Genealogy FAQ

All of our tours are fully customized, meaning travelers choose how many days and nights they’ll spend on their tour, whether they’ll have a private driver or rent a car themselves, how many days their Private Guide and Heritage Specialist will spend with them and what additional activities and excursions they include. We work with the travelers to choose their base location, help them select accommodations, and make suggestions on day trips.  

Once you are here, your Guide and Heritage Specialist will meet you, introduce you to the people he met during his research day and show you the home, neighborhoods, streets, and churches from your family’s past.

You will have a chance to talk to locals about your family and meet people in the village. You can visit the church or cemetery if you like. You’ll have a full multi-course lunch, with wine, either in or near your ancestral village.

All of our Private Heritage tours are customized and include a wide range of travel options.

We can include hotels, private transfers, train tickets to and from your ancestral village, your Ancestry Tour research and tour days, and other unique experiences such as cooking classes, wine-tasting, guided tour days, and more.

Normally, our research is mostly based on living relatives, so if necessary, we can put you in contact with them and arrange a meeting for when you visit in Italy.

 

 

If you’re planning to book a Genealogy Research with us but you can’t travel, this is how it works:

You contact us with the name of the village/town in Italy where the research should be done!

You provide date of birth(DOB) of the family members you’re looking for (even an approx date!)

The exact village/s or town/s where the Research should be made. (Not doing so would mean a waste of time and money for both parties and cause the failure of the Genealogy Research!), in other words, knowing that your Grandfather was from Calabria(Region) is not sufficient information for a Genealogy Research, but if you know the town, Reggio Calabria for instance, we will know exactly where we will have to go to do the Research for you!

You will provide us all the family information that might help us in the Research (certificates, photos, etc…)

You will have to authorize us to do the request for you with a PEC to make an appointment with the Registry Office to get the documents for you( We will need a copy of your ID, Driver’s License or any documents that we can attach to the PEC as evidence that we were authorized by you to do the Research on your behalf.

You will book the Genealogy Research with a 50% deposit of the total cost (remaining balance when we have the documents, and we can send them to you. The Research will start only after booking it with a 50% deposit.

Well, if  you need Genealogy Research and family documents from your Italian village or town in Italy, we can do the research for you, we will visit the Registry Office, Church and Cemetry to find deceased relatives for you, we will get you all of the certificates we can find, scan and email them directly to you, wherever you’re in the world(please, be aware that because of the Covid pandemic delays are possible!)

 

The research we conduct is based exclusively on certified documents from the local Registry Office, church, etc…we will need to be authorized directly by you to start the Genealogy Research by presenting an official request with a PEC(certified email).

It is a very common situation that you write to the Registry Office of your family’s village or town in Italy, but you receive no answer, why?

Probably, the reason is due to the fact that many local administrations today will only answer to certified emails (PEC, Posta Elettronica Certificata, a special type of email with legal value which is largely used in Italy). In this case, we can send the PEC for you! (PECs are available only in Italy!)

Depending on where in Italy you have to do the Research, price can vary! Clearly, a Genealogy Research which involves 2 or 3 villages or towns will be more expensive than a Research which will have to be made in just one village or town!eraldic Price can also vary, depending on the type of Research, a historic or heraldic research, for instance, will be more expensive than a regular family research!

Each case can be quite different because what we can do depends on how much accurate information we get from the traveler. We then travel to the village, meet with the city hall employees and continue to search for more documents, if needed.

We use the information we find to locate the neighborhoods, streets, piazza, or homes where ancestors were born. We look for the church they attended and inquire about cemetery information. We talk to locals about the family, how the town would have been during that time, and in some cases, we inquire about and search for Italian relatives.

 

Before starting a Genealogy Research, you need to know the exact village or town your family was from! For instance, if you’re looking for your Grandfather’s birth, marriage or death certificate and you know he was from Calabria, this information will not be enough for a successful research!

You need to know the exact village or town in Calabria where the research should be done, your Grandfather’s date of birth( or an approximate one!), and provide as much information as possible that might help in the research(certificates, family’s photos, etc…), if you don’t have this basic information(your family’s village or town, date of birth,et…), your research is probably destined to fail and it could translate into a real waste of time and money on expensive online services and commissioned genealogy research.

We cover the entire Italy with our Genealogy Research and services, thanks to our network of genealogists and specialists.