Repository:Antenati

Just as with other national-level portals regarding family history promoted in many different nations, the Portal "SAN-Antenati" was born of the necessity to organize and make available the enormous treasure of civil registration documents housed in the state archives so that genealogical research can go forward, for the purpose of recreate the history of families and individuals and also, at the same time, to contribute to the understanding of the social history of communities. Thanks to an agreement stipulated with FamilySearch International in 2011, by Luciano SCALA, Administrative Director for the Archives, the objective of this portal is to progressively publish millions and millions of images of civil records (many of which were converted from microfilms, created in the state archives by the Genealogical Society of Utah; a work which began in the middle 70s of the last century, while others are new acquisitions), and to do research by browsing through the documents online , in the section Browse through the Records.

Each image is accompanied by its respective archival description which gives the name of the institution where the original is stored, the collection , the type of record (birth, marriage, death, and so forth), along with the location, the date, and the file number or the envelope reference, where available.

At the same time, the portal allows for the progressive indexing of the names of persons shown in the individual records in the section Trova i Nomi (Find Names). The database of names will become bigger and it is planned that volunteers (all those who use The Portal) could contribute by writing to us at redazione.antenati@beniculturali.it.

Those interested can find more information in the section Il territorio e le fonti" (The Territory and the Sources) that lists the civil document collections which are stored at each separate institute. In this same section one can find the lists of military records, also useful for genealogical research, for which several state archives have built databases over recent years; all of which are searchable on line and can be used internally in the archives’ reading rooms. Interested parties can also find professional assistance to proceed further in their research, extending it to other resources such as notary records, cadastral records, etc.