Provincia di Frosinone
Cassino is a separate archival district
Frosinone holds two tribunal districts and they behave nothing alike. The Frosinone district runs 1871-1899 — a narrow window of twenty-nine years. The Cassino district runs 1809-1945, a hundred and thirty-six years, and includes comuni now in the province of Caserta. If the ancestral comune answered to Cassino, this archive is far richer than its own province's dates suggest.
Explore the comuni
Comuni in Provincia di Frosinone
Civil registers were kept by the comune, not the province. If one of these is your family's, start there.
Where the records are
What Archivio di Stato di Frosinone holds
The archive operates with the section of Anagni-Guarcino, and holds two tribunal series that should be treated as separate archives in practice.
The district of the Tribunal of Frosinone: civil status registers for 1871-1899.
The district of the Tribunal of Cassino: civil status registers for 1809-1945, a district that included some comuni now in the province of Caserta. This is the substantial holding, and for a southern family it reaches from the Napoleonic period to the end of the Second World War in one series. It also means a Casertano researcher may need to come here.
Levy records are held in the Distretto militare di Frosinone, classes 1923-1947 — a late run, reflecting the province's creation in 1927.
Matricular records in the same fond reach further back: ruoli matricolari with alphabetical registers, classes 1877-1945, and fogli matricolari, 1903-1922. The alphabetical registers make a name search practical, which is worth knowing when the civil series for the Frosinone district is only twenty-nine years long.
Digitisation is recorded as Completa, so both tribunal series are reachable at distance — a real advantage given how much of the Cassinate's local documentation was destroyed in 1944.
Continue your research
Two tribunal districts with different date ranges. Cassino runs 1809-1945 and includes comuni now in Caserta.
Archivio di Stato di Frosinone on Antenati
The archive's own statement of both tribunal series and its section.
antenati.cultura.gov.itPortale Antenati archive directory
Every participating State Archive and what each says it holds.
antenati.cultura.gov.itAn archive record and an online family tree will often disagree. Why family trees disagree, and what settles it →
Your roots
Frosinone or Cassino decides everything
There is no single date range for this province. There are two districts with different ones.
The Tribunal of Frosinone district: civil status registers for 1871-1899. That is it — no earlier, no later.
The Tribunal of Cassino district: registers for 1809-1945, and the district included some comuni now in the province of Caserta. For a family in the Cassinate or the Liri valley, that is a hundred and thirty-six years in one place, and it crosses the modern regional boundary between Lazio and Campania.
The reason is historical. Until 1927 the southern half of this province was Terra di Lavoro, in the Kingdom of Naples and then in Campania; the northern half was papal. The Cassino tribunal served the Neapolitan side and kept Neapolitan-style records from 1809, while the papal side had no civil registration in that form at all until after unification.
So establish which district, then which state the comune belonged to before 1927. The archive also keeps a section at Anagni-Guarcino for the northern comuni.
The province
Papal north, Neapolitan south, joined in 1927
The Province of Frosinone states that it was formally instituted by RDL no. 1 of 2 January 1927. What it joined were two territories that had belonged to different states for a thousand years.
The north — Anagni, Alatri, Veroli, Ferentino, Frosinone itself — is the Ciociaria of the Papal States, the Campagna e Marittima. Anagni was a papal city of the first rank: four popes came from it, and the schiaffo di Anagni of 1303, when Boniface VIII was seized there, is a fixed point in European history. These comuni have deep ecclesiastical records and no Napoleonic civil registration in the Neapolitan pattern.
The south — Cassino, Sora, Arpino, Aquino, Pontecorvo — was Terra di Lavoro, Neapolitan, with civil registration from 1809. Arpino was Cicero's birthplace and Marius's; Aquino was Thomas Aquinas's family seat; Pontecorvo was a papal enclave inside Neapolitan territory, which adds a third jurisdiction in a single valley.
The twentieth century then fell on the southern half with unusual violence. The Gustav Line ran through it, and the battles for Monte Cassino between January and May 1944 destroyed the abbey — founded by Benedict in 529 — and levelled Cassino town entirely. Surrounding comuni were devastated, civilian casualties were severe, and archives burned. The abbey's own library had been evacuated to the Vatican and largely survived; municipal records frequently did not.
When a Cassinate record is missing for the twentieth century, 1944 is the first thing to check.
Culture & traditions
Ciociaria, the Liri and the Comino valley
The province calls its northern half Ciociaria, after the ciocie, the laced rawhide footwear of its peasantry, and the name carries a whole rural identity that was heavily mythologised in the twentieth century — and that many families still claim.
The papal towns — Anagni, Alatri, Veroli, Ferentino — sit on hills with cyclopean walls beneath their medieval fabric, and their records are ecclesiastical in character well into the nineteenth century.
The Liri valley around Sora and Isola del Liri industrialised early: paper mills and woollen mills driven by the river's falls from the late eighteenth century, with a workforce that included French and Swiss technical families. That is unusual in central Italy and it shows in the surnames.
The Comino valley — Atina, Picinisco, Settefrati — is upland pastoral country with transhumance into Abruzzo, and it is the origin of one of the most concentrated emigrations to Britain of any Italian district: the Italian communities of London, Glasgow and south Wales draw heavily from these few comuni.
The Cassinate around Monte Cassino lives under the abbey's long shadow, and its parish structure was shaped by Benedictine landholding for a millennium.
Transhumance, papal administration, early industry and mass emigration to Britain: four quite different social histories inside one modern province.
Province established
1927
Comuni covered
91
Historic names
Campagna e Marittima · Terra di Lavoro · Ciociaria · Distretto del Tribunale di Cassino · Pontecorvo enclave
Languages & dialects
Italian · Ciociaro · Cassinate varieties toward Campania · Comino valley upland speech
Traditions
the ciocie and Ciociaria identity · Monte Cassino and Benedictine landholding · Liri paper and wool mills · Comino valley emigration to Britain · Anagni's papal history
The Province of Frosinone states that it was formally instituted by RDL no. 1 of 2 January 1927.
Visit the province
Going to the archive in Frosinone
Name the tribunal district first. Frosinone gives you 1871-1899; Cassino gives you 1809-1945. The difference is more than a century, and it is decided by the comune rather than by the family.
If the comune is now in Caserta but sat in the Cassino district, this archive may hold its nineteenth-century civil status. That is the reverse of the usual advice and it is worth checking before writing to Caserta.
For the northern papal comuni, ask about the Anagni-Guarcino section, and expect ecclesiastical records rather than civil ones for anything much before 1871.
Check twentieth-century absences against 1944 before treating them as search failures. Write ahead naming the district.
What to see
Monte Cassino — Benedict's abbey of 529, destroyed in 1944 and rebuilt.
Anagni — the papal city, and the schiaffo of 1303.
Alatri and Ferentino — cyclopean walls beneath medieval towns.
Isola del Liri — the waterfall in the town centre, and the mills it drove.
Arpino — Cicero's birthplace, on its acropolis above the Liri.
The Comino valley — Atina, Picinisco and Settefrati, and the emigration to Britain.
Not yet in the collection
Want to see Provincia di Frosinone represented?
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