Before Ellis Island went into service, people coming to the U.S. would be processed through Castle Garden. 

For 34 years, from August 1, 1855, when it opened, to April 18, 1890, over 8 million people entered the U.S. through Castle Garden. Among them, was Mother Cabrini, later canonized as Saint Frances Xavier Cabrini, from the village of Sant'Angelo Lodigiano in Italy, who worked tirelessly to help Italian immigrants.

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.

Arturo Toscanini was born at 3 a.m. on March 25, 1867 in in the house located in via San Giacomo No. 13 in Parma, Emilia–Romagna, son of Claudio Toscanini and Paola Montani.

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.