Genealogy Reviews Online

Archivio Di Stato Di Cosenza - Revisited

The Archivio Di Stato Di Cosenza is one of the most interesting genealogy resources I've explored.  I guess I feel this way because no other site on the web has Italian records useful to me.  Granted, it's only focused on a Provance in Calabria, but both of my paternal grandparents were born there.  I've written about the Archivio Di Stato Di Cosenza a couple of times, but never had much success actually using it - until now.

Of course I haven't found my grandparents yet (Antonio Agazio/Marietta Rota), but I'm getting closer because today I found my grandmother's father (Pasquale Rota).  I confirmed the record was his by date of birth (31 July 1849) with the known location - the town of Pedace.  The database contains many digital copies of the actual records, but my great grandfather's only had a brief transcription containing very interesting information.

Here's what I learned today from this brief transcription:  Pasquale Rota was a twin (the record contained the word "Gemello." I also learned Pasquale's father was Daniele Rota whose profession in Italian was "Bracciale."  From what I could find out, this word actually means manual laborer.  Pasquale's mother was Felicia Antonia Cava who was a "filatrice" (a spinner).  When I went back to the list of search results, a couple lines down from my great grandfather was the name Pietro Maria Rota born on the exact same day as Pasquale, and upon opening up the record I found the same parents - here was my great grandfather's twin.  

Of course knowing the names of the mother, father and brother opens up three new lines of research for me.  Not bad for a morning's worth of genealogy.

 

Italian Genealogy Records Online - Another Look

For a long time I complained about the fact there were no Italian genealogy records online despite the fact Italians immigrated to the US in such massive numbers in the 20th century.  Every so often I like to check out to see how the situation has improved.  While I find progress, there's still a long way to go.

There's been steady improvment at Ancestry.com, and while they do have some Southern Italian records, those they have still center on the North of the country.  By the way, I'm interested in Southern Italian records because the vast majority of Italian immigrants came from the poor provinces in the South and because both of my paternal grandparents came from Cosenza Province in Calabria. 

Family Search has two browse only provinces, but both are in Southern Italy.

This site provides transcriptions of selected Italian communes, but hasn't been updated in quite some time.  I have to add the transcriptions on this site come from individuals who do it for the purpose of their own research or just out of the goodness of their hearts.

To my knowledge, Archivio Di Stato Di Cosenza is still the only province in Italy with its records online.  Included are civil and some military records and includes many scanned original documents.  I'm not sure if all of their records are now online or if it's still a work in progress, but the site is very useful for me because both of my grandparents came from this province. 

There are many websites about Italian genealogy records, but very few actual online records. 

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Antonio Fragale, Sarafina Aggazio (younger sister of Antonio Agazio) and Family.

Italian Research

Just finished watching a great video on Italian genealogy produced by the Family History Library.  I have to say this is one of the best primers on Italian research I've ever seen.  It contains many of examples of Italian civil and church records with clues and hints on key elements on the record to look for...makes me want to get my hands on the records.

Naturalization Documents from Ancestry.com

A few days ago I wrote a post about whether I should subscribe to Ancestry.com.  My concern was a recent search of the site produced naturalization documents for my paternal grandfather, but since I did not have a subscription, I couldn't access them.  I received a lot of great comments suggesting I only subscribe for a month instead of spending all that money for an entire year.  I haven't subscribed yet, but I did get my hands on those documents from Ancestry (my source shall remain nameless), and I couldn't be happier. 

Above are two different copies of the same document.  The one on the right is what I had.  It's a horrible copy, but I was able to use it...barely.  I tried all sorts of sources to get a better copy (NARA, INS, Colorado Archives, etc.), but all told me they couldn't find it.  Maybe I didn't provide the right information, but I figured better copies didn't exist.

The copy on the left is the recently received Ancestry.com version.  I didn't realize how bad the other copy was until I saw this one.  I can now clearly see the street and town where my grandfather and his family lived; I can clearly determine the dates and places of birth of his children; I can clearly read the names and occupations of two men who witnessed the document; and I can clearly see how he described his immigration route to the United States.  There's now a gold mine of info for me to explore.

I'm also impressed with the scanning quality of the document from Ancestry.  I just might buy myself a month's access and see how it goes. 

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Finally Southern Italian Records Arrive Online at Family Search

I'm stunned right now.  I finally had the opportunity this morning to actually think about genealogy for the first time in about a month.  So as I browsed my way to Family Search so I could see recently added collections (that were NOT Italian) what did I find?  I found a recently added collection of Italian records.  This new collection (Palermo Province (Sicily) Catholic Church Records, 1530-1919) is the first Italian record set for Family Search and I hope they keep it going.  Granted, only 6% of the collection is completed, but at least when you look at the European Region  page, and scroll all the way to the bottom, Italy at last is listed. 

I don't have any ancestors from Sicily, but just across the Strait of Messina is Calabria so they are getting close.  Way to go Family Search!

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Archivio Di Stato Di Cosenza - Italian Records Online

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)

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Almost Wordless Wednesday - My Father and a Mystery Woman

 

Yet another photo of my young father (probably in his mid 20s...maybe after he returned from WWII) with an unknown woman.  Family members I talk to tell me my father (Louie Agazio) was a shy guy, but his album is full of these kinds of photos...and every one of these women are very attractive.  By the way, this is from a photo album my father told me (when I was a kid) to never look at...of course I was a sneaky and did the opposite.

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Immigrant Ship - Stampalia

I was browsing the New York Times archives recently and stumbled across an article about the ship that delivered my grandmother to the port of Philidelphia in September 1913.  I knew that my grandmother came to the US on the ship Stampalia and also read about how the ship was sunk (Aug 17, 1916) during World War I, but the article I found was press reporting on the event only three days after the fact (Aug 20, 1916).  The article also provides additional details on the ship I hadn't seen before. 

I was so full of myself for finding this nugget, I kept looking for more and found another article( dated Aug 21, 1914) about the Stampalia.  It seems a US banker had a whacky adventure trying to get out of Italy shortly after the start of World War I, and he was able to finally get passage on the ship.  It's a good story, but I really like the description he gave of his accomodations (steerage) on the Stampalia.  It's a small part of the article, but it interests me because my grandmother was in steerage on that very ship about one year prior.

To me, this kind of discovery is more exciting than any other and also goes to show how important newspaper archives are to family history.

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Dumb Luck - Again

So....I was surfing the Internet Monday evening and somehow I ended up on the Washington State Digital Archives page.  My brain is still a little fuzzy on how I got there, but when I saw the search box I started plugging in my surname list as I routinely do when I find sites like this.  I didn't get very far because after I entered "Agazio," I got a hit...and this is what caused my brain to get a little fuzzy.

I clicked on the one result under naturalization records, and I saw the name Antonio Agazio.  Hmmm...this was my grandfather's name.  Now before I clicked again I thought this couldn't be him.  Why would there be a naturalization record for my grandfather in Washington with a date of 1901 when I already have the petition for naturalization (1925) and declaration of intention (1922) he obtained in Colorado?  There have been so many false positives in my hunt for how this man came to the United States, but there was his name staring at me...so I took a breath and clicked.

As my luck sometimes seems to go in these matters, it was him.  Here's the record page and the actual declaration of intention my grandfather signed in 1908.  The exciting part about this find is the new information this document gives me.  I learned that he traveled from Italy to France; then to Liverpool, England; then to Quebec, Canada on a ship named "Lake Michigan."  Up to this point, I had no idea he was in France, England, or the name of the ship he sailed on to Canada.  I need to study the document closer and I will write more about what I find later.  I wonder why he went through the declaration of intention process twice?

The weird part of all of this is I wasn't really looking for him...it just kind of happened.

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New (to me) Italian Genealogy Resource

I've had a genealogical break-through of sorts recently.  This wasn't one of those eureka moments where I found a name leading to a hundred others going back in time, but it may eventually allow me to push my paternal linage back further than I thought possible.  This discovery has also given me great historical background I never had before on my paternal grandfather's place of birth - San Giovanni in Fiore in the Cosenza Province of the Calabrian Region.

While using my grandfather's place of birth as a search term, I found a 1995 article titled A Social-Demographic, Isonymic and Genetic Investigation on an Isolated Calabrian Village, in the International Journal of Anthropology.  This was both good and bad.  The good news is the "Isolated Calabrian Village" in the title was San Giovanni in Fiore, but in order to access the information I had to buy it.  Because I hoped it would provide me good info on my grandfather's hometown, and because I'm a sucker for spending money for genealogy reasons, I paid my $32 to download a 9 page article even though I had no clue what the title meant.  Sometimes being a sucker pays off and this time it did.  Copyright provisions won't allow me to reprint the entire article here, but what I found excited me.   

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My Greatest Genealogical Mysteries - How Did He Find All of Those Young Wives?

Young Wives of Domenico Aggazio (1844-?).  This is one of those situations where I will never know the true story, but it would be fun to know more.  My paternal great grandfather Domenico Aggazio apparently was the source of a small population boom in Southern Italy.  Between 1869 and 1903, Domenico had 3 wives (not at the same time) and, at last count, sired approximately 11 children.  There actually could be more because I haven't gone through all of the records yet.  Everything I know about Domenico comes from the civil records of San Giovanni in Fiore - a little town in Calabria.  I'm hoping Ancestry.com or FamilySearch.org gets this town's records online and indexed so I can more accurately sort out Domenico's marital and paternity issues.

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My Greatest Genealogical Mysteries - Illegal Immigrant or Not?

I was in my idea booth recently (a hot steamy shower) trying to think of a topic to write about, and for some reason, I started thinking of various mysteries surrounding some of my ancestors.  These thoughts weren't necessarily about brick walls, but about events in my ancestor's lives where I just scratched my head and wonder what the heck happened.  Over the next few days I plan on writing about a few of these characters.  I'm not sure how many I will get to because we are leaving early Saturday morning for a week long vacation in Myrtle Beach, South Carolina and I don't know how much time I will get to work on this series.  I'm hoping to have some quiet time where I can just sit back, listen to the ocean waves, and write.  So here we go with the first installment...

Canadian Border crossing of Antonio Agazio.  My paternal grandfather was born in the town of San Giovanni in Fiore located in Calabria, Italy in 1884.  He boarded a ship in Naples sometime in 1900 and immigrated to Canada - there's a story behind this too, but I'll save it for another time.  A family story has him traveling with a slightly older cousin (my grandfather was about 13-14) and entering North America somewhere in Canada.  He then worked in the Canadian timber industry and eventually crossed the border into the United States.  I don't have any official documentation showing this as fact, but in his citizenship paperwork from the mid 1920s he says he arrived at the port of Quebec, traveled by train across Canada, and crossed into the Untied Stated by ferry at Sault Ste. Marie, Michigan in July of 1901.  He goes on to say he traveled to Spokane, Washington and I assume his intent was to look for work.  Nine years later he shows up in the 1910 census as a railroad worker in Idaho's pan handle - a short 74 miles from Spokane.  This is all good information, and it's probably true, but the only documentation I have is what he wrote in the Citizenship documents about 25 years later.   

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Finding Living Relatives

(While this is a Carnival of Genealogy post, it can also double as a part of Craig Manson's theme of "Greatest Genealogical Find Ever")

I've found a number of new cousins in the US over the course of my short genealogy career - almost 6 years now.  Most of these were also pursuing their family histories, and since we were looking for many of the same surnames on the various genealogy websites, it's not too surprising we got into contact.  The most exciting discovery I had, however, happened almost completely by chance and involved a 61 year old letter posted on my simple family history site and Google.  I'd like to say it was my expert research skills that located the descendants of my grandmother's sister in the small town of Pedace ( located a little below the ankle of the Italian boot).  The reality is someone else (not even related to me) started the sequence of events that lead to what I consider my greatest genealogy discovery.

Agazio or Aggazio, and Interesting Surname Origin Theory

Find Your Family Name In Historical Documents

Spelling Confusion

Confusion about my surname began at the very start of my family history quest.  I have a scanned image of a letter written by my paternal grandfather's older sister in 1947.  It's a very sad letter about the hardships her family were facing just a couple of years after the end of World War II.  She asks my grandfather why he hasn't written, and asks him to send some fabric so her husband could have a new suit made.  There's a lot of interesting information in this letter, but what puzzled me the most was she signed it "Maria Aggazio."  In all of the US documents I could find, the name was always spelled as "Agazio" with one "g," and my family in Colorado had never seen it written as the letter shows.