Elaine asked me awhile back to explain how to go about looking at what Italian records the LDS has. I’ve split the request, from Elaine, for information about looking at Italian b/m/d records from the LDS into two parts – finding the records and looking at the records. These records can only be looked at in an LDS Family History centre which are attached to LDS churches world-wide. You will have to get your local LDS centre to order the records from Salt Lake City so if the centre is some distance away it would be better to try and make the arrangements by phone beforehand. There are fees which is to cover postage/expenses – about £1.80 - £2.50 per roll of film for 1 month or three. They will contact you when the film arrives and you can then book time at the centre. (Make sure you specify that you need a microFILM machine if it is rolls of film or a microFICHE reader of they are on microfiche. All of the Italian records I have looked at so far have been on MicroFILM). First of all you need to have an idea of the area of Italy you are looking for your relatives as the records are held by place. If you don’t have a definite village/town the only thing I can suggest is searching on the LDS site for the surname and see which areas of Italy they are appearing and try there. In my case, when I first started my search for SALVETA there were none on the LDS site. Now there are 57 but all from the Arco/Trento area which is in the north of Italy when I knew my family were from Picinisco and Casalattico in Frosinone Province in the south. The LDS are gradually transcribing the records they have collected but as they have 2.2 million rolls of film and 742,00 microfiche you can imagine how big a job that is. If you have a placename go to the LDS site at www.familysearch.org and pick the option for searching for ancestors. Instead of entering any names look at the blue band above which gives you several options and click on FAMILY HISTORY LIBRARY CATALOG. It will then go to a screen with a list of options and click on PLACE which will bring up two boxes PLACE and PART OF. This is to allow you to limit your search if it’s liable to throw up several places of the same name and I would suggest putting the name of your town in PLACE and Italy in PART OF. To get the hang of this it might be easier doing the search with Picinisco as I have which means you can follow the instructions below and then once you know what to look for try it again with your own village/town name. Thus I would put in Picinisco and Italy. When you press search it will come back with a list of places of that name it has records for. In my case it came back with Italy, Frosinone, Picinisco which is what I want - always pick the entry with country/province/town option if it has it as this is the one which will hold the b/m/d records. When you click on this link it will show a list of the records it holds for that place which can cover a number of topics, all of which might be of general interest to you, but the one you want will say Civil Registration eg Italy, Frosinone, Picinisco - Civil Registration. When you click on this link it will come back with the title of the records ie Registro dello stato civile 1809-1865 which means Civil Registration records 1809-1865. When you click on this link a screen will come up with information on authors, etc. Look towards the bottom of the page to check what format the information is in. Most of them will be MANUSCRIPT ON FILM IN ITALIAN and that just means the records are copies of the original manuscript records, in Italian, on microfilm. Up at the top right of the page is a button VIEW FILM NOTES – click on this and it will produce a list of the films they have with their reference number. This is the information you will need to order the films and I would suggest printing off the whole list if you can. You can then go through it at your leisure and decide which of the films you want to borrow without having to go back on-line all the time. In the case of the Picinisco records it has come back with a list of 11 rolls of film – 5 for births (Nati); 3 rolls for Marriages (Matrimoni); 2 rolls for Death (Morti) and 1 roll called Diversi which more or less means Miscellaneous. The Diversi roll is odds and ends which have been missed off the other rolls, or out of sequence records eg I found a 1879 marriage here. The rolls are split by how many records they fitted on a roll so for example the first Picinisco record is 1809-14 Feb 1818 and the next 14 Feb 1818-1829. On some rolls (usually the first or last for a b/m/d or the Diversi roll you will see items numbers as well under the film number. That is because they tend to start on records from the next village if the roll of film is not finished rather than leaving part of the roll empty. Each item on a roll is clearly marked with a bit of blank film between which means that if you are fast forwarding through the film you can see by the blank when you come to the next set of records and can stop to check the item number. The larger towns of course would have many more rolls of film – Naples has 46 rolls for births alone but they have split these into two year batches. Carla Salveta (Scotland)