Ask Orso Research Search

Your Italian family, traced from the records themselves.

Most family history online is copied. A tree gets built from another tree, a guess hardens into a fact, and nobody can tell you which document it came from — because there wasn't one.

An Ask Orso search is built from the ground up by a researcher working in the Italian civil records. We start from what you know — a name, a town, an approximate year — and work into the registers: birth, marriage, parents, and back through three generations of your Italian line.

See what you get

→ View a sample of our comprehensive report

A real report, reproduced in full — our own founder's grandmother, traced from a hill town in Irpinia to Newark. It shows the gaps as plainly as the findings, which is how every report is written.

What you receive

A written report on your ancestor's Italian family line, in which every fact is attached to the document it came from — the record number, and the archive or comune that holds it. Not a tree. A trail you can walk yourself.

Where your ancestor married in Italy and the records allow, their spouse's line is included as well.

Please read this before ordering

The report does not include copies of the records. It gives you the citation for every document — the act number, the year, and the office that holds it — not the document itself.

That is deliberate, and it is the part worth paying for: the citation is the hard-won thing. Once you have it, a certified copy can be ordered by anyone, at any time, from the office named — by you directly, or by us if you would rather. Prices for that are below.

What one search covers

One emigrant ancestor and their Italian family line. If your ancestor married in Italy, the marriage record names both families, so their spouse's parents are identified and included. Tracing that spouse's own line back through the generations is a separate search — as is a spouse your ancestor met and married in America.

How far back

A search traces three generations of the Italian line: your emigrant ancestor, their parents, and their grandparents — every one of them attached to the act that records them.

Italian civil registration generally begins in 1809 in the south and 1866 elsewhere. Before that, the records are parish registers held by diocesan archives, and they are mostly not digitized. Where three generations reach past the civil registers, we tell you where the road ends and what would be needed to go further. Carrying the line deeper than three generations is an extended search.

Not every report contains every section

What appears depends entirely on what survives. Registers were lost to war, fire, flood and simple neglect; some years were never kept at all; a parish book may exist where a civil act does not, or the reverse. A family may be traceable through four generations in one comune and stop at two in the next town.

So the sections of a report are shaped by the records, not by a template. Where something is missing, we say which document we wanted, where we looked for it, and why it was not there — rather than quietly omitting the section and leaving you to wonder.

If we find nothing

Sometimes a register did not survive. Sometimes it survives but does not cover the year. Sometimes the answer is simply that your ancestor is not in it.

That is still a completed search, and you still get the report: what was examined, what was found, and what was ruled out and why. We'd rather tell you a record is missing than invent what it might have said.

If you want the documents themselves

We request them for you at $250 per act, plus the comune's own fee.

We ask by PEC — Italy's certified email, which carries the legal weight of registered post with a return receipt, so there is a signed receipt proving the request was delivered and when. That matters when a town has been sitting on a request for months. And we ask for the copia integrale, the full transcription, rather than the summary extract — because a summary is a clerk's précis and can lose or reverse a name. We request both the digitally signed copy and the stamped paper original by post.

We will tell you the comune's own fee for your town when the report is handed over, rather than leaving you to find out afterwards. Fees differ from town to town, and for a record more than a hundred years old a comune may charge up to €300.

Italian comuni have up to six months by law to answer, and they vary enormously — some reply within a fortnight. That clock belongs to the comune, not to us. What we do is ask correctly, from the right office, citing the exact act, and keep asking until it arrives.

If you need the document for a citizenship application, confirm your consulate's current requirements first. Consulates set their own rules about which form they accept and how recently it must have been issued.

The report itself is delivered within seven days.