How to find out if Sicilian grandfather went back to Sicily and died there
Hello, I am relatively new to genealogy research and hope someone can point me in the right direction. My Sicilian grandfather abandoned his American family in Texas in 1939 and I am trying to find out what happened to him. The last piece of info I could find was a Social Security application made in Phoenix, AZ, dated1945 when he was 62 years old. From there the trail goes cold. I cannot find a death certificate for him in the US, so I'm wondering if he went back to Sicily and passed there. Are there any travel resources for finding out if immigrants went back to their home country? My grandfather never became a US citizen. My cousin and I had a trip to Sicily all planned for April of 2020 but of course it had to be cancelled. So now I'm back to researching from the US.
Any help or tips would be appreciated.
Thank you,
Camille
Answers
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Looking for records that show if an immigrant went back to his home country of Sicily.
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Privacy laws prevent research less than 70 years old in Italy, and even so, few records exist online beyond 1910 anyway (sometimes we can go up to about 1940). Records that are not online would have to be requested through government/legal channels and is not normally practical for an individual. If you know the exact birth/marriage/death date, you could request an actual certificate from the Italian comune, but even that is not obvious. To consult the records open-endedly or to consult anything less than 70 years old would require a serious legal reason.
What town in Sicily are we talking about here?
The only easy way I see to check this will be to look for his original birth record in Sicily. Rarely, clerks would update the birth record by adding a note in the margin when someone married or died. If ever this was done, then that is huge! It's a long shot, but it's the only realistic possibility of finding post-1951 death information by yourself.
To my knowledge (though I may be wrong since my expertise in Italian research only), there are no records of outbound travel from the USA for non-citizens. For citizens, there are US passport applications which at the time required the person to say where they were intending to go. I can say definitively that there are no records of inbound travel to Italy of any kind that survive.
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