As I said at the beginning of the last e-mail you have to pre-order the rolls of film because they are held centrally in Salt Lake City and you may have to wait several weeks for them to arrive depending on how popular they are. It is best, therefore, to book the film before booking time at the centre – they will phone you when the film arrives and you can book then. The costs are dependent on whether the film is a short or long term loan (1 or 3 months). For your first order I would suggest limiting yourself to 1 roll of film on a short term loan which will give you a chance to look at it and see if you think you will be able to work with it and how long it takes to go through a roll. The records were often in a poor state when they were filmed and many are difficult to read, some illegible and, for most of us, will be in a foreign language. It is certainly a daunting task at first. After my first roll I found it easier just getting two or three rolls on a long loan and then spending a couple of hours a week looking through them rather than booking long sessions. On my first visit I had booked a reader for 6 hours and was truly ill by the end of the stint! There are no charges for booking the readers or use of the Centre but you normally require to book in advance. Most centres also have limited opening hours so check all this out beforehand. In order to book a film you need the title and reference number of the film so if you have printed off the list of films from the internet you can decide which ones you want to look at first and tick them off as you have looked at them. This means you won’t accidentally re-order the same ones again! If you are visiting the centre to book films take the sheet with you and they can copy the details directly onto the order form. The layout of the records is the same on each record as it was a proforma type record where you filled in the blanks. Unlike the Scottish and English records that I have seen there is a lot of blurb about which Act the b/m/d is being registered under etc so you need to get the hang of where the information is that you want to look at – it is not in a table form. The format did change a couple of times between 1810 and 1865 but once you’ve worked out what is where it’s relatively easy to look at the names in the key places to see if the name you are looking for is there. As with Scottish records there is quite a lot of information. A birth record will give you mother and father’s names, where they’re from, their ages and father’s occupation. In the Picinisco records they don’t bother with addresses because the village is so small but they may do in the larger towns. There are photocopied indexes at the front of each year or group of years which in birth records gives mother and father’s names but there are other people mentioned in the marriage and death records not included in the indexes and if you are looking for any occurrence of a name in case it fits into your family it is better to scan each record. For example they have the names and ages of two people who ‘register’ a death and it’s often not someone with the same surname. I picked up a few Salveta’s who had registered deaths of non Salveta’s and it confirmed for me that the person was still alive at the date or gave me an age for someone I only had a name for. If you’re lucky there may be additional information. Some birth records I looked at had the date of marriage and the name of the person they married at the end of the birth record but as this was a small village and the person writing down the information could be the same over many years it’s not surprising that there would be some cross-referencing of records in this way. Some marriage records gave the bride’s grandfather’s name if her father was dead and she was not of age and sometimes the paternal grandfather’s name was on a birth record. I found noted on one death record (not one of mine) that the deceased had been executed at the town entrance but it didn’t give a reason why! I found having a list of certain Italian words with me helped eg the months of the year, numbers, and how eighteen hundred and was written so you could work out the dates. Also words like morto/morta (deceased), celibe (unmarried man), nubile (unmarried woman), vedova (widow), vedovo (widower), nato/nata (birth). In my case my ancestors’ occupation was always contadino which more or less means peasant ie they worked the land so I didn’t bother with a list of occupations but it might be helpful. I can’t offer to translate documents for people but can certainly help with the odd word here and there. I didn’t take any copies from the records I did myself, however, if someone has an LDS centre which can print from microfilm, if you print off a single record (it may run over two pages so check the numbers written on the top of each page) I’ll circle the areas with the information and explain what it is ie father’s name, name of child etc and if I can scan it I can make it available to everyone. I found it easiest to draw up a proforma with the information I knew should be there (the oldest records have the least info) including a space for the number of the film and the record number and then filled it in at the LDS and typed them up later. It meant I didn’t miss information and if I couldn’ t translate something eg the occupation, I copied the Italian word down which gave me the chance to look it up later. If anyone is interested I can e-mail them a copy of the proformas I used. I’m not sure if every part of Italy laid the records out in the same way so you may need to adapt them once you have looked at records in your own area. I did find almost a hundred SALVETA b/m/d records between the villages of Picinisco and Casalattico but my father already knew his great grandfather, Barbato SALVETA had come to Picinisco from the neighbouring village of Casalattico sometime in the mid 1800’s and that his son, Fortunato (whom we are descended from) was born in Picinisco. Barbato was the only SALVETA to move to Picinisco and we found two other sons of Barbato’s we didn’t know about and in the Casalattico records we found Barbato's birth which gave us his father and mother Francesco SALVETA and Anna Felice LIEGHIO. By finding their death records we were able to go back another generation to another Barbato SALVETA who must have been born around before 1760 at the latest as his son Francesco was born in 1775. As SALVETA is an unusual name and there is no-one but our family around the Casalattico/Picinisco area with that name my father is sure that they came from somewhere else and he was hoping to find a record saying where they had come from. Francesco’s death record says he was from Casalattico (although that may just have been that he had lived there for so long) but we are making a trip to Italy in October and hoping to look through the earlier records that the LDS have not microfilmed and see if we can find the first Barbato’s marriage or death records in the hopes that it tells us he came from somewhere else. Hopefully it will connect with Trento and the records the LDS have already transcribed from there. This has been quite a long ‘instruction’ sheet and it will be difficult to follow without actually doing it. If there is anything I can clarify just contact me at [email protected] and I’ll see if I can be of help. I will shortly be posting a list of the non Salveta surnames I have come across in the Salveta b/m/d records that I have. If any of them are of interest to you let me know and I’ll send you a copy of the record they came from. Carla Salveta (Scotland)