alert the priest or nun that a baby had just been brought. They would take the baby in and then find a family willing to raise the child. It was not uncommon for the birth parent to reclaim the child when the baby became a teenager. “What I am learning through these records is a whole new appreciation of the loving and giving that is part of Italian culture,” Susie said thoughtfully.
As Paul, DeeAnn and Susie heartily agree, working together – both in person and online – is the key to success. There is a subtle but major shift from the “old” way of thinking (this is my research) to the new, collaborative approach (this is our family and our research).
“It’s hard at times to do your own research. Everybody needs to get help from someone smarter than them,” Dave remarked. “You have to go forward with what you’ve got. It gets down to practice. If you do it once a week, it’s easy to forget what you did before. If you work at it a little everyday, it gets easier.”
And if you do it with like-minded friends, it becomes a joy.
Carol Kostakos Petranek is one of the Directors of the Washington DC Family History Center and a Volunteer at the National Archives in Washington, D.C.