Below you will find information and links relevant to researching and understanding Italian ancestry.
Italian Last Names
When doing research on ancestors, you may find different spellings of their name in various documents. It is only in recent times that the spelling of surnames has become standardized, so the spelling you see in documents often reflects an imperfect phonetic rendering. In addition, immigrants sometimes decided to modify their names after coming to the USA.
One way to deal with variations is to look for a standardized spelling that’s used in Italy today. If you find several possibilities, it can be helpful to look at geographical distribution and frequency. There are several websites that provide such information.
There are two sites that can display maps showing the frequency of a surname in each region of Italy: The Italian Last Names Map has an interactive map with English instructions and information. The GENS cognomi search page is written in Italian, but it’s easy to use and has several nice features, including maps showing surname distribution in the USA as well as in Italy. The GENS search also seems to use a more comprehensive database of surnames.
The Italia.InDettaglio surname search provides an interactive form that can be used to get detailed information about the distribution of surnames within the various regions of Italy.
Census Enumeration District Maps
FamilySearch.com currently provides access to census enumeration district maps for 1900 – 1940. This can be very useful if you want to find the census record for a particular location.
While various website for genealogical research provide a search feature to help you census records for a particular person, there is no comparable way to search by location. If you want to find the record for a particular address, you need to narrow the search geographically to a set of records small enough work with. Sometimes this is easy. For example, the 1880 census record for Dennison, Ohio comprises 25 pages, making it feasible to read through the entire record to look for a particular address.
For larger places, such as Columbus, Ohio, this approach becomes considerably more labor intensive. In 1850, for example, Columbus was divided into five wards, and the census records for Ward 1 alone comprises 92 pages. By 1860, the census records for Ward 1 had grown to 127 pages. For 1880 and on, census records for Ohio are organized into sets by enumeration district. This makes it a bit easier to search for a particular address, provided you know the enumeration district for that address. That is difficult to determine for 1880 (and Ohio census records for 1890 were destroyed by fire), but for 1900 and beyond, the enumeration district maps are a great help. Even so, the process can be difficult. The maps cited above are broken into sections that often are not labeled, so it takes a while to find the relevant map for a specific area in a given census year.