After the recent sporting escapades this weekend, Europe seems like a place that the English might not wish to focus on this morning. Though we played well, the mighty Italians seemed to manage to outplay our England squad in the wee small UK hours of Saturday night. But are we downhearted? Well, yes! We’d like to have won our first World Cup match but Uruguay were beaten by Costa Rica so we still have hope in the Group D stages. Anyway, I digress…..
Most European genealogical research is going to be fraught with problems, not least in terms of the language in which the document is written. We are fortunate that so many resources are available online nowadays – I remember the days when ‘serious researchers’ had to go to London to even look at the censuses of England and Wales and even then, you had to manually search through each page of the schedule to find your ancestors. How easy it is now…. well, in a manner of speaking!
5.6 million births and baptisms, 2.1 million marriages and almost 1.4 million deaths and burials – in Italian – are available on Ancestry (1806-1900). I am sure that some avid England supporters on Saturday might have wished to update the 2014 registers in some way in order for our team to win but I guess we won’t have access to those records for many decades, nay centuries, to come yet.
Ancestry also has a staggering 13,000 plus historical postcards with photographs of places in Italy. Each postcard caption has been indexed and can be searched by keyword or location. This database is particularly useful if you are looking for a photograph or picture of a specific place in time.
There are also 25,000 for Germany and Austria, 1,000 for Sweden and 46,000 for France, so I am guessing this is just the tip of the iceberg in historical postcards on Ancestry. Another one to keep in mind…. but how to keep a list of all these wonderful finds….
