Provincia di Palermo
Palermo city has indexes without matching registers
Palermo is the one province where an index survives for a period whose registers the archive does not hold. For the city only, decennial indexes of births, deaths and marriages run 1865 to 1905 — but the registers they index are not there. That sounds like a dead end and is the opposite: an index entry gives a name, a date and an act number, which is exactly what the comune needs to find the original it still holds.
Explore the comuni
Comuni in Provincia di Palermo
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 Palermo holds
The principal fond is the Stato Civile della Restaurazione — Palermo and the comuni of the province, 1820-1865. For every comune it holds birth, marriage and death registers, together with files of documents submitted by the people registered.
Two things are held for the city of Palermo alone. First, decennial indexes of births, deaths and marriages, 1820-1865, which are not held for the other comuni. Second, decennial indexes for 1865-1905 — a period for which the archive does not hold the corresponding registers. That second set is a finding aid to records held elsewhere, and treating it as such is the key to using it.
For material the archive does not hold, there is a substantial digital alternative. With the Soprintendenza Archivistica della Sicilia, FamilySearch has digitised the civil status archives held by the comuni of the province. These appear under Stato civile della Restaurazione (registri dei Comuni) and Stato civile italiano (registri dei Comuni) — that is, the comuni's own first originals rather than the archive's second copies. For the 1865-1905 gap in particular, that is where the registers are.
Digitisation at the archive itself is recorded as Parziale — which is part of why the FamilySearch comune sets matter so much here.
Continue your research
Civil status in Sicily begins in 1820, not 1809 — a decade later than the mainland.
Archivio di Stato di Palermo on Antenati
The archive's own statement of its holdings, including what it does not hold.
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
City and province are not the same search
Palermo divides between the capital and everywhere else, and the archive's holdings divide with it.
For the province, the core is the Stato Civile della Restaurazione, 1820-1865 — births, marriages and deaths for every comune, with files of allegati. There are no decennial indexes for these comuni, so a search means knowing the year, or reading through it.
For the city of Palermo, decennial indexes do survive for 1820-1865, which makes a city search materially faster than a provincial one for the same years. And the city has the second set, 1865-1905, for which the archive holds no registers.
Use that second set as a finding aid, not as an endpoint. An index gives the act number; the comune of Palermo holds the first original. The correct move is to search the index at the archive and then request the act from the comune with a number in hand, which is a different and much easier conversation than asking them to search.
The province
A Bourbon reform, and a capital that stopped being one
Sicily kept its own institutions long after the mainland was reorganised, and the modern provincial framework here dates from the Bourbon reform effective in 1817, with Palermo as one of the principal territorial administrations. The State Archives use 1817 as the institutional marker, and civil status itself began in 1820 — a decade later than on the mainland, which is the single most useful date to remember about Sicilian records.
That lag has a cause. Civil registration was instituted for the Kingdom of the Two Sicilies in 1819 by Ferdinand I and took effect in Sicily the following year. So a mainland Neapolitan family can be traced in civil acts from 1809, while a Sicilian family of exactly the same standing cannot be traced that way before 1820. Before that, the parish is the only route.
Palermo had been a capital in its own right — of the Kingdom of Sicily, with its own parliament and its own aristocracy — and losing that status in 1816, when the two kingdoms were merged, is the political wound behind much of the island's nineteenth century. The province around the city is large and varied: the Conca d'Oro and its citrus gardens, the Madonie mountains inland, the Tyrrhenian coast west toward Trapani, and the isolated interior toward Caltanissetta. The Arbereshe comune of Piana degli Albanesi sits in the hills above the city, Albanian-speaking and Byzantine-rite since the fifteenth century.
Culture & traditions
The Conca d'Oro, the Madonie and the interior
The province is not one landscape and its families did not share one life.
The Conca d'Oro, the shell of land around the city, was citrus country — lemons and oranges grown in irrigated gardens, and a trade that made fortunes and, in the later nineteenth century, produced some of the earliest documented protection rackets in Sicily. Families in the ring of towns from Bagheria to Monreale and Carini worked those gardens.
The Madonie inland — Petralia, Polizzi, Castelbuono, Gangi — are high mountain comuni with a pastoral economy, deep snow in winter and their own dialect. They were remote enough that emigration there ran late and hard.
The coast west of the city through Terrasini, Partinico and Alcamo's border country was tuna and vine country, with the tonnare working the spring migration.
The interior toward Corleone and Prizzi is latifundia land — great estates, day labour, and the social conditions that produced both mass emigration and the fasci siciliani of the 1890s.
Piana degli Albanesi is the exception to all of it: an Arbereshe community with its own language, its own Greek-rite eparchy and its own Easter, five centuries after its founding. Its records may be in the Byzantine rite rather than the Latin.
Province established
1817
Comuni covered
82
Historic names
Val di Mazara · Intendenza di Palermo · Circondario di Corleone · Circondario di Termini Imerese · Circondario di Cefalu
Languages & dialects
Italian · Siciliano (Palermitano) · Madonie varieties · Arbereshe at Piana degli Albanesi
Traditions
Santa Rosalia and the Festino · the citrus gardens of the Conca d'Oro · the tonnare · Arbereshe Easter at Piana · the fasci siciliani
The modern Sicilian provincial administrative framework derives from the Bourbon reform effective in 1817, with Palermo as one of the principal territorial administrations. 1817 is used as the institutional heritage marker.
Visit the province
Going to the archive in Palermo
Know whether you are searching the city or the province, because the tools differ. A provincial search for 1820-1865 means working by comune and year without an index. A city search for the same years has indexes and is much quicker.
If the event falls between 1865 and 1905 and the family was in the city, go to the index first and come away with an act number. Then approach the comune, or look for the same act in the FamilySearch comune sets.
Nothing in this province is searchable before 1820 in civil records, because civil status did not exist in Sicily until then. Earlier generations mean parish books and a different set of institutions — a different request, and often a different building.
What to see
The Conca d'Oro — Monreale, Bagheria, Carini and the citrus ring around the city.
The Madonie — Petralia Soprana, Polizzi Generosa, Castelbuono, Gangi, high pastoral comuni.
Piana degli Albanesi — Arbereshe, Byzantine-rite, Albanian-speaking since the fifteenth century.
The Tyrrhenian coast — Terrasini, Partinico and the tonnare that worked the tuna migration.
The interior — Corleone and Prizzi, latifundia country and the ground of the fasci siciliani.
Palermo itself — the four mandamenti of the old city, and the only comune with surviving indexes.
Not yet in the collection
Want to see Provincia di Palermo represented?
Requests are how we decide what comes next — every one is read, and the places people ask for are the places that get made.