I spent nine years following two families from the foothills of Monte Grappa, the Forners and the Miottos of Monfumo and Castelcucco, in the province of Treviso, in the Veneto. Almost everything I learned about where to look, I learned by getting it wrong first. This is for anyone starting the same search — for family history, for a book, or for an Italian citizenship application.
What is not online, although almost everyone assumes it is
The first place people look is the Portale Antenati, run by the Italian Ministry of Culture. For the province of Treviso it holds a single collection: the Napoleonic civil registers, 1806 to 1812. It does not hold the Italian civil registration that began after 1866 for these towns.
FamilySearch has the same gap. For Monfumo and Castelcucco its catalogue lists only the Napoleonic years, and the collection Italia, Treviso, Stato civile (Tribunale), 1871-1941 includes neither town. The parish of San Nicola Vescovo in Monfumo shows zero records.
In practice: birth, marriage and death records from Monfumo and Castelcucco between the late nineteenth century and the 1920s are not digitized anywhere. You have to request them.
Where they are
- At the comune itself, in the ufficio di stato civile (civil records office). Italian civil registration began in the Veneto after the 1866 annexation; the Monfumo indexes I used start in 1871. Write to the comune, ideally to its certified e-mail address (PEC), listed on its official website. Writing in Italian helps.
- At the Archivio di Stato di Treviso, the state archive, which keeps the court’s duplicate of the registers after 1871 and answers genealogical requests by mail.
- At the parish, for anything older than civil registration. Baptism records also name both parents.
Ask for the copia integrale, never the estratto
This is the most useful advice here. The estratto per riassunto, the short certificate a comune issues by default, leaves out exactly what a researcher needs: the father’s trade, the family’s address, the mother’s age, who registered the birth. The copia integrale is a copy of the whole record. For genealogy, that is the one to ask for.
Di and fu: two words that tell you who was alive
Italian documents give a person’s parentage in a fixed formula. Di before the father’s name means he was alive on the date of the document. Fu means he had already died.
On a 1940 identity card belonging to my great-grandmother’s brother, the clerk wrote di Vincenzo and, on the line below, fu Pandolfo Domenica Santa. That told me their father was alive in 1940 — while a public online family tree had him dying in 1914. In papers from the mid-1940s the same man is already fu Vincenzo. Two small words narrowed the death of a man whose death record I have never seen to a window of five years.
The same name, spelled four ways
Expect this from the start:
- Italian women did not take their husband’s surname. In Italian records my great-grandmother is a Forner all her life; in Brazil she became Forner Miotto. A ship’s list from 1927 entered her under her husband’s name, a Brazilian office three days later under her maiden name. Search under both.
- Names were heard, not copied. A girl baptized Gina appears within two weeks in 1927 as Ginneta, Dinetta and Ginita, depending on who was writing.
- First names have variants too. My great-great-grandmother is indexed as Pandolfo Santa, Pandolfo Domenica and Santa Pandelfa. She was one woman, named Domenica Santa.
An index helps you search; it does not prove anything
Transcribed indexes shared among researchers are a great help, but the Monfumo birth index I used gives only the father’s first name, not his surname. And two transcriptions of the same index disagreed on precisely the line I needed. Use the index to find the record number, and the record to make the claim.
The same goes for printed genealogies in local histories: the one for Castelcucco gets the family’s structure right and its dates wrong — it has my great-grandmother born two years later than her birth record says, and it leaves out two of her sisters. And it goes double for collaborative online trees, where anyone can merge two different men into one, and the mistake looks exactly like everything else.
If your ancestor went to war
The Albo d’Oro dei Caduti della Grande Guerra, searchable online by surname, lists those who died in the First World War. Those who came home are not in it. For them, the record is the foglio matricolare, the military service sheet, held at the state archive of the province. Request it with the soldier’s name, his father’s name and his draft class (his year of birth).
If your ancestor emigrated
The trail is often better on the other side of the ocean, because every border crossed produced a piece of paper. In the United States, the Ellis Island passenger manifests; in Brazil, the register of the São Paulo immigrant hostel at the Museu da Imigração, the passenger lists of the Arquivo Nacional, and period newspapers in the Hemeroteca Digital of the National Library. It was in an Ellis Island manifest that I found my grandmother’s uncle, a man no one in the family knew had crossed the Atlantic — his story is in another note in this journal.
This note is part of the research for the book Terceira Classe (Third Class), about Italian emigration to Brazil and the sinking of the Principessa Mafalda in 1927. If you are researching a family from Monfumo, Castelcucco or the neighbouring towns, get in touch.