Why Family Trees Disagree, and What Settles It

Start free. We mean it. Find Your Comune costs nothing, we built it ourselves, and most people should exhaust it before they spend anything.

Online family trees are a real contribution. People have given years to them, they are often useful, and they are frequently right. What they are not is evidence.

A tree records someone's conclusion. An act records what was written down at the time, by someone standing in the room.

That distinction is invisible until the moment it decides everything. Here is one of those moments, from our own family.

One father, two mothers, two acts

Girolamo Francese of Nocera Inferiore had children by two women. Online, that surfaced as a contradiction — two sources, two different mothers, one of them presumably wrong. A careful reader flagged the conflict and advised resolving it before paying anyone for research.

Both sources were right.

The registers show it in a way no tree structurally can, because a tree has one field for mother and a parish did not. Two acts, fifteen years apart, each naming its mother as his wife. He is forty in the first and fifty-five in the second: one man, born around 1827.

Half-sisters. Not an error.

A search gives you three fields. The act gives you twenty.

Born. Parents. Town. That is what a result usually tells you, and it is where the information usually stops. Those three fields are an index entry — a finding aid someone made so the record could be located later. They are not the record.

Here is what the same two acts actually say, and all of it comes to you:

• The address. Corso Vittorio Emmanuele in 1867; Via Fiorio, number 26, in 1882. A street you can stand on.
• The father's trade and age. Speziale — an apothecary — aged forty, then fifty-five.
• The mothers, and their own fathers. Mariantonia Dipino di Raffaele. Rosa Mancino. A generation further back, in one line, at no extra cost.
• The hour of birth. Seven in the morning. Six in the morning.
• The witnesses, with their ages and what they did for a living: Carlo Attanasio, fifty, possidente; Aniello Benevento, forty-four, possidente. Witnesses are usually neighbours, kin, or the family's trade circle — they are leads.
• The marginal notes. Added to Suriella's birth act twenty-three years after it was written: on 30 August 1890 she contracted marriage with Gregorio Aitelli. Her birth record names her husband.
• Whether a man's father was still alive when the act was drawn. It turns on two letters — see below.

None of that is in the index. None of it is in a tree.

What a free search cannot do

Read the act, not an index of it

Indexes carry a name, a year, a number. Everything in the list above sits in the act and nowhere else. Each line of it is a thread.

Reason across documents

One act is a fact. Two acts read together are an argument. A man's age in 1867 set against his age in 1882 is what proves he is the same man.

Know where the records are

Which archive holds them, which years survive, which district a comune answered to in a given decade. Jurisdictions moved constantly. A modern map is frequently the wrong map for a nineteenth-century record.

Name the document behind every fact

So you can check it yourself, rather than take our word for it.

Say what was searched and not found

A register that did not survive is an answer. It is one free tools never give, because silence and absence look identical.

We only do Italian records

Not as a limitation. As the reason the work is any good.

Italian civil registration is not one system. It begins in 1809 in the south, 1820 in Sicily, 1866 across most of the north, 1871 in the Veneto — and in papal territory there is a fifty-year hole where nothing civil exists at all. Provinces were created and abolished. Comuni were renamed, absorbed, transferred. Knowing that is not general genealogical skill. It is Italian genealogical skill, and it is most of the job.

Then there is the reading. In Suriella's act her father is Girolamo Francese di Gaetano. A witness is Carlo Attanasio fu Francescantonio. Two small words. Di means that man's father was living. Fu means he was dead. A routine birth act quietly tells you that Gaetano Francese was alive in September 1867 and Francescantonio Attanasio was not.

A service covering every country cannot hold that for every country. We would rather be genuinely useful in one place than approximate everywhere.

We know where to look because we have done the looking

None of this came from reading about Italian records. It came from working them, comune by comune, starting with our own family.

That work is public. There are place pages for every comune, province and region on this site, each setting out where that place's records are actually held, which years survive, and what to do when the obvious archive is the wrong one. We wrote them because we needed them.

When you ask us to trace a line, you are not paying for access to a database. You are paying for someone who already knows which register to open.

See one, in full

Arguments about method are cheap. Here is a finished report, free to read and to download, with nothing taken out: a sample research report.

It follows our own founder's grandmother from a hill town in Irpinia to Newark — and it shows the gaps as plainly as the findings. There is a section we could not complete, a promising record we found and then rejected, two documents that contradict each other, and a list of what is still unfound and where to look next. That is what every report looks like, because a search that cannot say what it failed to find is not a search.

Where to start

Find Your Comune is free. Begin there, and come back when the records need reading.

Ask Orso is the full search: a researcher in the civil registers, tracing one emigrant ancestor's Italian line back through three generations — your ancestor, their parents and their grandparents — with the archive, comune and record number behind every fact.