Sample Research Report
Every Ask Orso search is delivered as a PDF report like this one, reproduced here in full and watermarked.
It traces Maria Emanuela Morra — known in America as Emma — born at Castel Baronia in the Province of Avellino in 1902, from her birth act in the Italian civil registers to her arrival at New York in 1923 and her life in Newark. She is our own founder's grandmother, which is why we are able to publish her in full.
It documents three generations — Emma, her parents, and all four of her grandparents — every one of them read from an act, not taken from a family tree.
→ Download the full sample report (PDF, 25 pages)
Read it for what it admits
A sample report is usually a showcase. This one is not. It contains a promising record that was found and then rejected, two documents that contradict each other, a grandmother whose date of death we have bounded but not yet fixed, and a list of what has not been found and where to look next.
That is deliberate. A search that cannot say what it failed to find is not a search — it is a sales document. Every report is built the same way.
What is in it
- The birth act, field by field — born at seven in the evening, in the house at Piazza Mancini, number sixteen; declared by the midwife because her father was away working; the witnesses a carpenter and a shoemaker, named and aged.
- Her parents' marriage act, 1901 — the single document that opened generation three, read line by line, together with the two birth extracts filed alongside it and her grandfather's death act of 1899.
- The comune — Castel Baronia, 639 metres up in eastern Irpinia, and the three reasons this family was hard to find there.
- The crossing — the S.S. Providence out of Naples, read across both facing pages of the manifest, including the brother she was travelling to and the uncle added in pen.
- A record index — every fact tied to a numbered document, with the office that holds it.
- Where the trail continues — what was searched, what was not found, and what to try next.
Why the names were the problem
The archives write the town as one word, Castelbaronia; the town today writes itself as two. She was christened Maria Emanuela and buried as Emma. Her married surname was Aitelli, which reaches neither. An official extract issued by an Italian comune reversed her mother-in-law's given name and surname, and shortened her father-in-law's name by half.
Nothing about this family was missing. Everything was filed under a name nobody was looking for. That is what the work actually consists of.
What a report does not contain
Copies of the records. A report gives the citation for every document — the act number, the year, and the office that holds it — not the document itself. Once you have the citation, a certified copy can be ordered by anyone, at any time, from the office named. We can also request them on your behalf.
A guarantee of anything beyond the Italian registers. This sample carries an arrival manifest, an American naturalisation, a marriage certificate and a census household. None of that was promised. It surfaced while establishing who she was — because a name in an Italian register only becomes a person once a second document, usually made in another country, agrees with it — and where we have it, you get it at no additional charge. But it is not part of the commitment, because we cannot know in advance whether such a record exists, whether it survived, or whether it can be reached. A report containing none of it is a complete report.
Not every report contains every section. What appears depends entirely on what survives: registers were lost to war, fire, flood and simple neglect, and some years were never kept at all. Where something is missing, we say which document we wanted, where we looked for it, and why it was not there.