Antenati website

De Francesco, Julie Kathleen

Hello All, I just watched Lisa Louise Cooke's presentation on Italian Research today, and I can see that my State of Ascoli Piceno is fully digitized on the Antenati site. The problem I'm having (and have had for at least the last five years) is determining which Parish holds the records for Montegallo (Communi) and more specifically Castro (Frazioni). I've mapped out churches, exhausted online research and tried just spot-checking different record sets to no avail. I can't help but feel that I'm just totally missing something. Can anyone help point me in the right direction? Is there anyway to learn if records for an area no longer exist? Many thanks in advance, Julie DeFrancesco

joseph99929

The Antenati website hosts records held by Archivi di Stato (State Archives). Basically everything that's publicly accessible at the archives in Italy, they're putting it online for everyone to use from home.

However, in the province of Ascoli Piceno, only the vital records of the city of Ascoli Piceno proper have ever been sent to the archives to be made public. The vital records of the other towns in the province have never been transferred and are technically not accessible to the public at this time.

There are 3 ways you can proceed, but they're not easy:

1. You can work with the offices of the Comune of Montegallo directly, requesting official birth/marriage/death certificates. Governmental vital registration in this area began in 1866, so any birth, marriage, or death record after that year should be held by the Comune. If you have specific information already (birthdate, etc) and have a legal reason to request a certificate, then they are required by law to issue it. However, any broad searches or any informal genealogical research will be at their discretion and they are not obligated to assist.
2. You can attempt to access church records directly. Church records can go back as far as the 16th century. Though your frazione of Castro would have historically had its own parish church, it no longer does, so presumably any records would be held by the nearby parish of San Bernardino in Balzo, though this is just my assumption. Sometimes, parish records have been transferred to the Archivio Diocesano (diocesan archive), so it is worth contacting the Archivio Diocesano di Ascoli Piceno to ask. If the records have been transferred to the diocese, then they'd be fully open to the public and you can study them in-person. That said, 99% of the time, the records are still at the original parish churches in town, and are not open to the public. Research is still possible in these cases, but it requires cooperation from the parish priest to lookup records or to grant special permission to consult the records in-person. Parishes in Italy are under no obligation to assist though. It's hit-or-miss, but if you can be vouched for by a regular parishioner of the church still living in town, this goes a long way. Most people will utilize the services of a local professional genealogist based in the area to access church records.
3. Finally, for men born after 1841-ish, there would be military draft lists (liste di leva) and service records (ruoli matricolari) held at the Archivio di Stato di Ascoli Piceno and accessible publicly. If you have some data about your ancestor already, then it is possible to request copies of these records by email, or actually consult the originals in person. Military records are not super useful for genealogy, but they at least give the parents' names.

I'm very sorry not to have better news to share about genealogy research in your area! There is hope that one day in the future, the vital records will be transferred to the Archivio di Stato for public consultation and eventual digitization by Antenati/FamilySearch, but this is not the case yet.

De Francesco, Julie Kathleen

Oh my goodness! You can’t imagine how important and appreciated this information is to me. I can’t believe all the hours I put in to looking at records on the antonati site when the information wasn’t even there to begin with. I certainly would’ve spent many more hours without your kind communication. Thank you so very much for sending such a complete and informed response. Gratefully, Julie De

joseph99929

@De Francesco, Julie Kathleen It's my pleasure, of course! Just in case I've missed something, it'd be good to get someone else's opinion. If nobody else answers, you can try asking the same question on https://www.italiangenealogy.com/forum/italian-genealogy