In our last post, we discussed the U.S. census records you can use to learn more about your ancestors and discover your immigrant ancestor. Though we are using Italian ancestry to take this journey, most European ancestors can be found in the same way. In this post, we are looking more closely at other records you will find to locate the town your ancestor came from. This time let’s talk about church records.
Most Italians are Roman Catholics (like the Irish and many Germans), and the Catholic church keeps very good records for baptisms, marriages, and burials. At least I have found that to be the case. My immigrant ancestor, my grandfather, came to the U..S. single and married here. One of the records I looked for in finding his hometown was a marriage record.
He got married in the church so a marriage record would be one church record I would need to look for. There are also civil marriage records that you will find at the county courthouse, but they do not give any information about the country they came from. Records of most parishes are kept in the individual parishes. Records for defunct parishes are in diocese offices though some diocese have copies of some church records. Some local churches get many requests and may not be able to get to your search request right away.
Try contacting the church and if you hit a road block, make an appointment with the diocese archivist to see what information they have. Be specific in what you are looking for. Sometimes the archivist will pull registers ahead of time to expedite your search. If there is a website, use it to contact and request records. In my case, I had the names of my grandparents, the church they were married at (it was the nearest church to where they lived at the time), and the approximate year (based on census records).
I set up an appointment with the diocese archivist (as the church secretary had a backlog of genealogy requests and suggested the diocese) and discovered that many of the church records had copies at the diocese. I was able to find my grandfather’s marriage record which listed his parents’ names and the town in Italy he came from. Easy! Well, not really since I had done a lot of research before. But I had the information I needed which was the town in Italy he came from. I could now begin my search of Italian records to continue my ancestral tree.
Some of these records may be online. Where do you look? The usual suspects – Ancestry, FamilySearch, MyHeritage, FindMyPast, etc. What if you don’t find what you are looking for in church records? Try naturalization records (some censuses will indicate if a person was naturalized). Not naturalized? Try other church records (baptisms for children, burial records). Try looking for a passenger list or a passport application. There are many avenues to the same result you can take to find what you are looking for!
What records have you found useful in discovering your ancestral town? Let us know in the comments below!
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