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Italian Genealogy: Unlocking Town & Church Records
Comune and Chiesa: Unlocking Online Italian Town and Church Records is a four-week online course delivered in partnership by the Society of Australian Genealogists and Family History Academy, and taught by specialist researcher Barbara Bombaci, CG®. It is designed for family historians who are ready to move beyond what migration records can tell them and work directly in the sources their ancestors left behind.
Italian civil and church records can be extraordinarily rich, capturing multiple generations of family information in a single document, yet they vary considerably by region, period, and record type, and navigating what exists, where it is held, and how to use it requires both knowledge and strategy. This course addresses that directly, guiding participants through records spanning three distinct historical periods and two parallel record-keeping systems, civil and ecclesiastical, with a focus on building transferable skills rather than one-off finds.
Barbara Bombaci brings specialist knowledge of Italian records, repositories, and research strategy to every session. Participants leave not just with new techniques but with a genuine understanding of the Italian archival landscape — and the confidence to keep researching long after the course ends.
Payments on this site are in US dollars (USD).
Prefer to pay in Australian dollars?
This course is also available via Past in Practice, where bookings are processed in Australian dollars (AUD). The Past in Practice course fee is set as a fixed AUD price. Depending on exchange rates at the time of booking, the USD option may result in a higher or lower cost once converted.
You are welcome to choose the booking option that best suits your preferred currency.
Details
Workshop Cost: $197 (US dollars) for 8 hours (4 sessions each of 2 hours, plus a short break)
When: 15, 22, 29 September & 6 October 2026 @ 6 PM Central US
Where: via ZOOM. All sessions are closed captioned, recorded and available for viewing for 14 days following each session. A comprehensive handout is provided. Attendance is limited to 30 participants.
About Barbara Bombaci, JD, CG®
Bombaci Heritage Research
Barbara Bombaci is a Certified Genealogist® living in Wisconsin, USA. She has deep Sicilian roots traced back to at least the 1600s and strong German roots in New York and Pennsylvania from the early 1700s.
Barbara particularly enjoys working with Italian ancestry, records, and context, as well as upper Midwestern US research. She is dedicated to adding context to her ancestors' stories and has written and spoken on the push-pull factors of Sicilian immigration into Louisiana and methods for identifying Italian towns of origin.
Her genealogical volunteerism includes indexing a local probate office's files of approximately 48,000 records, and serving as past program chair of a local genealogical society, past registrar of the Salt Lake Institute of Genealogy (SLIG), a member of the APG Advocacy Committee, and a current trustee of the Board for Certification of Genealogists Education Fund.
Benefits for Family Historians
Extend your research into Italy
Go beyond the migration record and into the original Italian sources — wherever your ancestors came from.
Understand the full archival landscape
Know not just where to look but why records exist, what shaped them, and how the historical context of each era affects what you find.
Read and abstract Italian and Latin sources
Develop practical language skills for the terminology, handwriting, and record structures you will encounter.
Apply learning to your own research
Structured homework exercises allow you to work with your own Italian ancestors' records between sessions.
Open to researchers worldwide
This is a course about Italy and its records. It is equally relevant whether your family went to Australia, North America, or anywhere else in the world.
Queensland, AUSTRALIA
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