To be able to do effective searches, it is necessary to know how the Italian archives which record documents with the information of our ancestors created by clerical and governmental organizations are organized.
We can distinguish at least four types of Italian Archives:
The State Archives (in each province)
The Diocesan Historic Archives
Other Private archives
Italian Genealogy Letters to send requests to Italy to obtain Vital Records and Parish Records for your genealogical research
Each Italian province has its own State Archive and we can resort to them requesting copies of documents containing data of our ancestors: lists of leva, censuses.
In this website you can find information related to the State Archives (postal address, e-mail address, times, names of the directors, among other).
Archivi - Italian Archives Portal (English)
Lists of Websites of Italian archives
Portale della Memoria degli Italiani - This website is about the historical records of Italian population, through the digitized registers conserved in every State Archive participating in this Project.
Friuli in prim - To allow easier researches, the Archive of the State of Udine has stored online a database.
Almost each Comune has an Archivio Comunale or Archivio Storico Comunale (town archive), generally divided into pre-unitario and post-unitario (before and after unification of Italy) sections.
Some of the Commune Historic Archives have transferred all or nearly all their patrimony to the State corresponding to their province. Since the Archivio comunale (Town Archives) are part of the local municipality, its the address can be found through the town hall.
Many comuni archives keep important resources which are useful for our genealogic searches such as censuses, and lists of recruits, but not all the comuni have catalogued their archives.
In many Italian regions they are developing revalue, recovery and re-inventory projects for the document patrimony the communes archives keep.
These projects are:
Guarini (Piedmont Region Project)
IBC Archivi (Emilia Romagna Region Project)
Lombardia Beni Culturali (Lombardian Region Project)
RINASCO (Lazio Region Project)
SIUSA - The Sistema Informativo Unificato per le Soprintendenze Archivistiche (Unified Information System for the Supervision Agencies) better known as SIUSA, intends to be the primary access node to non state archival documents, both public and private, which are not kept by State Archives. General historical, administrative and archival informations are provided, to allow a better comprehension of the context. Communes of the provinces of Ancona, Enna, Genova, La Spezia, Pesaro y Urbino, Pordenone, Potenza, Reggio Calabria Rovigo, Sardegna, Savona, Trieste, Venezia )
Visiting these websites, we may be able to check if there is some information that might be of interest for us.
