Ancient Roman ruins, historic buildings and churches, including the state archives, were destroyed in the April 2009 earthquake in the medieval village of L’Aquila, Italy. The prefecture that housed the archives was leveled under the collapse of the 18th-century church of St. Augustine. Some 40 years earlier in 1967, an unexpected, major flood of the Arno River also caused the loss of significant historic records, documents and works of art in the city of Florence.
Such untimely and often unpredictable acts of nature suggest the need for careful attention to records preservation, a need recognized by the directorate general of archives in Italy.
Quote from DGA official
In response to that need, at the conclusion of the National Conference of Archives in Pescara, the DGA announced a newly formed collaboration with The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints through its genealogical arm, FamilySearch International. In a cooperative effort with all 109 state archive repositories, FamilySearch will digitize valuable historic records, making a permanent copy of the records.
Digitizing is not the simple act of scanning an analog record into digital form, but consists of a series of steps that produce a digital copy for Internet use. Meticulous care is employed in locating, pulling and capturing the information from an individual file. Individual files are carefully replaced in their original positions. Each file is indexed to review and format extracted information; then files are digitally converted and published.
Italy’s newly formed agreement will include information gathered from all of the country’s archive repositories. The definitive and historic collection of Italian genealogical information initiated by Napoleon Bonaparte during his occupation of Italy covers all of Italy’s birth records from 1802 to 1911 and the marriage and death records from 1802 until 1941. (Later records are protected under national privacy laws.) The Church arranged its first Italian microfilming agreement in 1948 with the Waldensian Evangelical Church in Prarostino, Torino. In that agreement, 66 rolls of microfilm dating back to the 1600s were captured. The records were packed on the backs of mules and carried down from a mountainside to be filmed. The two record-keeping organizations began a joint digitization venture in 1975, but this phase will allow for a complete record of the registries.
The scope of the newly formed project is second in volume only to the digitization of the United States censuses and is estimated to include 115 million individual records, which include approximately 500 million separate names.
“It is estimated there are about 750 million living people worldwide with Italian roots,” explains Paul Nauta, manager of planning and communication in the Church’s Family History Department. “The U.S. alone has more than 10 percent of its population with an Italian heritage, while Argentina and Brazil have 60 and 40 percent respectively. That’s a huge migration that extends the interest in these Italian records far beyond the country’s immediate boundaries. People with Italian heritage are fiercely loyal to their roots and want to further their understanding of family traditions and relationships.”
Nauta’s own family emigrated from Italy to the United States in the early 1900s.
His father lost touch with his forbearers, and Nauta says he “grew up thinking he was the only family in the entire country with his last name.” By chance in the mid-1990s, Nauta received an email offering to help him connect with his family in Italy. As a result, the genealogical researcher uncovered relationships long lost. “I met living first cousins I’d never known anything about. It was absolutely surreal to walk into a town established in the 1500s and know that my family with my name had been there for over 400 years. They still own the same farmland outside the village, still make the same cheeses and press olive oil. You really feel like you are a part of those who have gone before you.”
In order to help others discover their own family story, volunteer indexers help transcribe these names from the civil registration into a searchable format. Volunteers work line-by-line through the records to organize vital statistics on each person listed. About a thousand volunteer Italian-language indexers currently work on previously digitized files, but it is estimated more than ten thousand will be required to prepare the newly available records for publication.
Once a file has been indexed, it is published at FamilySearch.org and at the DGA website, allowing free online access to the genealogical information. Currently over four million Italian historic records are available at the Church’s genealogical research website, FamilySearch.org.
To learn more visit www.FamilySearch.org/learn