[:en] Alphonse Gabriel Capone was born in the Brooklyn borough of New York City on January 17, 1899. He was the most famous American gangster, who dominated organized crime in Chicago from 1925 to 1931. Al was married at age 19 on December 30, 1918 to Mae Josephine Coughlin who was of Irish descent. The…
[:en] “Where have you gone, Joe Di Maggio”. It was 1968 when Simon & Garfunkel sang “Mrs. Robinson”. Joseph Paul Di Maggio, the greatest baseball player of all time, Marilyn Monroe’s ex-husband, was born on November 25, 1914 in Martinez, California, the eighth of nine children born to Italian immigrants Giuseppe DiMaggio (1872–1949) and Rosalia…
[:en] Dean Martin was born on June 7, 1917, in Steubenville, Ohio, to an Italian father, Gaetano Alfonso Crocetti (15 dec 1894–29 Aug 1967), and an Italian-American mother, Angela Crocetti (née Barra; 18 Dec 1897–25 Dec 1966). They were married in Steubenville, Jefferson, Ohio, 25 dec 1914. His father, who was a barber, was originally…
On the evening of 13 March 2013, Cardinal Jorge Mario Bergoglio was elected Bishop of Rome and Supreme Pontiff on March 13, 2013, taking the name of Franciscus. His surname immediately reveals the Italian origin. Jorge Mario Bergoglio, son of Mario Giuseppe Francesco Bergoglio and Regina María Sivori, was born on December 17, 1936 in…
Many Italians have left their motherland for political persecution. The descendants don’t know the history that has forced the ancestors to emigrate. Italian archives have preserved the memory of the expatriation reasons. In the State Archives of every Italian province you can discover files made by Political Police Offices and by Prefecture from 1894 to 1943. These documents are about informations found by the police…
Discover the website’s “Carte da legare”” promoted by the Italian Ministry of Culture – Directorate General Archives, created to make known the archival heritage of the Italian psychiatric hospitals. The most important news of the site shall be the consultation with the filing of medical records of 13 historical psychiatric hospitals. It is done with…
In many italian genealogic research you could find child for whom both parents were listed on the civil registration of birth as ”unknown’. This is a very big ‘brick wall’. Infant abandonment was widespread, for a variety of reasons: the extreme poverty of most citizens in large town and the social disapproval for unwed pregnancy was. Many new mothers…
These records can be a very important source if you only know the province of origin of your male ancestor. Conscription of all males at the age of eighteen was instituted in 1862. The lists of military recruitment contain the name of all young residents in every Italian province, indicating the municipality of residence. These lists include also…
During the First World War a total of 10 million people, both servicemen and civilians, were captured and sent to detention camps. The International Committee of the Red Cross (ICRC) created an index card for each prisoner and detainee. You can now search through the five million index card entries held by the archives of…