Provincia di Ascoli Piceno

The Stato civile, 1808-1938, holds registers of birth, marriage and death with allegati, spanning the Napoleonic, Restoration and Italian periods in a single continuous fond — a hundred and thirty years across three sovereignties.

Within it, the archive is specific about one interval: the series concerning the Italian period, 1861-1865, comprises registers coming from the city parishes and from other parishes of the 17 frazioni of the circondario. For those years the parish did the registering and the parish books are here. It is the bridge across unification and it is easy to miss if you are looking for a civil register under a civil heading.

The Anagrafe del comune fond holds the fogli di famiglia and the schede individuali produced by the registry office of the comune of Ascoli Piceno — household sheets and individual cards. For establishing who lived with whom, and when a household changed, these are more informative than any single act.

Levy records are in the Distretto militare di Ascoli Piceno, classes 1839-1949: the lists of male citizens born and resident in the district called to the levy examination. Fogli matricolari from the same fond cover classes 1841-1946.

The levy series beginning with the class of 1839 predates the province itself by twenty-one years, which is a reminder that the military administration and the civil one have different histories.

Digitisation across the fond is marked Completa.

SIAS records the Province of Ascoli Piceno as existing from 1860, following the extension of the Rattazzi provincial order to the Marche and the Minghetti decree of 22 December 1860. The Marche were annexed to the Kingdom of Sardinia that autumn, after the papal army's defeat at Castelfidardo in September.

Before that the territory was papal, part of the Marca Anconitana and administered through delegations. Ascoli itself is ancient — Asculum, the Picene capital, where the Social War began in 91 BC — and it is built almost entirely in travertine, which gives the city its particular grey-white uniformity.

The province as constituted in 1860 was much larger than today's. Fermo and its territory, a substantial and historically distinct city with its own long archival tradition, were part of Ascoli Piceno until 2004, when the province of Fermo was created. A record for a Fermano comune from before that year may well be catalogued here.

The land runs from the Sibillini mountains down the valleys of the Tronto and the Aso to a short Adriatic coast at San Benedetto del Tronto and Grottammare. The Tronto was the boundary between the Papal States and the Kingdom of Naples, so the southern edge of this province was an international frontier until 1860 — with all that implies for smuggling, marriage across the line, and records kept by two different administrations within sight of each other.

The 2016 earthquakes struck the Sibillini comuni hard, and Arquata del Tronto among others was largely destroyed.

If the comune is now in Fermo, check here for anything before 2004 — the province was divided only then, and the older material stayed.

For 1861-1865, ask for the parish series. The civil register you expect does not exist for those years; the parish book that replaced it does, and it is in this archive.

Ask about the Anagrafe del comune fond for Ascoli households. Family sheets answer questions that birth and death acts cannot.

For a family on the Tronto, expect the trail to cross into the Kingdom of Naples before 1860 — which means Teramo, and a different record system, on the other bank.

Ascoli Piceno — the travertine city, Piazza del Popolo and the Quintana each August.

The Tronto valley — the papal-Neapolitan frontier until 1860.

The Sibillini — Arquata, Montegallo and Montemonaco, struck hard in 2016.

San Benedetto del Tronto and Grottammare — the Adriatic fishing coast.

Offida — lace-making and the Romanesque Santa Maria della Rocca.

Acquasanta Terme — the springs on the road over the Apennines into Lazio.