Fra Noi Embrace Your Inner Italian
Around 1987, there was a man who had a vision for Italian genealogy. His name was Dr. Thomas Militello, from California and eventually Nevada. Dr. Tom had trouble trying to find genealogists who were researching the same towns as he was, and what surnames they were researching. Keep in mind that this was the late 1980s so ancestry.com and FamilySearch did not exist as we know them today and social media was years in the future.
Dr. Tom founded a group called POINT, which stands for Pursuing Our Italian Names Together. The objective of POINT was to get people to join the group and share information about the Italian surnames and towns they were researching. They would receive a book with everyone’s surnames and towns, and eventually Dr. Tom created a quarterly magazine called POINTers with articles on research methods, trips to Italy, etc.
In the 1990s, former Fra Noi writer Tony Lascio founded a local chapter of POINT so Chicago-area Italian genealogists could get together and trade information. Eventually 27 more chapters popped up around the country, including my north suburban chapter that I ran 2001-2014.
You may remember how often I wrote about the doings of the POINT group and chapters way back when I inherited the Fra Noi genealogy column after Tony passed away in 2004.
Dr. Tom was forced by failing health to cease POINT operations in 2013, and he passed away in 2019. Most of the chapters faded off for various reasons. So, we are back to not having a way to look for people who are researching the same Italian names and towns that we are. Or are we?
Obviously there are more internet resources than in 1987 to try to find fellow researchers. They aren’t organized like POINT was, but you can look in a lot of places.
Naturally, social media is a great place to find kindred spirits. I have looked for genealogy groups for several provinces and regions in Italy and found some connections that way. Sometimes there’s a genealogy group just about a single town! There doesn’t seem to be much about genealogy research of specific surnames, but once you join the province or town group, if someone is actively researching that surname, you’ll find ’em!
Both FamilySearch and Ancestry.com allow us to upload our family trees, and each site lets you search other peoples’ trees in the hope of finding a family match, or at least finding who submitted a tree from your town with your grandfather’s surname. As with any genealogy site, not everyone is actively researching or answering the notes written to them. So don’t be surprised if your question goes unanswered. But sometimes these sites show how recently someone has been logged in, and this can help you determine whether the contact is likely to respond soon. Once you upload your tree, other people might find you and start a family-data-exchange that could be very beneficial.
I am specifically using these sites to try to find people who might have visited Italy and worked with, or photographed, the church records from the ancestral town. If you are already working with civil records on FamilySearch or Antenati, everyone has basically the same access to the same records. But if you find that “player” who went to the old hometown and worked with the church records, it might be a gold mine!
And while researching this column, I discovered that the old POINTers archives were acquired by IGG, Italian Genealogy Group. https://www.italiangen.org/pointers-archive/ You have to be a paid member of IGG to get to these, and the information may be out of date. Find the name of a person researching your name and town in an old POINTers. Then use social media to find that person so you can contact them, or their descendants, today.
If you have success using any of these methods, please email me at italianroots@comcast.net and put “POINT” in the subject line. Happy hunting!
