Author: Italian Roots Editorial Team

The story of the great Italian migration: why millions left Italy between 1880 and 1920, where they went, and how to find your emigrant ancestor in the records.

How to find your Italian immigrant ancestor: passenger manifests, naturalization records, censuses and more—and how these records reveal the ancestral town in Italy.

What Ellis Island records reveal about Italian immigrants, how to search passenger manifests, and the truth about the name-change myth.

The great Italian ports of emigration—Naples, Genoa and Palermo—and what the journey from them was like for millions of emigrants during the great migration.

How Italian immigrants built the Little Italys: national parishes, mutual-aid societies, newspapers and chain migration that recreated home in a new land.

How Italian immigrants and their descendants assimilated: anglicized names, lost language, and shifting identity—and what it means for your genealogy research.

Many Italian emigrants returned home. Understanding return migration and the ‘birds of passage’ explains vanishing records and reshapes how you trace your family.

Millions of Italians emigrated to South America. The story of Italian migration to Argentina and Brazil, why it was so large, and how to trace these lines.