How to Find the Sicilian Town Your Family Came From

Almost everyone who writes to us about their Sicilian roots opens with the same sentence: "My great-grandfather came from Sicily, but I don't know where exactly." That is normal. People who left between the late 1800s and the years after the war often never named the town, or named it once in dialect at the dinner table, and nobody wrote it down.

The good news is that the answer is almost never in Italy. It is in a drawer, in a box of papers, in an American database. You start from the person who left, not from the people who stayed, and you get there with some method and a lot of patience.

Start with the papers at home

Before you open any website, open the drawers and ask the oldest relatives. The things that matter most are often the ones that do not look like documents:

• Funeral prayer cards. Many show place and date of birth, sometimes the town itself.
• Baptism, marriage and death certificates of the American family. They can give the parents' names and, with luck, the town of birth instead of a generic "Italy".
• Passports, letters and postcards. An address on the back of an envelope is worth gold. Even the photographer's stamp on the back of an old portrait says where the family lived.
• American draft cards from the First World War. Men born between 1872 and 1900 had to register, and the card asked for the place of birth.
• Social Security applications, when the person had one: they often give the town of birth and the parents' names.

Keep everything and photograph all of it, including pages you do not understand. A name that looks meaningless today can be the one that unlocks the search two months from now.

Passenger lists: what they say and what changes after 1907

When a Sicilian boarded a ship, the name went on a list compiled by the shipping company at the port of departure: Palermo, Naples, Genoa. On arrival the list was checked by American officers. Many Sicilians landed in New York, but a sizeable share arrived in New Orleans, Boston or Philadelphia. Today the Ellis Island lists, in use from 1892 to 1954, can be searched for free on the foundation's website and on FamilySearch.

The difference that matters is this. The older lists give name, age, trade, last residence and destination, but often not the town of birth. From 1907 there are more columns, including the place of birth and the name and address of the closest relative left in the country of origin. A father, a wife, a brother: with that name you already have a second person to look for and, almost always, a second clue to the place.

If your family left before 1907, it is not over. Look for brothers, cousins and anyone who travelled later with the same surname. A relative who arrived fifteen years later is often recorded in far more detail.

Naturalization files

Those who decided to stay applied sooner or later for naturalization. Files before 27 September 1906 vary a great deal from court to court and sometimes say only "Italy". After that date the forms are standard and include date and place of birth, the name of the ship and the date of arrival. Copies of files after 1906 can be requested through the genealogy programme of the federal office in charge. It takes time, but it is one of the documents that most often solves the town problem.

The surname changed (but not at Ellis Island)

You know the story: "They changed his name at Ellis Island." It is almost always a myth. The lists were written in Europe before departure, by clerks copying from a document, and American officers checked names without rewriting them. The variants come from elsewhere: a transcription made by ear, a Sicilian surname spelled the Italian way, or a family that chose to simplify the name to work, to go to school, to fit in.

In practice a surname like Lo Presti may appear as LoPresti, Lupresti, Presti or Lo Prest. When you search an archive:

• try the variants, splitting and joining the surname;
• search by first name and year of birth more than by surname alone;
• remember that in Italy women always keep their maiden name. The wife of Giuseppe Russo appears in Italian registers as Maria Lo Bue and in American ones as Mary Russo. Searching for "Russo" to find her is the surest way not to find her.

Once you have the town: what the town hall holds

Every Italian town hall keeps the civil registers: births, marriages, deaths. In Sicily civil registration begins in 1820, under the Bourbon kingdom, and from 1866 it belongs to the unified Italian state. A birth record gives the child's name, the parents' names (the mother with her maiden name), the father's age and trade, the witnesses and often the street where the child was born. In small towns those registers are still in the registry office, in a cupboard, handwritten in a nineteenth-century script that is not easy to read.

Going further back there are the parish registers: baptisms, marriages and burials, in many Sicilian parishes from the sixteenth century. They are private and are consulted with the parish priest's permission. We cover them in another article, what survives in Sicilian archives, and what doesn't.

One clarification, because it is right to be clear: our service works on the registers of town halls and parishes. Italy also has provincial state archives, and many old registers have been digitised and can be browsed for free online. That is a useful route for anyone who wants to start alone, but it is not what we do.

The four facts without which no search can start

Whatever route you take, before you search a register you need four things:

1. First name and surname of the ancestor, spelled as in the oldest document you have.
2. Years of birth and death, even approximate. A five-year window is enough.
3. The town, meaning the municipality and not the province. People who write "Palermo" often mean the province, which has more than fifty municipalities. And beware of hamlets: the place your grandmother talked about may have a different name from the municipality.
4. The names of the ancestor's parents, with the mother's maiden name.

The fourth is the one that really counts. A register can hold three Giuseppe Russos born in the same years in the same town: it is the parents' names that tell your great-grandfather from the others. Without them even a good archivist has to guess, and in family research guessing is the fastest way to build the wrong tree.

If you already have these four facts, you have done the part nobody can do for you. The rest, searching the town hall and parish registers, is what we do with our roots trips.

When it makes sense to get someone on the ground

Many small-town registers are not online. They are consulted in person or by letter, in short opening hours, in Italian, with a clerk who has plenty of other things to do. Sometimes an hour of searching with the right person saves months of correspondence.

That is why we built our roots trips service: a professional listed in the national register of roots tourism experts searches your family in the town hall and parish registers, finds the house, looks for the relatives who stayed and then takes you there with an interpreter for a full day. One thing has to be said honestly: you buy the search, not the result. If nothing is found you still receive a written report of where we looked and what came up, which is useful for continuing elsewhere. The search takes at least three months, so if you plan to travel next spring, now is the time to start.