What Survives in Sicilian Archives, and What Doesn't

Anyone who starts looking for Sicilian ancestors soon asks the same thing: "Will the records still exist?" The honest answer is: it depends on the town, the year and what has happened to the registers in the meantime. Some are in surprisingly good condition after two centuries. Others are incomplete, damaged, or simply cannot be found. It is worth knowing before you start, because it changes the expectations you set out with.

Town hall civil registers

For anyone researching a nineteenth-century family, the main source is civil registration. In Sicily it begins in 1820, under the Bourbon kingdom: every municipality had to record births, marriages and deaths. From 1866 the service belongs to the unified Italian state, with more uniform registers and, later on, indexes. A nineteenth-century 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 of the house. A marriage record adds the names of the spouses' parents. A death record often names the parents of the deceased, and it is one of the quickest ways to climb a generation.

More recent registers are valuable too, because they help close the circle. From the unified Italian state onwards, in the margin of many birth records there are notes about the person's marriage and death: a single page thus links records from different years, without your having to find them one by one. A twentieth-century death record often gives the name of the spouse and of the parents too, and lets you check what you have reconstructed from the other documents.

Those registers were kept in two copies: one stayed in the town hall and one was deposited with the court, and over the years in the provincial state archives. That is why some have been digitised and can be browsed for free on a public portal online. It is a useful resource for anyone who wants to make a first attempt alone. It is worth being clear about one thing, though: our service works on the archives of town halls and parishes, not on the provincial state ones.

Parish registers

Church registers are older than civil ones. After the Council of Trent, in the mid-sixteenth century, parishes had to record baptisms and marriages, and later burials. In many Sicilian parishes the registers start in the sixteenth or seventeenth century. For anyone with eighteenth-century or early nineteenth-century ancestors they are often the only source.

They are private archives, not public ones. They are consulted with the parish priest's permission, sometimes through the diocesan office, and there are no opening hours: it depends on the person and the day. A baptism record gives the names of the parents and the godparents, and godparents are a precious clue, because they were often relatives or neighbours. Some parishes also keep the so-called "stati delle anime", a sort of census of the town's households that shows who lived in the same house. Not every parish has them, and they have not always survived.

How to read a nineteenth-century page

Opening a nineteenth-century register for the first time is a strange experience. The records are handwritten in tight cursive, with formulas that repeat: the date spelled out in words, the hour, the name of the person declaring the birth, his trade, his age. Ages are often approximate, trades abbreviated and place names written in the dialect form of the time. In the oldest parish registers the language is often Latin, with names italianised or latinised: Joseph, Giuseppe and Peppino can be the same person.

Some registers have indexes by year or by decade that speed the search up a great deal; others do not, and then you have to turn the pages one by one. That is why the time a search takes depends not only on how many registers exist but on how they are made.

What has been lost

After two centuries something is almost always missing. The most common causes are ordinary ones:

• Damp, mice and weak paper. Many registers were kept in humid rooms, and nineteenth-century ink can have eaten through the page.
• Fires and floods. A town archive that burns takes whole decades with it.
• Earthquakes and war. Collapsed or damaged buildings, and the bombing of 1943, hit archives too.
• Moves and loans. Registers taken elsewhere for a piece of research and never returned, volumes shifted during a town hall move.
• Sloppy keeping. Torn pages, skipped years, records written in a hurry in unreadable handwriting.

Recent records, on the other hand, are protected by privacy rules: entries closer to our own time are not freely open to everyone. In practice, someone looking for a great-grandfather born in 1880 works with material that can be consulted. Someone looking for a grandfather born in 1935 will have to go through the papers held by the family and through people who are entitled to ask for copies.

The most frustrating case: the name is there, but it does not connect

The most common problem is not the missing register. It is the register that is there, where you find six Giuseppe Russos born in the same decade in the same town, and you do not know which one is yours. It happens when the parents' names are missing, when a family appears with the surname written two different ways, or when the person you are looking for emigrated young and left no other trace.

In these cases a serious researcher does not pick the one that looks most like your man. They write that there are several candidates and say what would be needed to tell them apart: the exact year of birth, the name of a brother, a later marriage. That too is a result, because it says where to look next.

How far back you can go

With civil registers you reach, in the best cases, 1820. With parish registers, much earlier. In practice, though, the search slows down with every generation, because every step back multiplies the possible namesakes and reduces the information needed to tell them apart. For many families the first three or four generations can be rebuilt with fair confidence. Beyond that, every link has to be checked against several documents: a birth record, a marriage record, a brother's death record, the names of the godparents.

That is normal, and it helps to know it in advance: stopping at some point is not a failure, it is the honest measure of what the papers say.

What a good negative result looks like

It can happen that after a well-run search nothing is found. A good negative result is not "there is nothing". It is a written report that says:

• which registers were consulted (town hall, parish, years);
• which variants of the surname and first name were tried;
• what similar entries were found and why they were not taken to be the right one;
• which years are missing or unreadable;
• where it makes sense to start again, for example in a neighbouring town or a different parish.

A report like that is part of the work we do in our roots trips. With a report like that you throw nothing away: you know exactly where the search stopped, and you can carry on alone or with someone else without repeating the work already done.

That is why you buy the search, not the result

It is the reason why, in our roots trips service, the research is paid for as work and not as the promise of an outcome. Nobody can guarantee that the right register still exists, is legible and holds the name you need. What can be guaranteed is the method: where we look, with which variants, for which years, and an honest written account at the end.

If you want to understand what is realistic to expect for your family, start with the article on how to find the Sicilian town your family came from: with a name, years, a town and the parents' names in hand, the question about the registers becomes far more concrete.