I created this site so that others who may be researching their family connections to Lapio, Italy could benefit from the research that I have done. My wife has great-grandparents from Lapio (picture below) who both immigrated from Lapio to Fitchburg, Massachusetts in 1913 and later married in the same town in 1917. I started a family tree project to learn more about my wife's side of the family. I also wanted to have some reference to the various family names being mentioned around the table during sunday dinners as well. So like most people, I started a family tree and started researching.

I first created a family tree on Ancestry and was able to piece together information from american records. I realized that trying to find information about those who lived in Italy before they immigrated to the United States was challenging. Then I eventually learned about Antenatti. A website that contains a plethora of Italian records and just so happened to have an impressive complete collection of vital records ranging from 1809 to 1945. Unfortunately, all records need to be translated from Italian and there was no searchable database to find individuals throughout these records. Basically, the process was to search page by page for relevant information about someone you are researching.

I had recently witnessed other peoples approaches to this by scanning each page and recording the information; eventually linking the puzzle pieces together to form a lineage in their family tree. I recognized a couple of inherent problems with this approach. Not have a complete dataset of information to work from would increase the possibilities of inaccuracies being stated as fact. Another problem was that while someone had taken the time to scan the pages, there was no way others could benefit from this work. I quickly realized that if I wanted to create the Lapio family tree the right way, I needed to index the entire Antenati collection of Lapio records. This would give me the best option to be able to search for individuals effeciently and also use the power of the data to reach conclusions I couldn't do ordinarily.

While I surmised this would be time consuming to index all the available records, I still believed it was worth it, so that I can create the family tree using the most complete set of data. I also figured others could benefit from this work as well, which is how this website came to be. I created a searchable database of all of the indexed records and a record section listing all records by year and record type. After creating a custom software solution to index the records in my spare time, I finally finished my indexing project after about 1 and a half years; indexing over 22,241 records. The culmination of this work is available to anyone in the world via this site!

I consider this family tree project complete, but one day, I would like to see the parish records of Lapio (especially before 1809) photographed, so that they can be forever saved for posterity. I imagine many would benefit from this information and be able to extend the roots of their family tree even further!