Looking for records before 1809

[cjs1218]

I am looking for records of ancestors who were born and died before 1809 as records before 1809 aren’t available online. How do I go about finding records in the towns of Atri, Cellino Attanasio, Poggio delle Rose, Castilenti, Montefino and Amatrice? My understanding that that now I have to contact parishes but how do I go about doing that?

[vairanoPatenora]

For parishes, try seeing if they have a presence on Facebook. I have been able to keep in touch with a parish through Facebook messaging. You can also try contacting the Diocese. Additionally, you can reach out to ItalianParishRecords.org for advice. They are a non-profit dedicated to preserving these records.

Other lines of inquiry include looking at the marriage processetti documents. These are available on the same Antenati government site that holds the post-1809 records. These are supplementary documents that would have been filed alongside the actual marriage record. For the groom, they include the death record of the paternal grandfather. If the grandfather died before 1809, this will be a handwritten copy of the parish record, so you can get a sneak peak into the parish records!

You can also contact the provincial archive to request a search of the Catasto Onciario. This was a census that was conducted in the mid-1700s.

[luigirusso007]

On the Catasto Onciario of the various municipalities: they are all in the State Archives in Naples and in some cases can also be found in provincial or municipal archives (those in Naples are the copies of the Regia Camera della Sommaria (to which they were sent), while the few copies that have been preserved in the other archives are the copies that were kept locally that in some cases remained in municipal archives or merged into provincial ones (State Archives or other provincial archives).