Provincia di Venezia

The civil holding is precise and short: the Atti dello stato civile di Venezia, 1806-1815, introduced by Napoleonic decree and in force to 1815.

From that date until the Italian regulation, the civil registrar's functions return to the parish priests. The archive says so, and it is the governing fact for the whole of the nineteenth century here: research for 1815-1870 goes to the diocese and the parishes, not to this fond.

The same pattern holds across the region, and the neighbouring archives state it independently. Treviso records that from 1816 the function passed to parish priests. Belluno directs research for 1815-1870 to parish archives and only from 1871 to the comuni. Vicenza holds its Stato civile italiano explicitly from 1 September 1871.

That date — 1 September 1871 — is when Italian civil registration came into operation in the former Venetian provinces, five years after annexation. It is the single most useful date in Veneto genealogy.

For the Napoleonic period the region's departmental fonds are extensive elsewhere: Padova holds the Dipartimento del Brenta 1806-1815, Belluno the Dipartimento della Piave, Rovigo the Basso Po, Treviso second copies with indexes and allegati for 188 named localities.

What this archive holds in unmatched depth is the Republic's own administration — notarial, judicial and magistracies' records across a millennium, which for pre-1806 families is the real resource.

What the archive holds is fully digitised — though for this province that is nine years of civil status, not a century.

The Citta Metropolitana explains that after Napoleon's defeat the Austrian administration converted the former Adriatic Department into the province.

What preceded all of it was the Republic of Venice, which governed itself for eleven centuries and ended in 1797 when Napoleon handed it to Austria at Campoformio. Venice passed back and forth — French again from 1805, when it joined the Kingdom of Italy and received the civil registration that produced the 1806-1815 fond; Austrian from 1815, in the Kingdom of Lombardy-Venetia.

The Austrian half-century was one of decline and emigration. Venice's port was eclipsed by Trieste, which Austria favoured; the mainland was poor; and from the 1860s the Veneto became one of Italy's greatest sources of emigrants. Between 1876 and 1914 several million left, disproportionately from this region, to Brazil, Argentina and the United States — and later to the Agro Pontino in the 1930s, when Veneto families were settled on the drained Pontine marshes.

The 1848 revolution made Venice a republic again for seventeen months under Daniele Manin before Austrian bombardment and cholera ended it. The city joined Italy after the plebiscite of 1866.

Mestre and the mainland grew enormously in the twentieth century with Porto Marghera, built from 1917, which reversed the direction of the province's population.

Fix the period and the destination follows.

1806-1815: this archive, the Napoleonic civil series.

1815-1870: the diocese and the parish. Fifty-five years in which the priest was the registrar.

From 1 September 1871: the comune, and the Italian civil system. Not 1866 — the five-year difference is where most Veneto searches go wrong.

For anything before 1806, the Republic's notarial and judicial fonds here are the richest source in Italy for a city of this size.

If the family emigrated, expect it to have gone in a group: Veneto emigration moved by village and by kin, so a single Brazilian or Argentine colony often maps to one comune.

Murano — glassmaking since 1291, and a closely recorded artisan caste.

Burano and Pellestrina — lace, fishing, and dialects of their own.

Chioggia — the fishing town at the lagoon's southern end.

The Riviera del Brenta — Venetian villas along the canal to Padua.

Porto Marghera and Mestre — the industrial mainland built from 1917.

The sestieri and their parishes — the unit Venetian records are organised by.