The growth of local Italian-American newspapers accompanied the explosion of Italian immigration after 1880. These publications helped their readers acclimate to America and stay in touch with their roots.
They also challenged deeply insular people to reconcile their traditions with the possibilities of a new life.
Browsing a Specific Newspaper Issue
The obituaries and marriage announcements in newspaper columns can provide valuable clues about your family. Still, there’s much more to discover: a historical context for businesses, schools, social events, church affiliations, and more. Look for articles about local Italian-American communities, especially if there was a newspaper in the area where your ancestors lived or worked.
If you’re not finding what you’re looking for, try browsing instead of searching. Many online newspapers have been scanned using optical character recognition software, which converts image text into searchable text. But if the images are faded or the OCR is inaccurate, finding specific names or dates can be challenging. When this happens, try perusing the entire newspaper for an image of your ancestor and its publication date.
The earliest Italian immigrants arrived in America in the late 1800s as relatively unskilled labor that helped fuel the industrial economy. They seemed unlikely new Americans, coming from a semifeudal land that didn’t even unify as a nation until the 1860s. Their arrival thrust them into a conflict between deeply rooted traditions and the possibilities of a new life. The stories they left behind in their newspapers reveal how their community wrestled with this conflict for generations.
Searching by Date
One of the best ways to find information in a newspaper is to search by date. This is particularly helpful for finding obituaries, which often list birth, marriage, and death dates. It also helps you locate articles that may pertain to your ancestors.
Some newspapers have been digitized and are available online. For example, the online newspaper has an extensive collection of United States and Italian newspaper archives that can be accessed through its site or by visiting a library or Family History Center.
You can access many Italian newspapers through subscription websites.
Tracing your Italian heritage is a rewarding and challenging journey. The challenge comes in trying to understand the balancing act that the ancestors of Italian immigrants faced between preserving their deeply rooted traditions and adapting to the modern world. Their ancestors often struggled to balance this conflict in their personal lives, reflected in their records and the legacy they left behind for their descendants. Using United States and Italian records and family knowledge, you can better understand your Italian ancestors and the story of their immigration to America.
Searching by Name
Search-by-name tools can help you find ancestors, but you might need to realize that you can use them in other ways. You can fill in ship names, church denominations, occupations, associations like Masonic membership, and titles such as “Reverend” or “Doctor” to narrow your results even more than typing the name. This method can be especially effective on sites that don’t neatly provide a field for all names or where transcription errors have created spelling quirks.
You can also search for a particular date using this technique. This is particularly useful if you know what event you want, such as a birth or death announcement or land sale. Then, browse the newspaper’s card catalog until you reach the year for that event. You can also try this trick with a given name and location, a spouse’s name, or a specific place of origin.
Many Italian-American newspapers may include obituaries, which are also helpful for finding relatives. They can help you connect with the lives of your ancestors and gain insight into their culture. Adding obituaries to your genealogy research can also give future generations a sense of what it was like for their family members to leave Italy and immigrate to America.
Searching by Place
While obituaries and marriage announcements are valuable, community newspapers can give you a broader sense of your Italian ancestors’ day-to-day lives. Look for information about schools, social events, businesses, and other important happenings in the town where your ancestor lived. Sometimes, your ancestor may be mentioned in a story about other people from the town, which can open up a whole new line of research.
The card catalog will let you browse newspapers for a specific date range. For example, if you know the year and month of your ancestor’s death or birth, you can check newspapers for those dates. Or, if you have a name or two from a ship passenger list, you can use a known site to find newspaper articles about that person. It’s always a good idea to search more than one resource – different search methodologies and transcriptions can mean that you hit pay dirt at one site and miss it at another.
When tracking your Italian ancestry, don’t be too anxious to jump into the ocean and start researching in Italy. Make sure you’ve thoroughly completed your American research first. Also, remember that most Southern Italian men wanted to earn enough money in America to return to Italy and buy land, so you’ll likely want to check more than one passenger arrival list.
