Category Archives: Italian Roots

The painful truths in genealogy

Italian Living Posted on by

I’ve been creating my own little “village family tree” using all of the records I can get my hands on.  For one of the towns, the records I most easily have access to are only a single census, and then death records for about two centuries.  Because of that, I was building families first with only their dead children, and then after I had all of the death records placed in the tree, I went to the census and filled in some gaps (the birth records will someday fill in more gaps).  It was tough.

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Lost in Translation . . . but the Party Continues

Italian Living Posted on by

My husband is a Scots-Italian. Did you know that even was a thing? I didn’t until I met him 23 years ago. But interestingly, there is a LARGE community of Scots-Italians. My husband’s family was part of a substantial migration of Italians who left Italy for Britain in the early 1900s. Both sets of his grandparents headed to the “Big Island” of sorts to raise their children. The Italians who left Italy for Britain frequently became businessmen, and in Scotland, they gravitated towards Ice Cream and Fish and Chips. There was a time when it was stereotypically accurate to assume that the “chipper” was an Italian.

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