For a long time I've patiently waited for services like Ancestry.com, FamilySearch.org and others to finally start putting useful Italian records online. I just think it's so weird there are tons of Irish, English, German, Central and South American records online, but very few places where one can find enough Southern Italian records to make online research useful. The few records Ancestry.com is offering are from Northern Italy where, compared to the South, relatively few immigrants originated - FamilySearch has zero Italian records. I'm sure there is a very good reason for this, but I don't have a clue what it could be.
I guess I've looked in the wrong places. This morning, in a round-about way, I discovered the Archivio Di Stato Di Cosenza. This is the Archives of Cosenza province, Calabria (basically the in-step of the Italian boot) and they have a searchable online database. It just so happens both of my grandparents came from small towns in Cosenza so you can imagine my interest here.
The opening page is a search form, but will not give you any results unless you register for the site. I discovered this by searching for my surnames and some other common Italian names, but the results were always zero. After registration the results started appearing.
When you enter a name you get two lists. The first is a list of people who are the subjects of the records, and a second list of other people mentioned in those records. For example: I entered my grandmother's maiden name "Rota" and this generated a list of 154 people, and the second list showed 21 other names mentioned in those records.
I was surpriseg at the types of records available. I found birth, death, marriage, and what appears to be Army enlistment records. Most of these are simply a transcription of enough of the document to create an index, but I did find actual images of a few documents recording the enlistment of a person. There is also a nice bookmark feature where you can save a link to a particular record you want to come back to later. The dates of the records appear to run from 1800 to 1900 and one of the best part of the site is you can toggle the transcriptions from Italian to English. My understanding is that they are still adding records to their database.
The Archivio Di Stato Di Cosenza is not a fancy site. Sorry, but it has no social networking or family tree features that the subscription services are falling all over themselves to create as centerpieces of their sites. It consists of just plain records...the kind real family historians love to dig into.
(The image above is the coat of arms of the Province of Cosenza)
