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Italy Emigration and Immigration

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Finding Town of Origin

Records in the countries emigrated from are kept on the local level. You must first identify the name of the town where your ancestors lived to access those records. If you do not yet know the name of the town of your ancestor's birth, there are well-known strategies for a thorough hunt for it.

Italy Genealogy Research Using the Wiki – Video Series

These three lessons demonstrate the use of personal and U.S. records to search for the name of your ancestors' home town in Italy.

Historical Background

Immigration into Italy

Early 1200s. Waldensian emigrants from France moved to northern Italy as a result of religious persecution.

1431 to about 1450. Thousands of Greek and Albanian Christians moved into Italy as a result of persecution under the Muslim Turks. They settled in coastal areas of the Italian peninsula and in Sicilia.

1492 to 1692. Thousands of Jewish emigrants moved into Italy because of religious persecution. Most of them came from Spain and Portugal. Many settled in Rome and other major cities.

Emigration From Italy

Prior to 1848. About 10,000 emigrants left Italy prior to 1848.

1848 to 1870. More than 20,000 emigrants left Italy and migrated to the United States. This wave of emigration was caused by political upheaval and revolution as Italy struggled to become an independent, unified state.

1870 to 1914.

  • From 1870 to 1880, an estimated 55,000 Italians came to the United States.
  • From 1880 to 1890, more than 300,000 others arrived.
  • As word arrived in Italy of the opportunities in America and as economic problems increased in Italy, nearly 4 million Italians came to America between 1890 and 1914.

Most emigrants were from southern Italy and settled in New York, Chicago, and along the East Coast. Many emigrants from northern Italy settled in the coal and mineral mining towns across the United States. Other northerners later settled in northern California where a climate similar to their own existed.

Besides going to the United States, many Italian emigrants went to Argentina, Uruguay, Brazil, Australia, and Canada.

Passport Records (passaporti)

In 1869, the Italian government began requiring people to obtain passports to move within Italy. However, the United States and many other countries did not require passports, so many Italians left Italy without an official passport.

The Italian government used passports to make sure young Italian men did not emigrate to avoid the military draft. Consequently, police were responsible for passports. Passports are still issued today by the questura (head of the internal police) in each province. Although you may write to request passport information, the archives where these records are kept are not open to the public. You will generally find passports among the personal papers of the emigrant’s family in his or her destination country.

Because passport records can be hard to find and access, you may want to check with the anagrafe (registrar’s office) in each comune. This office keeps records of residency changes and emigration along with dates and probable destinations.

Some passport applications have survived the years and are currently being digitizied and indexed by the BYU Immigrant Ancestors Project. Although it is an ongoing project, you may do a name search on the information indexed to this date.

Contents: Names of passengers holding passport or migration permits and the names of their parents, places of residence or origin, dates of migration, destinations, relationships with other passengers or party members, and vital information such as birth dates, marriage dates, children, etc.

Immigration Records

United States

Passenger Lists

To search those records, see United States Immigration Online Genealogy Records.

U.S. Citizenship and and Immigration Services Genealogy Program

The USCIS Genealogy Program is a fee-for-service program that provides researchers with timely access to historical immigration and naturalization records of deceased immigrants. If the immigrant was born less than 100 years ago, you will also need to provide proof of his/her death.

Immigration Records Available
  • A-Files: Immigrant Files, (A-Files) are the individual alien case files, which became the official file for all immigration records created or consolidated since April 1, 1944.
  • Alien Registration Forms (AR-2s): Alien Registration Forms (Form AR-2) are copies of approximately 5.5 million Alien Registration Forms completed by all aliens age 14 and older, residing in or entering the United States between August 1, 1940 and March 31, 1944.
  • Registry Files: Registry Files are records, which document the creation of immigrant arrival records for persons who entered the United States prior to July 1, 1924, and for whom no arrival record could later be found.
  • Visa Files: Visa Files are original arrival records of immigrants admitted for permanent residence under provisions of the Immigration Act of 1924.[1]
Requesting a Record

Australia

Brazil

Italian Brazilians are Brazilian citizens of full or partial Italian descent. Italian Brazilians are the largest number of people with full or partial Italian ancestry outside Italy, with São Paulo being the most populous city with Italian ancestry in the world. Nowadays, it is possible to find millions of descendants of Italians, from the southeastern state of Minas Gerais to the southernmost state of Rio Grande do Sul, with the majority living in São Paulo state and the highest percentage in the southeastern state of Espírito Santo (60-75%). Small southern Brazilian towns, such as Nova Veneza, have as much as 95% of their population of Italian descent. In 2019, 11,663 people with Italian nationality emigrated from Italy to Brazil according to the Italian World Report 2019, totaling 447,067 Italian citizens living in Brazil until 2019.[2]

References

  1. ↑ "Genealogy", at USCIS, https://www.uscis.gov/records/genealogy, accessed 26 March 2021.
  2. ↑ "Italian Brazilians", in Wikipedia, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Italian_Brazilians, accessed 17 Apri 2021.
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