Ciao Northwesterners.
I have been working for a while on Sondrio/Lombardy.
I wanted to share a source that the rest of you may or may not know about.
Family Search has images that have never been indexed for our areas. Sondrio's is here .
They may look intimidating, but fairly easy to navigate.
My family comes from the valley where Chiavenna is, so I have been working on this area pretty exclusively.
A sample of how I have been approaching the unindexed source can be found here.
The Births 1866-1910 link brings you to the microfilm.
The Index link brings you to a subgroup. Within the subgroup I have created a work plan to index the images and to put them into wikitree.
Of course this works best with smaller communities.
The year link on the Index page brings you directly to the names of that year once they are entered, the names will bring you to the actual individual. After the year link I have made a comment as to wether or not I have entered the individual into wikitree. It is basic information, Name, Birth Year and Location. This is easily entered off the the page listing all the births of the current year. Then, the plan is to go back to individuals and glean the rest of the information from the record (birthdate, father, fathers age, paternal grandfather, mother, mothers age, maternal grandfather) and whatever else is possible. Once that has been entered, a link from the name to the wikitree record. It is a big project, but has proved valuable. Often I find names on Ancestry with the last name and a year, with my index I can find the person very quickly (the year is often one or two off).
This work plan is designed to work on multiple records at once without regard to how they are related to you. There will be people who already exist in Wikitree that were put there, but the work plan does not reflect them. The goal of the work plan is to batch input.
Another source which has proved invaluable is this surname distribution website. If you type in the surname in the region, you will find what town the surname is found in. This has also proved invaluable in locating records. You can also use it to triangulate should you know a specific couple that was married in Italy, you could enter both surnames and see what town both of those surnames are found in.
buona giornata
