It is often said that there is another Italy outside Italy, made up for those millions of Italians who emigrated to North America and South America in the 1800s and 1900s.
Unfortunately, there is not an archive with the names of those Italian emigrants who sailed to the Americas.
This lack of information makes it difficult for the descendants to find their ancestors, as well as their places of birth; besides having to deal with the problems related to the application for the Italian citizenship.
The database of Italian immigrants, we are publishing here, is born to fill, at least in part, considering the dimensions of this phenomenon, this lack of information.
This archive has its origin in a large professional activity of hundreds of genealogical searches, which led us to get to know at depth, public and private archives of a large part of Italy, to discover lots of sources and unpublished documents about Italian immigrants to the Americas. From this, we got the idea to put together these materials and build a database of the Italian immigration, which will increase as time passes by.
Our work starts especially from Genoa, which was the greatest Italian port, which accepted all immigrants from the North and Center of Italy.
Today, we are publishing an initial list of over 20,000 names. It is made up of data of public and church archives, in particular, from the Passports (which provides data of the “regular” emigration) and of the military records (which describes the “irregular” emigration) of the ones who escaped from serving in the armed forces.
The database will be updated and have a gradual implementation; we recommend to check it out periodically.
Consultation to this database is free of charge, if you find your immigrant it is possible to obtain, after payment, the document showing the information, including the place of birth; or with an additional cost, delegating the task of getting the birth certificate to us.
We hope that this contribution may speed up your search.