Where's the birth certificate? Citizenship part 3

This post is part of a series covering a story of seeking Italian citizenship. The story starts here.

After the rather inauspicious start detailed in the previous post I recovered my composure and passed my carefully selected folder of documents to the Signora who was assisting me.

The folder contained the birth, marriage, divorce and death records (as well as the aforementioned naturalisation certificate) of my relevant Italian family line. Each document was a certified copy of the original, which had subsequently been translated into Italian, and then apostilled by the Foreign and Commonwealth Development Office (FCDO). (Apostilling, for those not bureaucratically inclined, is the act of certifying an official document that enables it to be recognised by a foreign government.)

It took some months to gather these, the most tricky being the birth certificate of my great-grandfather Guilio, not least because it wasn’t immediately obvious where he was actually born. This was a potential issue because there are no central records of births in Italy. The records are held in individual town halls, which can cover just a small village; you have to know the specific town hall in which to search otherwise you’re in trouble. In the relatively scant documentation I had seen he listed his birthplace as Parma, presumably because that was the city and/or province of his birth but on seeking information in the city, no certificate was found.

All through this period I was reflecting on my emotions - mostly tense and trepidatious; the prospect of a door opening again to smooth a path to live and work in Europe when that opportunity seemed lost after Brexit foremost among them. One day the sinking feeling and the next a gleeful smile, depending on developments - and there are plenty more of those in this tale.

I reflected too on the fragility of connections and records themselves; the marvel of the internet and digitised catalogues that facilitate information availability. This is not a new thought but is brought home when you are searching because of a specific need, rather than out of curiosity or pleasure. The marvel of the internet contrasted sharply with my living family’s knowledge. Those that I had asked were not able to help particularly - showing that factual detail can, if not recorded, alas quickly slip away into the ether when people with that knowledge die.

With no certificate and no other leads my solicitor asked if I had any more information. Slightly despairingly I went back into the depths of ancestry resources on the internet and after much rooting around the despair disappeared and I struck lucky.

I found a record that related to Guilio’s father, Modesto (Modesto and his wife Vittoria emigrated to the UK when Guilio was a baby). Modesto was, at the start of the second world war, identified as a ‘Male Enemy Alien’, and had to be formally exempted/released from internment. The record I found and shown below details that he was released in November 1940, and crucially lists his birthplace as Tornolo, a small commune in the province of Parma, in the hills on the border with Liguria. Tornolo therefore seemed as good as any place for Guilio to have been born too - I set the wheels in motion and a week later I was riding high once more with a email in the inbox with his birth certificate in pdf form attached - amazing! 

It was this discovery that enabled the aforementioned document folder to be sufficiently replete with relevant information, which was now being assiduously checked by Signora - with whom we will conclude in part 4.