Fundamentals

What you need to know to start

The first thing to consider when contacting us is to understand exactly what your goal is. There are two main areas of interest:

1. Reconstructing family history
2. Obtaining documents to apply for citizenship

Whatever your decision, you will need three things:

Choose a service

If you are interested in learning all about your family history, this service opens up a very wide range of options, but building your own family tree remains the classic option. This option is divided into three packages of three, four, and five generations at a fixed price: the larger the package, the larger the final tree, the further back in time we go. The research uses Civil Status records from today to 1820 and Church records from today to 1500.

In the first place, we use the Civil Status records, which are rich in information, written in Italian, and better preserved; with these, we usually manage to complete the three and four generation packages (but also associating the church records). For the five-generation package, on the other hand, it is necessary to use only the Church records, since we almost always arrive at dates before 1820, which the Civil status records do not cover; these records contain only dates and names, are written in Latin, and are therefore more difficult to interpret.

Some of those most curious about their family history, after purchasing one of the three genealogy packages, choose to purchase the Surname Tree package. In this case, we collect every marriage record of every individual with your surname within a community and then connect all the individuals to each other in search of the founding core.

Others want to delve deeper into an individual ancestor's family relationships to find his or her siblings, cousins, uncles, and aunts; this is possible with the Indirect Ancestor package. But we can go even deeper: did your ancestors fight in theaters of war? Does the house they lived in still exist? What is the location of their gravestone? We can answer these questions, too.

All of our packages include a research report, a family tree chart that synthesizes all of the research, all of the original documents in digital form, and long-term support that begins the moment we deliver your tree.

If, on the other hand, you are interested in obtaining documents to obtain citizenship, then the problem is simply one of bureaucracy. Most of the time, the Sicilian institutions that have to process your applications are slow and dysfunctional, to put it mildly. We are the oil that unlocks a gear that would remain jammed for a long, long time. We are Sicilians, we live in Sicily and we know which strings to pull.

Costs

Most of our packages have a fixed cost, so you know up front how much you will spend. You're not paying for blocks of hours of work that we're unlikely to get done. You only pay if we find what you are looking for. Otherwise, you pay NOTHING.