When applying for Italian Dual Citizenship or researching our Family History, the starting point is the official Italian birth record of that first Italian born ancestor who migrated to the U.S. We have to remember that all family documents in Italy are only maintained in the exact town where the person was born. Surprisingly, many Italian Americans today often don’t know the exact town of their Father or Grandfather or Great Grandfather. The good news is that there are a number of U.S. records that may shed light on the town of birth of the ancestor(s) who left Italy.
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Unless individuals seeking Italian citizenship via jure sanguinis have definitive proof or confirmation that their ancestor naturalized they should not automatically assume that by serving in the US armed forces their ancestor gave up his Italian citizenship.
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Researching Italian Records can be very rewarding if we take into account that people would remain in the same town generation after generation. It is part of the Italian culture to settle in one place, marry people from within the same community, live in the same ancestral home and pass on the same trade to the next generation. As a result, today we may be able to trace a family as far back as the late 1500s by researching records in the same town.
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The current law granting Italian citizenship jure sanguinis states that women could hold but not pass citizenship to children born before January 1, 1948, the date Italy became a Republic.
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The newest and certainly the most intriguing approach to discovering our family history is DNA testing and analysis. A DNA test result shows us the “mix” by percentages of the various “nationalities” or geographic history of our family. But often, the results may not show any or only a small percentage of “Italian” background…