My husband and I will be traveling to Milan to search for birth/baptismal certificates for my great-grandfather and great grandmother who were born in Vicosoprano and Alpepiane Italy. Can anyone suggest someone who can accompany us to churches diocese and record keepers to translate English to Italian and vice versa?. We do not need a tour guide per se. We would pay them for their time, of course.
Posted by
Tresana, Highlands Ranch, CO, USA
23666 posts
You probably need to dig around on the internet and look for genealogical societies in Milan. You would be time and money ahead to pay a researcher to some preliminary searching. There are professional people who do. Sometime in the future will go to Prague for the same reason and have identified a professional who will assist us in that manner. Another approach would be to contact the church in both Vico and Alpe to see if they would id a local who does that kind of work. Not only do you need the translation that they can provide but also someone is very familiar with how the records are kept and where. And there is also the possibility that the records have been index and are available on the internet.
Posted by
Seattle, WA, USA
7737 posts
Frank's suggestions are brilliant. There are lots of people who go back to Italy to explore their heritage.
Posted by
Santa Fe
27 posts
I did this very thing last Spring. It was easy!
And with you knowing what towns they were born in you have half the search completed.
We stayed in the town my maternal grandparents were born in (about 10,000 people)
Next time, we will stay there again and wander to the villages, just a few miles away, my paternal grandparents were born in.
We are adventurous so one of the desk clerks at our hotel spoke beautiful English, wrote down the phrases we would need to communicate, and drew a map to the birth records office (Anagrafico).
Everything is on the computer!!! Even my grandparents birth and marriage records from 1880's!
They told us to come back in 2 hours because the records were so old and buried deep, and they needed the time to uncover them. They photocopied the original hand written entries for me. They are beautiful.
Someone at your hotel can probably help you. There is always someone eager to help find family. Family is one of the top priorities of Italians, along with loyalty to town, country and soccer team.You might even find someone working at the hotel who would love to accompany you.
I didn't feel the need for baptismal records, but the church was around the corner and from what our hotel clerk said, would have been easy to access as well.
As an aside, by an act of Grace, we found family too. It's a long story but... I sat with my 2nd cousins in the very house my grandmother was born in!
As I said, Italians love helping us connect to our heritage.
I was telling everyone, in my broken Italian, that I met on the streets and in shops that my grandparents were born here and almost every single one of them made an effort to help in some way.
You are going to love this journey.
Buona fortuna!
P.S. do you know about bing.com/translator If you have a smart phone, iPad etc you can type in English and it will translate to Italian ( or most other languages) as you type..