I like that custom of deep mourning. I'm glad you told us about it. It seems like it could give a person a year to meditate on what the loved one meant to those left behind -- time to focus on the grieving process before moving on. I'll jump in with a Norwegian custom I know about, since none of my ...

Thank you, Livio. I am flattered because I understand you, if not a native Italian, have lived there for 50 years. If the translation is accurate it is because of people like Lucap, Italian-English dictionaries, online search engines and the fact that both my father and I used to have medium-high po...

Hi. I'm not lucky enough to be Italian. But I'm helping my best friend research her family history. Unhappily her Italian-born grandparents never learned English and she never learned Italian so 90% of the traditions and lore they knew has been lost. The last few days I've found her grandparents' ma...

Hi, Peter. Your comment reminded me of something I found in my own family history that gave me a chuckle. In the early Middle Ages a branch of my grandfather's Norwegian family was of minor nobility in Belgium. His wife, my grandmother, has an ancestor who was an ancestor of William the Conqueror an...

Thanks again, Tessa and Lucap. I'm so grateful for what you're teaching me. I've bookmarked the link on conjugating Italian verbs, Lucap. I wish I had time to go back to college. I learned French from my mother and grandmother but I loved being formally taught French grammer, conjugation and idioms ...

I'm having a bit of trouble figuring out the words enclosed by parentheses in the following image of a birth record. I'd appreciate any help.

Hi, Trish. I did, in fact, order the microfilm. Thanks for explaining about records of banns and marriage records. Since the film is still at my local center I'll go over tomorrow night and search for the actual marriage record. The links are going to come in very handy when we reach a point where w...

Thank you, thank you, thank you, Brujaojos and jonnyonthespot! I had no idea how banns were handled in Italy at that time. I recall banns being asked when I was a girl in the Catholic church but they stopped posting them in the early eighties, I think. Would registers carry the actually registration...

Thank you, Lucap! I'm going to see my friend on Sunday and I can't wait to work my way through this and show it to her then. She's so excited!

I have learned a lot from you. There is much, much more for me to learn but you have helped me a great deal to start to learn to read hand-written Italian.

If anyone is interested, this is the result of the marriage whose registration you are helping me dicipher: http://img28.imageshack.us/img28/7401/turanofamily.jpg My best friend's father is the spiffy young man in knee pants. And this is Salvatore and Lucia at their fiftieth wedding anniversary: htt...

Here is the part of the record I'm having trouble reading. I'm on the computer with the image editing software now so I reduced it to a more civilized size: http://img522.imageshack.us/img522/9996/turanoperricertificate.jpg I can't pretend to any kind of exposure to native Italian culture so what I ...

I apologize for the huge size of the file. This is the first time I've saved an image digitally from a microfilm reader. The film is so small and the registers have been oriented in such a way on it that I had to use the most powerful lens to get the print to be a readable size, even for the staff a...

Thanks so much for trying, maestra. I don't think I can upload it to Photobucket. It was too large for either Imageshack or Google Sites to accept. However, I was able to upload it to Google Documents and changed the permissions so everyone can see it. Does that work for you?

Hi. I don't read intalian, but I used to be fluent in French. This is the marriage record of my best friend's grandmother. If I could get help wlith its translation, I'm sure I would be able to figure out the marriage records of many of her ancestors. She and I would be very grateful for any help an...

Thank you so much, misbris. I had no idea the name was mangled like that!