I explained in a prior post where to look for the original Italian documents containing birth, marriage, and death information. Once you have the pertinent documents, you may need some help in interpreting them if you don’t understand Italian. Even if you do speak Italian, the cursive from the 1800s differs from ours, so you may need a little help in deciphering the handwriting. Luckily, there are many free resources you can turn to for help.

My favorite is FamilySearch.org. It’s free and is loaded with valuable information. You may have to register in order to gain access to everything but it’s quick and painless (and did I mention: FREE?).

This page has translations for the birth, marriage, and death records. You’ll need to scroll down the page to the various sections and then click on the links that say, “See translation of…” or something along those lines. It will show common records and translate them line by line.

For help with figuring out the handwriting on the documents, see this page. It will help you figure out what some of the cursive letters are. If you’re lucky, the person who wrote the record has nice, neat handwriting. Some of them, however… well, they rival my terrible handwriting, so figuring out, say, the proper spelling of a last name can get a little interesting.

Happy hunting!