Sicilia

No record was ever filed under "Sicilia." There is no Sicilian archive and no Sicilian civil register. Everything is provincial or local, and the narrowing goes like this.

Find the province. Sicily has nine: Palermo, Catania, Messina, Agrigento, Trapani, Siracusa, Ragusa, Caltanissetta and Enna. Each has its own State Archive.

But check the date against the province. This island has changed its administrative map more than most, and three of the changes will send a researcher to the wrong place. They are set out in the records section below — read them before you search.

Then find the comune, which is the real target, and for anything before 1820 the parish.

What gets you there is American records: manifests, naturalisation papers, census returns, draft registrations and the receiving parish. Those are where a comune name usually appears.

One caution specific to the island. Palermo and Messina were ports of departure as well as places of origin. A manifest naming either records where a family boarded, not necessarily where they lived.

And one clue that works unusually well here: the patron saint. Sicilian towns are strongly identified with their patrons — Rosalia for Palermo, Agata for Catania, Lucia for Siracusa — and a devotion carried to America often names the town.

Sicily sits at the centre of the Mediterranean and everyone took it. Greeks founded Syracuse, Akragas and Selinunte, leaving temples that outdo anything in Greece. Rome made it its first province and its granary. From the ninth century the Arabs ruled, transforming the island's agriculture, irrigation, food and language — and dividing it into three administrative regions that outlasted them by eight hundred years.

The Normans conquered it in the eleventh century and, unusually, kept what they found: Arab administrators, Greek clerks, Latin clergy. The Kingdom of Sicily created by Roger II in 1130 was one of the most sophisticated states in Europe.

What followed was long foreign rule — Swabian, Angevin, Aragonese, Spanish, briefly Savoyard and Austrian, then Bourbon. But the crucial point for records is that Sicily remained a separate kingdom with its own parliament and institutions, even when its king also ruled Naples. Formal union into the Kingdom of the Two Sicilies came only in 1816.

The island joined Italy in 1860. Since 1946 it has been an autonomous region with a special statute — which is why Sicilian provincial institutions have been reorganised in ways that differ from the rest of Italy.

Sicilian research differs from mainland research in one date and one source, and the island's administrative map has moved three times in ways that matter.

Civil registration begins in 1820

After Napoleon's fall, French-model civil registration survived only in the Kingdom of the Two Sicilies and the Duchy of Modena and Reggio. On the mainland of the Kingdom it had run since 1809. In Sicily it was introduced in 1820.

So for a Sicilian birth before 1820 there is no civil record to find. The register never existed. Use parish records or the riveli below. From 1 January 1866 the Italian civil registration applies as elsewhere.

The riveli di beni e anime

Sicily's equivalent of the mainland catasto onciario, but older and more numerous: declarations of goods and souls made for taxation, listing each household with its property and its members. They function as a partial census and can substitute for parish registers where those are missing. They survive in the fonds of the Tribunale del Real Patrimonio and the Deputazione del Regno, and were compiled at irregular intervals from the sixteenth century onward. Published lists of the years differ between sources, so check the specific years for your comune.

Three changes that send researchers to the wrong province

Noto, not Siracusa. Under the reorganisation of 11 October 1817 the island was divided into seven provinces, and the south-eastern one had its capital at Noto. Only by the law of 20 March 1865 was the provincial capital restored to Siracusa, the province taking its name. For records before 1865, the province is Noto.

Girgenti, not Agrigento. The province and city now called Agrigento were Girgenti until 1927. Nineteenth-century records use the older name.

Enna and Ragusa did not exist before 1927. Both were created by decree of 2 January 1927. Ragusa was formed from twelve comuni detached from Siracusa, most formerly of the Contea di Modica. Enna was created as the provincia di Castrogiovanni, taking the name Enna only in December of the same year. So an ancestor from an Ennese or Ragusan comune, born before 1927, was registered in a different province — and older material may be catalogued under Castrogiovanni.

The older divisions

Before 1817 the island was divided into the three valli — Val di Mazara in the west, Val Demone in the north-east, Val di Noto in the south-east — a division of Arab origin that lasted some eight centuries. Under Spanish rule, from 1583, it was also organised into 44 comarche. Both names appear in older documents.

After 1946

Under the Sicilian special statute the island's provinces were reorganised, later as province regionali. This affects modern administrative correspondence more than historical records, but it explains why Sicilian institutional names differ from mainland ones.