There are many fantastic online resources to track your Italian/Sicilian ancestors, but it’s easier if you have a solid starting point. Here are suggestions for getting started, with some tips and tricks.

Gather Information
Get your hands on every bit of information you can about your family and related families (cousins, aunts, uncles, in-laws, etc).

• Names, birth, marriage and death dates of relatives
• Where your parents and grandparents were born
• Where they lived (state, city/county, street)
• When they emigrated
• When they moved
• Where they worked
• What groups or unions they belonged to
• Who lived nearby
• Who were their close friends

Get this information as far back as possible, and don’t forget this information for all the brothers and sisters, aunts, uncles and cousins in each generation. Look over this information from time to time, because as you go along, things will pop up at you that you now make sense or align with something you now know.

Gather information from all your older living relatives and the older family friends. Don’t wait to do this!!  This can take the form of stories, but also documents (immigration papers, deeds, wills, passports, newspaper clippings) and photos. Document the family stories (write down what is said, and who told you – stories are not always completely correct, but they hold clues that can be important). Ask a lot of questions, ask often, and don’t be discouraged if your older relatives say they don’t remember much. Each time you chat with them, they will invariably come up with some tidbit that will help you add a puzzle piece.

Getting Relatives to Talk to You
Any number of people have told me that their older relatives, especially if Italian, simply do not want to talk about “the old country.” However, if you can begin to share information that you are discovering, sometimes they will warm up to the idea. Short of that, I have never met a person who did not thoroughly enjoy talking about himself and his life. So ask questions about the person himself. This will invariably lead to stories and information about people involved in his life.

Analyze What You Know
After you have some starting information, review and analyze it. You have to decide what to go after first. To me, genealogy research is a matter of figuring out what the information you already have tells you, so you have to figure out what you “know” so far.  For example, you will probably need to calculate (or guess) how old someone was when he lived in a certain place, roughly how old he or she was at the time of marriage, or how old the parents were when each child was born. This is so when you start looking at records you can recognize your relative when you come across him. It all depends on what information you are starting with, but your analysis will tell you what to look for, and where to look. Sometimes, it gets to this – What question does this information answer?

Here’s what I mean. You find your immigrant family in the 1900 New York census, and both the husband and wife listed their place of birth as Italy. So you could narrow your search for their immigration records to 1900 and before. (Sometimes the census will list how many years in this country.)

But now you have another question – did they marry in Italy and come over here, or meet and marry here? And if they were both 18 years old at the census taking, they may have come to the US by themselves, or traveled with their parents. (In Sicily, most young people did not marry until around age 20 or a little older; a bride or groom aged 17-19 sometimes needed special permission from parents and sometimes a town council to marry.)

Anyway, when you look at ship manifests, don’t forget to look for others who came from the same town as your relative. Our immigrant relatives often came in groups, but not always as families.

(Also, emigrating Sicilian women always went by their maiden names, never by their husband’s surnames. So on migration records you will see your male relative, his wife listed by her maiden name, and the children with the father’s surname.)

If these hypothetical relatives had only one 7-month old child in the 1900 census, then the marriage date would likely have been at least a year before 1900. They could have unfortunately lost earlier-born children, but number of births and number of live children is also sometimes asked in the census. Nevertheless, it’s still a starting point; you have an approximate year for a marriage.

What if they appear in the 1900 New York census but don’t show up in the 1910 NY census? Well, they moved. So then you need to figure out where they went. This is where the family stories can help – do you know where other relatives or friends lived, or where your ancestor lived a decade or two later? If yes, check city directories and census records there.

It really is detective work, it is not always easy, and I don’t know that everyone is suited to it. But if you get hooked, there is almost no greater thrill than figuring something out or finding a piece of information that fits into your puzzle.