For those Americans of Italian extraction who wish to return to the birthplace of their parents or grandparents to look into their roots, we can provide a complete service.

This can include driving you to the town in question, booking lodging, as necessary, helping you find the names of relatives living and dead from the town archives and taking you to the local cemetery for you to find siblings and other relatives of your grandparents and great grandparents. Wherever it is helpful, we can act as interpreters and translators to facilitate the whole operation, including interpreting during your first meeting with long lost relatives.

A successful example of such a search occurred in 2003, when we took an American woman and her daughter to a small town in central Italy to investigate her grandfather's birth and residence records. The officials at town hall became very interested in the case and wracked their brains and queried other townsfolk to find living relatives of our client. After a lengthy consultation, they found the name of a man who turned out to be a cousin. A telephone call resulted in an invitation to lunch and an unusual, but joyous meal with old photos and exchange of emails as much a part of the menu as the food and wine.

An even more impressive case perhaps occurred in January of 2006 when we accompanied two women to Castel di Sangro, a town in the Abruzzo region. The two women were not related, but both had family that had migrated to America from that town. The only piece of information they had to go on, apart from their last names, was a photo of a church that one woman's father spoke of often. We arrived on a Sunday and the only place to seek assistance was the main church. Mass was breaking up as we entered. We asked a woman who was exiting whether she could tell us where the church in the picture was located. She replied that it was high up in the mountains and invited us outside to show us. As she was pointing upward and describing to us how to arrive by car, two other women left the church and approached us out of curiosity. The two American women began asking about their family to the two Italian women who had just joined us, initially through our translations, but then more directly as the two Italian women dusted off their school learnt english. Each of the American women paired off with one of the Italian women as they queried news of their ancestors. the astounding result, although tentative and subject to confirmation at the town records office, was not only were the two Italian women relatives but the indivdual Italian that each American women had selected at random to talk to, turned out to be related to her. Being Sunday and with the records office closed, no further investigation could be done. Email addresses were exchanged and one of the Italian women promised to involve, in researching their cases, one of her friends who takes great interest in tracing people's ancestry. The morning visit was topped off with a nice lunch at a local restaurant.

	Letter from Mr. and Mrs. Robert Carney