January 16, 1999 Meeting Minutes
POINTers IN PERSON Minutes
Milwaukee, Wisconsin
George Koleas (#1527)
Pointers In Person, Chapter 22, met at the Italian Community Center on Saturday, January 16, 1999. Present at the meeting were Nancy and Dick Boudreau, Charles and Madeline Carome (930), Lois Cozzuli (220), Vincent D’Orazio (3418), Mave Freyberg, George Koleas (1527), Marie Raaf , Marie Roth (766), Ginger Schmidt (2471) and Margaret Schutz (2149)
George Koleas announced that he had contacted the Milwaukee County Genealogical Society and they agreed to have our chapter serve as the Italian Area Interest Group. Our meeting minutes and future meeting schedules will be forwarded to them.
Vincent
D’Orazio attended the P.O.I.N.T. Conference. He reported that it was a very
good conference with many fine speakers and vendors including professional
genealogists. Vincent suggested that “ One should be caution about using
"professional" genealogists. Before
laying out a big sum of money, I would ask for references, then ask them to do a
small task such as finding the birth date of a great grandfather and see
Vincent has made more than a dozen trips to Italy where he has managed to trace his family to 1450. He offered the following advice on how to be successful when you make the trip to Italy. First, start with exhausting all your sources at home. Your objective is to locate you family’s village. This can be found from interviews with relatives and supported with naturalization records and passenger lists. Next, learn Italian. While you do not have to be fluent in Italian, you must know enough to get by. While many younger Italians know some English, most older Italians do not. All Italians will respond positively when they hear you trying to speak Italian. . When you arrive in your village, head for the Parrochia, or head parish. You will find birth, baptism, marriage and death records in handwritten form. Depending on the handwriting, it can be very difficult to read. Marie Roth, who has also made several trips suggested getting a letter of introduction from your own parish priest or from a school. This has worked to open doors that may have otherwise been closed. As a rule, priests will not let you look at the records alone. Unfortunately, researches that came before you may have tore pages out of the record books. If this happened in your village, the priest will want another priest present to insure that the records are protected. If someone is not available, you may not be given access to the records. If you arrive during a village festival or celebration, you will experience a wonderful event, but you probably won’t see any records. Ask if there is a local historian. There may be people in the village who has made genealogy and the history of the village their hobby. Above all, be a good guest in the village. Be friendly and respectful. Try to build relationships with the people you meet. They may lead you to family members. If you find a family member, they will go out of their way to offer you their hospitality. Be ready to spend time with them and build that relationship for future visits. Another source will be the Notario records held by the Archivi di Stato Civile. Notary records can contain all sorts of information about a variety of transactions. . Notaries were the precursors of lawyers. They recorded business transactions, taxes, dowry agreements, land purchases, etc. The older ones are written in a mixture of Latin and Italian. Therefore besides coping with the calligraphy, poor handwriting, and abbreviations, we have Latin to contend with. This may help you fill in some of the history of the family, what they owned, where and when they owed it, what they did and maybe even how they lived. These records may be very old and very faded. They may also be very fragile. Be very careful.
Our next meetings will be April 10, 1999, September 11, 1999 and January 15, 2000. All meetings are at the Italian Community Center at 11:00 a.m. to 12:00 Noon. At noon, we adjourn to the restaurant to continue our discussions and enjoy a lunch together.
George Koleas
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