I created this site so that others researching their family connections to Lapio, Italy could benefit from the research I have done. My wife's great-grandparents (pictured below) both immigrated from Lapio to Fitchburg, Massachusetts in 1913 and married there in 1917. I started a family tree project to learn more about her side of the family — and to finally put dates and faces to the family names that kept coming up around the table at Sunday dinners.
I began with a family tree on Ancestry and was able to piece together a great deal from American records. Tracing the family's life in Italy before they emigrated proved much harder. Eventually I discovered Antenati, a website of digitized Italian records that happens to hold an impressively complete collection of Lapio's vital records spanning 1809 to 1945. The catch: the records are handwritten in Italian, and there was no searchable index — researching a person meant paging through the registers image by image.
I had seen how others approached this: scanning page after page, recording what they found, and gradually linking the puzzle pieces into a lineage. That approach has two inherent problems. Working without a complete dataset makes it far too easy for guesses to be stated as fact, and all of that careful effort benefits no one beyond the person who did it. I realized that if I wanted to build the Lapio family tree the right way, I needed to index the entire Antenati collection of Lapio records. A complete index would let me search for individuals efficiently and use the power of the data to reach conclusions that page-by-page research never could.
I knew indexing every available record would be time consuming, but a family tree built on the most complete data possible — and a resource others could use — made it worth the effort. That is how this website came to be: a searchable database of every indexed record, along with a Records section listing them all by year and record type. Working in my spare time with custom software I built for the job, I finished the project after about a year and a half, indexing more than 22,000 records. The culmination of that work is now available to anyone in the world through this site!
I consider this family tree project complete, but I still have one hope: that the parish records of Lapio — especially those from before 1809 — will one day be photographed and preserved for posterity. Many families would be able to extend the roots of their trees even further!