Availability of Palermo "Citta" records

[rfiorille]

Hello Forum!

I'm doing some research of a family that came from the city of Palermo and trying to get a better understanding of the records that are available. It appears on the antenati website that there are 17 "sezioni" in the Archivio di Stato di Palermo that have links to actual records. For example, there is Palermo (Sezione Molo)(oggi Palermo) and Palermo (Sezione Sant'Oliva)(oggi Palermo). And then there is a link to just Palermo that contains only "indici decennali". The entries in the indices provide the names of the sezione where the event occurred and then sometimes they just say "Citta". Am I understanding correctly that Citta records are only available as an entry in the index and that there is no corresponding record available online? I have found corresponding records from the index when they list an event that occurred in one of the available sezioni.

I hope this is clear. I appreciate anyone helping me further understand these records better. Thank you!

[adelfio]

You have to write for record info Hugh Torabene has them indices for you with most of the names here is the address you need give all the info you need location and name date and volume number and record number.

Città metropolit. Palermo (PA)
Comune di Palermo
Piazza Pretoria 1
90132 Palermo (PA)
Italy


Marty

[rfiorille]

Thank you Marty.

I just want to be sure I'm understanding correctly. You say that Hugh Torabene has indices. However, I don't need the indices because I am able to find the birth info in an index online. I'm looking for the actual records. I was looking for Giuseppa Antrosiglo born in 1864 in Palermo. I found the index for her birth record. Along with her entry in the index was a sister of hers by the same name born in 1856, but born in Molo sezione of Palermo. My Giuseppa born 1864 is listed born in Citta. Here is the page with the entries in the index:

http://dl.antenati.san.beniculturali.it ... 1.jpg.html

I'm able to find the birth record for Giuseppa born in 1856 because I know to search the records in the Molo sezione found on the antenati website. The birth record is here:

http://dl.antenati.san.beniculturali.it ... 3.jpg.html

I don't know where to search for Giuseppa born 1864 because there is no "Citta" sezione among the records. If I provided High Torabene with this index information, are you saying he would be able to locate the record and provide a copy?

I would also like to be clear in understanding that the records for "Citta"
are NOT available to search online. Is that correct?

Sorry for the confusion. I'm just trying to understand correctly. Thank you!

Robert

[adelfio]

The citta Palermo witten for have indices by Hugh Torabene the are sections of Palermo on are on familysearch.org and antenati both different dates

PG LINK SCROLL DOWN
https://www.familysearch.org/search/cat ... %20Library

PG LINK
http://dl.antenati.san.beniculturali.it ... aurazione/


Marty

[parkergambino]

One can no longer deal directly with Hugh Tornabene (check spelling!), as he passed away in 2016. Before his death he was able to wrangle the Palermo matrimoni indexes into a sort-able MS Excel file, but did not get around to doing the same for births and deaths. Still, as has been pointed out, the 10-year indexes are available on Antenati.

I still struggle to understand Palermo's geographical organization and how the records (and their availability) are affected by it. A while back there was a somewhat similar search dilemma for death records in that early 1860's "gap" between the earlier Antenati records and the later FamilySearch records. And I haven't yet had time to delve in to achieve the understanding of the "system" to my satisfaction. I know it will take a sustained amount of effort for this to happen for me.

However, bbivona seemed to have a grip on the situation. It's possible that Citta records are to be found in the "Sezione Reunite" listings. Take a look at this thread, and see if it helps both your understanding and your search.

https://www.italiangenealogy.com/forum/ ... 02#p284316

Good luck.

Parker

[rfiorille]

One can no longer deal directly with Hugh Tornabene (check spelling!), as he passed away in 2016. Before his death he was able to wrangle the Palermo matrimoni indexes into a sort-able MS Excel file, but did not get around to doing the same for births and deaths. Still, as has been pointed out, the 10-year indexes are available on Antenati.

I'm sorry to hear about Mr. Tornabene's passing. He truly made a great contribution with the indices of the Palermo records. I was not aware that the indices I was using on Antenati were from him. I found the Excel/Google Sheets files on this website (http://kristincihon.com/geni/locations/ ... mo/#family) and there do appear to be files for births from 1896-1905, but not the earlier records, nor the death records.

bbivona seemed to have a grip on the situation. It's possible that Citta records are to be found in the "Sezione Reunite" listings. Take a look at this thread, and see if it helps both your understanding and your search.

https://www.italiangenealogy.com/forum/ ... 02#p284316

Good luck.

Parker

Thank you for pointing out this posting. It's exactly what I needed to read. So far I've only looked for the record I posted above from 1864 that listed Giuseppa Antrosiglio born in "Citta", but I had success finding it in the "Sezioni Riunite". So at first glance this does appear to be where the "Citta" records are located. I'm not doing a lot of research in Palermo, but I'll be sure to update this post if it appears that that most of my Citta records are located in the "Sezione Riunite".

Thanks!
Robert

[parkergambino]

Tornabene and the Palermo Indices

A few items in this thread might create a misimpression of the relationship between Hugh Tornabene and the 10-year Palermo Civile Indexes. The following account is based on my own experience as well as information I've received from several genealogists whom I consider to be reliable (and who I hope won't object to being mentioned by name here). It still seems that my information is incomplete, but for me, knowing every detail about the provenance is inconsequential, attribution notwithstanding, compared to the nitty gritty of using the written records (actually, the scans available on the web) as primary sources for family history research. Like Palermo geography itself, the more I try to understand how the various pieces are accounted for, the more I find myself scratching my head.

According to Marcello D'Aleo, the 10-year indexes for Palermo Civile were privately printed. I personally examined one set at the state archives in Palermo (Archivio di Stato - Sede della Gancia), where they are conveniently available on a shelf in the library. No need to fill out a document request form, as you would to examine the original registry documents.

Scans of these indexes are found on the Antenati website (I'll just call this "Antenati"), which is an official site of the Italian government. I don't know how many copies of the indexes were printed, or where other copies might be located. Some time ago I had tried to find out whether the FamilySearch Center in Salt Lake City had copies, but could not get anyone on the phone who knew what I was talking about, let alone tell me if the indexes were present. Once the scans were made available on Antenati (fairly recently for Palermo), that question became moot, and I did not pursue it further. I can tell you that the Antenati scans were not made from the material I used at the "Gancia" archives in Palermo, because those were in poor shape, with tattered or missing pages especially at the beginning and end of each volume, among other problems. On Antenati, for the Palermo State Archive, the indexes from 1820 to 1895 are available, but the scans of the registries end in the early-to-mid 1860's, complementing without overlap the online records of FamilySearch, which pick up from the mid-1860's forward.  Caution: somehow, on Antenati some of the pages of these volumes are out-of-sequence, as if somebody was ignoring the rules of alphabetization, and a bit of detective work may be required to locate the correct pages. Even worse, there are some flat out omissions of (usually small) sections of indexes.  Tough luck.
 
Hugh Tornabene's work   (https://sites.rootsweb.com/~tornabene/index8.htm): The information presented on this site has been processed as follows: each page was scanned; then it was processed through an OCR (optical character recognition) program; the results were parsed into various fields (columns in Excel); data in the fields were entered onto an MS-Excel spreadsheet.  It's massive!   Links to some manageable subsets are found the bottom section of Tornabene's Index page.  Character recognition being an imperfect technique, these sheets are shot through with misread typo-variety errors, and characters placed into incorrectly merged or split fields (columns).  Nonetheless, many of these can be easily figured out and corrected.   Although I think Tornabene intended to cover births, marriages, and deaths, only the marriage portion (1820-1895) was completed before he passed.  It makes the data very searchable; so if you know how to sort data in Excel you can easily group together all of the marriages of children of a specific couple, etc.

Jim Bianco has told me that some of the above steps, which I have attributed to Tornabene, were not actually performed by him. Regardless, it is he who has put it up on a very user-friendly site.

Remaining unanswered questions: 1. What is the source of the volumes used for the scans on Antenati? 2. Are they the same as those used by Tornabene? 3. Antenati indexes end at 1895; where did the post-1895 data come from? I suspect that there are additional volumes (birth, marriage, death) covering the years 1896-1905 (I don't remember checking specifically for these while at the Gancia); that would explain the existence on Tornabene's site of the Excel files for Palermo births, 1896-1905. But it is strange that these years are not included in the processed marriage files, which end at 1895.

As always, I appreciate any corrections or modifications to this account by someone who has more knowledge than me.

Parker