One of the typical problems that arises when you start doing genealogy is determining whether the person you have found is really the person you are looking for. For example, what if you are looking for “Emma Smith”, born in 1878, in New York City — if you don’t know her parents and you find someone matching this date and place, are you sure you have the right person? In this case, I was helping someone whose problem was even trickier — what if you find someone whose birth date and parents match, but their first and last names are different? How do you “prove” that someone changed their name?

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I’ve started this blog to share my excitement about Italian genealogy with others. I’ve done quite a bit of work on my own family, and I’ve found that I enjoy helping others to figure out how to do their own Italian genealogy or to help them when they are stuck.

The main feature of this blog will be entries where I describe a problem someone is facing in their genealogy — some relative that they have been unable to trace — and then walk through the steps that I took to help them solve this problem. By sharing this information with my readers, I hope that I might help a few people to learn how they too can have fun learning about their Italian ancestors. Along the way, I will try to share as much helpful information as I can — such as how to read Italian records, tips for finding relatives when they emigrated, etc.

So how will I find people who are stuck and need help? Often I run across them on various mailing lists — people often send out pleas for help when they can’t think what to do next. If anyone ends up reading this blog, then consider this an offer for free — yes, free! — help with your Italian genealogy. Consultants in this area charge anywhere from $50 to $100 an hour for this kind of help, but I will give you for free whatever help my time allows. Everyone gets one free problem solution (or as best as I can do), with no explicit limit on the amount of research I will do. If you find you have lots of research you want to do, contact me for my rates, but I don’t do this for a living so I don’t accept a lot of clients.

One of the benefits of living in Utah is that I live near the largest Family History Center in the world. This means I can look through lots of microfilms in their collection, free of charge, which comes in handy when you are not sure where your ancestors may be lurking. I also get access to Ancestry.com free of charge at my university, so I can look through their records easily as well.

Happy reading — I hope I can be of some help.