Church records search in San Basile (CS)
Apologies if this has been asked, but I couldn't find a way to filter search results by group. Does anyone know how to contact the San Giovanni Battista church in San Basile, Cosenza for a records search request? I emailed the church directly, the diocese in Lungro, and the mayor in San Basile asking the same. None have responded. I have a list of birth, marriage, and death dates for my ancestors that are outside those available from the civil registry.
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I'm sorry to hear you haven't had any luck getting a reply about church records! It is in general considered quite difficult to obtain access to church records in Italy, as these records are not considered public. Any lookup request or in-person consultation request will be at the sole discretion of the parish priest, and rejection is a very real possibility. Sometimes, there is no choice but to wait for a new parish priest to be assigned. Of course, if you can be vouched for by a regular parishioner of the church (a relative perhaps), this goes a very long way to gaining access!
Another piece of advice would be to search public trees on FamilySearch, Ancestry, Geneanet, etc, and check and see if anybody else has clearly accessed church records in your town (if they have data that would otherwise be unavailable). You could then ask them how they managed to gain access!
Finally, it is also possible to deal with a professional genealogist in Calabria (the more local the better), but this is of course a mixed bag.
In any case, the entity to contact is indeed the parish or the parish priest personally. The diocese Beni Culturali office or the Archivio Diocesano will not have the records themselves, though it may still be possible for them to direct your request to the parish priest more formally. The comune cannot do anything to help you with church records.
I assume you are interested in church records for research before 1809, since the civil records from 1809 onwards are all online on FamilySearch. Church records after 1809 are generally not required except in very special cases, since the civil records are already so detailed and with a lot of built-in redundancy.
Unfortunately, according to SIUSA (they recently inventoried the available parish records of Calabria), very little exists in your town prior to 1809 anyway. In fact, the only pre-1809 church records that appear to exist are 27 years of deaths from 1775-1802! See: https://siusa.archivi.beniculturali.it/cgi-bin/siusa/pagina.pl?ChiaveAlbero=123934&ApriNodo=1&TipoPag=comparc&Chiave=117276&ChiaveRadice=117276&RicTipoScheda=ca&RicVM=indice&RicSez=fondi
There are 2 other sources which can be used for pre-1809 research:
- The catasto onciario census was done all across the Kingdom of Naples in the 1740s-50s. It can be consulted freely in person at the Archivio di Stato di Napoli. It is also possible to request the archive photograph your town's census in full for a (somewhat hefty) fee. This census was done in your town of San Basile in the year 1753.
- Notarial records are more advanced, and much more time-consuming to study, because of how vast they are. These include all contracts drafted by notaries. The vast majority of these are business-related and totally useless for genealogy, but there are a decent number of marriage contracts and wills which are extremely useful. It's a misconception that notarial records are only for the upper class. In reality, anyone with some kind of property or real estate would want to die with a will and marry their daughters off with a marriage contract. In my experience, I found marriage contracts for about 50% of my ancestors and wills for about 50% of my male ancestors. In your case, these records would be at the Archivio di Stato di Castrovillari. Unfortunately, nothing survives from San Basile notaries prior to 1791. Approximately 20 books of notarial contracts survive from San Basile between 1791-1808 (with many more after 1809). That said, a small town like San Basile may simply not have had any notaries at all based there until 1791, and so your ancestors' contracts from before that time may be with notaries from a neighboring town.
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First, thanks a lot for your detailed and helpful response. There was a lot of information there I didn't have. I'll forward this message to others who are working on the same line.
Second, I'm surprised the church would reject a records search request. Most churches charge for the certificate and some for the search. Since it's unlikely they'd have them in digital format, I'd be willing to pay for physical copies. I've ordered a bunch of records from other churches in a similar manner.
It's strange that SIUSA say there are death records from 1775 onward. In one of the marriage records of my ancestors, it shows my fifth great-grandfather having died in 1768 and that record was taken from the church there. In those marriage proceedings, there are so many birth records from 1777 onward as well. I wonder what happened to those archives.
Regarding the public tree, I've been working on the San Basile line with another user. He's done a lot of important work in documenting families from there and surrounding communes. Part of his tree is here.
The Castato Onciario records for Cosenza are online and there's a collection for San Basile. Through the marriage process records, we've been able to connect them to some of the families in the Catasto. However, there's a 1-2 generation gap in some parts that the church archives would fill.
That's very interesting about the notarial records in Castrovillari. is it possible to access them online? That could help narrow the gap between the civil registry and the Catasto.
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Interesting that you mention having ordered record searches from other parish churches before with success. From personal experience and from what I can tell being involved in the Italian genealogy community, it truly is hit or miss. I've had more luck arranging in-person research, but this is because for my hometown, I have 1st cousins still living there who could vouch for me, and then I could have my hometown parish priest vouch for me to consult at other churches in the same diocese, since the priests all know each other.
It does seem illogical for a church to outright refuse to do a lookup. The only real reason for that is laziness, in my opinion, or perhaps IT issues, not receiving or not knowing how to read emails. A phone call doesn't hurt, if you speak Italian, the worst outcome is a rejection, so no worse than where you are at now. When it comes to in-person consultation, there are legitimate worries about people damaging or even vandalizing the books, so trust is very important, and since in-person research must always be supervised directly by the parish priest, there's a time issue too.
Regarding records loss, if the marriage processetti from 1809-1865 include baptism certificates from prior to 1809 and death certificates from prior to 1775, then those records definitely still existed at that time. So, any record loss would have had to happen after that time. The reasons for records loss are varied, but for catastrophic losses like these appear to be, it's either fire or earthquake. I don't believe your area was ever affected by any earthquake, so that leaves fire.
Records loss is definitely real though, one of my ancestral towns has literally nothing pre-1809 surviving, and I have many other brick walls in the 1700s and 1600s caused by records loss.
That said, the SIUSA inventory (done in 1995) may have mistakes. This would surprise me, but it's certainly not an impossibility. The only way to find out for sure would be from the parish priest or possibly the diocese Beni Culturali office (which supervises parish priests in their conservation duties). There is an older inventory of church records, done by the Vatican in 1942, not available except in book form. Here is the WorldCat entry for said book: https://www.worldcat.org/title/censimento-degli-archivi-ecclesiastici-ditalia-del-1942/oclc/652361555 It'd be interesting to see if in 1942 there were older books still conserved, as this would either imply SIUSA is wrong or that any records loss necessarily happened between 1942 and 1995.
I totally forgot that Cosenza province catasto onciario is online, so that is fantastic! No need to consult that in Naples then!
As you know, jumping from civil records back to the 1750s for the catasto is not always possible. You should be able to do it for at least some of your ancestral lines, but certainly not for all of them.
There is no means to consult notarial records online, this is normally work that has to be done in person. The Italian Archivi di Stato do offer a photography service for a fee, but you normally need to already know the exact document (notary, date, etc) you are looking for in advance. Maybe if the notarial books have alphabetical indexes (in the 1700s-1800s, they definitely should), they'd be able to photograph those for you and then you could request individual pages of records (marriage contracts, wills, etc) that appear interesting, but this seems like a stretch.
Notarial research is considered very advanced because the records are in freeform (they are legal contracts after all), so a good understanding of Italian is absolutely required. Because of how time-consuming it is, notarial records should only be used as a true last resort when church records are either lost or incomplete. In my case, for my hometown, the church records are all intact back to the 1500s, but because the marriages and deaths do not name the parents, I had no choice but to resort to notarial records.
Unfortunately for you, and I'm not sure if this is temporary for COVID or not, but the Sezione di Archivio di Stato di Castrovillari is only open to the public twice a month (!!) and for a limit of just 3 books per day (!!). For somebody (or for a professional researcher) who lives in the area, this is manageable, but for a foreigner, this simply does not work! Unfortunately, state archives in Italy vary widely from province to province in terms of funding and service, but this has to be by far the worst policy I have ever encountered. See: https://www.archiviodistatocosenza.beniculturali.it/index.php?it/130/sezione-di-castrovillari Here is the actual inventory of the notarial books under conservation: https://www.archiviodistatocosenza.beniculturali.it/getFile.php?id=562
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The Catholic Church has a policy that their records should not be accessible by Latter Day Saints or FamilySearch. This is because they strongly object to their records and property being used for Latter Day Saint ordinances. This policy is obviously widely ignored, if you look at the millions of Catholic records on FamilySearch. But Italian bishops and dioceses, being so close to the Vatican and the Pope in Rome, are more likely to hear about these sorts of policies than the dioceses in other countries. So this may explain why you are having trouble getting access to Catholic church records in Italy.
Here's an article about the policy written shortly after it was introduced: http://web.archive.org/web/20130404132959/http://genealogy.about.com/b/2008/05/05/vatican-orders-catholic-parish-registers-off-limits-to-lds-church.htm
If you are a baptized Catholic, make sure to mention this when contacting priests and parishes seeking access to records. If you can prove you are a member of a faith other than the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter Day Saints, it may also be worthwhile mentioning this.
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