Yeah, but what does it actually say? Or,: A quick reference for decoding Italian Marriage Records
It's all well and good to have the Antenati Portal, but finding the name of your ancestor on a document does very little good if you can't read what's going on.
Mercifully, many Italian records follow a certain formula; in fact by a certain period, many records are actually printed forms with lovely blank spaces for the important info. While knowing word-for-word what's happening in a document is great to get a fuller picture (and, occasionally, discover something unexpected), what follows here is part one of a quick cheat sheet for scanning records for what is usually the most pertinent information - you know, the stuff you're actually looking for.
We'll kick this off with marriage records. Why marriage records and not birth records or death records? Mostly because it's the first file I hit when rolling through my records, but also because marriage records will often contain other relevant information to help you find those other records. Don't know when Nonna was born and half the people in her town are named "Maria Caputo," Nonna included? If you know your Maria Caputo married Grandpa Giacomo LaVecchia, that will help you narrow down which Maria Caputo marriage record is yours. And then, when you find the marriage record, you'll get lots more information that will enable you to go further and find that pesky birth record.
First thing's first: the names of the couple getting married are listed on the left-most bar, husband's name first. They are written in the order in which they occurred, so "Numero 1" here indicates they are the first marriage recorded this year.
The other first thing is the giant chunk of text that begins in the second column. It essentially reads:
The year 189_, on this day the [day] of [month], in the [a.m. or p.m.] [hour] and [minute] in the Town Hall of [name of town], open to the public.
(All those "_" and "[ ]" are where the official records the specifics.)
Moving on:
This section, though interesting from a "I wonder who the official recording this is" perspective, is not necessarily that pertinent to you. Unless you're tracking names to see which, if any, of your family members ended up government officials.
Here's where the magic starts to happen:
Here we have recorded that the following individuals appeared before the official to announce they had been married. It always starts with the husband's information because The Patriarchy™. So here we have:
[Last Name, First Name], of [number] years, [profession], born in [town], resident of [town], son of [father's first name], resident of [town], and of [mother's name], resident of [town.]
If you see "fu" before the name of a parent, that essentially means "the late [name of parent]." So, in our example above, it says Innocenzo is the son of the late [fu] Maria Marchisella, resident in life [nella vita] of Garaguso.
That is a TON of information in a very short amount of space. The formula repeats itself for the wife's information:
The rest of the form lists the names of the witnesses, and then the sign (or mark for the illiterate) of the relevant parties at the bottom. But the meat of the document is up top.
What's marvelous is that from this one form, you can now calculate backwards the years of birth for both spouses, you have a terminus antequem* for when certain parents died, and you've got birth places and places of residence for all of the above.
What questions do you have about family research? Comment on this post and tag us on Instagram @genealogyarchaeologist.
A presto,
Christina
*Snuck in a little archaeological term in there for you. It means "before which." We know here that Maria Marchisella was already "the late Maria Marchisella" in January 1896, so she had to have died before then. By knowing when her son Innocenzo (the husband in question in this document), we also have a terminus postquem, or date "after which." If she birthed Innocenzo, and Innocenzo is 20 here in 1896, that means she could not have died before he was born in, roughly, 1876. So when you go to look for her death records, focus on the years between 1876 and 1896.
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