 No, that sounds like the old Batman Adam West intro. It kinda does, huh? It does. Look who we brought. We brought the Italy project to you guys today for the bingo. I'm so excited about Italy. I'm so excited. I was talking to the guys beforehand, Frank and Chris, with the Italy project. And the whole reason I did Ancestry DNA was because I was convinced I was Italian. Everybody around us always said, how much Italian do you have? Who's your Italian relatives? Where do you come from, mentally? I have 0.5% and even that's probably a blip. So not Italian, but I still love the culture. I still love everything about it. I will even date myself, because this is kind of an interesting week for me and with Italian culture. Back in the day before cable, when you actually had to get up from the couch and turn your TV to change the channel, we had one channel that was a black and white channel or showed old movies. And that's where my love of Italy started from the old movies. And someone who passed away just a couple of days ago, Miss Gino Lolo Gibrugina and Mrs. Campbell. I don't know if anybody remembers that old movie, but the movie's quirky. Forget about the movie. Just watch the movie for the scene. The scenery of going around Italy is fabulous. And of course, you know, Sophia Loren. But we're here to talk about the Italy project in particular on Wiki Tree. So let me go ahead and add this project here. And Frank and Chris, why don't you tell us a little bit about the structure of the project? Cause I know you have a couple of different sub-projects within this project. Well, yeah, because Italy has to cover a huge country. Even though it doesn't really look that big on a map, it is and encompasses several different regions. And we have teams that can take care of like stuff in Calabria or Torino or anywhere else like that. And basically we just covered the entire country and try to bring in so many people that we can from each different region and just try to focus on that using sources from like Antennaity or Family Search and other places like that. And it's pretty fun. We also work with Notables actually because I think Italy has had a lot of notable people coming from there like for Columbus, you know, Da Vinci, you know, Pavarotti that we work with them because Italy has a very, very long and storied history. You really do. I mean, your Notables are probably a tremendous amount of the profiles that you guys work on and fine tune and finesse going through a lot of them. I'm just gonna pick a random one and what do you know? Probably one of the most famous ones that we have here. And I like showing this one because if you notice, look at the way the name is. And I wanna point out that as you're working probably on profiles for the Italy project, if you come into confusion with the name, reach out to one of these two gentlemen because they can definitely help you with how the name should be displayed and the alternate names if need be. But it's important to know that if a woman was born and lived in Italy, they always use last name even if they got married. They always use their maiden name? They always use their maiden name. Yeah, your birth surname is your surname for your entire life. So anything that she shows up on, birth, marriage, birth of her children, her death, like everything is her birth surname. That's a really big part for us to learn. Yes, but if you're looking for a last name, it's like really common, like if you're looking for a song like, maybe I could ask you to go. That still would be a very, very common last name. So you would have to like see, look for a town that they were born in. And you're looking for your daughter, who's the name, by the way. Yeah, I think so. The other big, probably a really, really big section for Wiki Tree and the Italy Project is the Discord for those that have family members that migrated from Italy. I know a lot of times that we Americans think that, oh, they all immigrated here, but they did not. Large quantity of Italians did go to Argentina, Brazil, even Australia and Canada. Yeah, and some of our project leaders are part of the different parts of the diaspora in South America and in other parts of Europe. So matter of fact, our categories project is one of the things we've been spending a lot of time on the last couple of months, just trying to get those cleaned up and standardized and try to get a category set up for each little comune in each little province in each region for all of Italy to kind of make tracking profiles a little bit neater. So what do you find most of the work in the Italy Project is currently? Is it working on those purely still in Italy or are you finding a lot of people working on those that migrated from Italy? A lot of people who are getting started, especially if they are Americans or South American, a lot of their struggle is kind of making that leap, being able to bridge across the ocean to figure out who their migrating ancestor was. As Chris mentioned, names are very familiar and with naming traditions in Italy, names get repeated again and again and again. And so somebody's Francesco Santoro, there may be 20 of them who immigrated around the same time. And if you don't know exactly which town they came from, if you don't know anything about who their parents were or their other family members, then you've got this whole maze of different possible ancestors that could be yours if you don't know exactly which one. And depending on the timeline of the immigration, you may or may not get information about their town of origin or the town that they were living in when they moved. And so if somebody immigrated before say the mid 1890s, they'll just say, they're from Italy. It's like, okay, well, that's helpful. Yeah, that's very, well, I do wanna put you on the spot just a little bit, but this will be an easy one, I think. We do have somebody who has joined us who has been very excited for this particular project to be shown in Bingo. So Erin, I'm gonna ask you to give us just a little bit of information about a brick wall you have of somebody who did migrate to the United States. I believe it's on our husband's family. Do you, Erin, do you happen to know the name of, I guess your brick wall, the name and the location of where they came from in Italy? And if she could give us those two, I think that will help explain how we can research and try and find the correct person. And I do wanna point out that beforehand, Frank and Chris were giving me some tips about how to research for Italian profiles in Italy. And Chris, I believe mentioned, be careful of ancestry because a lot of people will pick a common name and not really do the research with that. And you're probably picking the wrong person. Is that right, Chris? Yeah, it is, because unfortunately, some names like Capola, Tadasko, Santoro, they are really, really unbelievably common. You might as well be looking for Smith, you know? And you were going to find that a lot of common names are out there, but there is a way around it, by looking for the naturalization records and looking at sentences, maybe, just maybe they'll have like a little hint, like if, then 1950 census, okay? If you look at that and know how there's a little highlighted section under 1950 census, what is that some people are from? Put down like, apparently from Italy, occasionally someone put like San Pietro, Amida, which is where my paternal ancestors are from and you could find a clue like they're like, okay, so that must be where they were born. So you can look for the naturalization records and look for family members and also if you have DNA matches, they can probably help you too. That's sometimes it will have trees and link you to those certain areas of the world. And something you see a lot too, if you don't necessarily have the naturalization records which specifies a certain location, just like if I'm talking to somebody introducing myself and they say, where do you live? I don't say, I live in Skokie because nobody outside of Skokie knows where Skokie is. So I live in Chicago. Okay, well, I don't live in Chicago. I live in Skokie. So, if you have somebody who says, well, my grandfather's from Palermo. So what was he really from Palermo, which is a city and it's a big city or is he from the province also called Palermo which has 80 something different little towns and he put their own little sets of records. But there are tools for like, kind of narrowing that down using the little bit of guesswork because there are tools where you can search like databases of surnames in particular provinces and see, okay, well, where is this surname found most commonly? Now, which community have this, the largest concentration of that surname? And so you can sometimes use that to narrow things down. It's not 100% scientific, but if you have a really rare surname, then it can definitely help kind of point you in the right direction to maybe narrow your scope from having to look at 100 towns to maybe looking at five or six towns. That makes sense. And we have an answer from Erin. So her birthplace says Forenzo. And Forenzo is the, it sounds like it might be a misspelling of Forenze. Forenze, yeah. Forenze. And then let me go ahead and share my screen real quick with you again. This is her brick wall. Yeah. So would you recommend that she take her, the maiden name and go to research it where the bird is located? I see she actually has Forenzo, which is a standalone town in Potenza, which is down in the South. And so those records are gonna be probably available either on FamilySearch or on Antinati. But yeah, so you would definitely look at what her birth surname is trying to find her birth record in Italy. And I wanna point out too, let me come back over here. One, the Italy project main page is a project resources. And one of the coolest things I have seen on WikiTree for help for sources is going to be Frank's Italian records online. And this is available to everybody. Let me see if I can zoom in a little bit more on this. And what he does is he gives everybody the information. You've got your region that you're looking for, your province and the collection name, but he gives you the link as well. So you don't have to go to Google search or find it. You can actually look. So Erin maybe come to this and see, I'll put it in here in the chat real quick, but it's on the project resources page too. And he's created so everybody can come in here, look at it, view it, click on a link. So maybe what Erin would do is go to FamilySearch first to see if she can find anything. And if she can't, come to this particular spreadsheet to the area she's looking for. And would that be, let me see, would that be, so she'd be looking in the, she'd be looking in the, you got to look by region first. So you'd scroll up to a Bacillicata because it's alphabetized by region. There we go. Yep. And then Potenza, you have a couple of different choices. And I was just digging on FamilySearch while you were looking here. And I know that. So for records from 1861 to 1929 for Forenza, they are actually in the Melfi Tribunale collection on FamilySearch. And what I did is I went to FamilySearch, went to the catalog, typed in Forenza as the place and it gave me a couple of possibilities. So for anything after 1861, you'll find it on FamilySearch and should be freely available at home. You wouldn't have to go to like a FamilySearch Center or a library. And then anything from 1809 up to 1860 would be on the Antonati website, also freely available online. Okay, Aaron. We gave you some homework there, maybe. That's great, Frank. Because do you realize you probably helped her break down that brick wall just from this presentation in Bingo. And since we're talking about Bingo, let's go ahead and bring it up. Does everybody have their first Bingo card up? Let me go ahead and give me one second. Let me bring it up one more time. I put it in the chat. We'll go ahead and bring it up one more time. And we might have a couple new people that are here. So what you need to do for the Bingo is just click on the link and it will bring up your Bingo card and instead of numbers like B9 or B8, whatever the numbers are, what we do is we come up with words that are based on the project. And the Italy project has supplied us with wonderful, beautiful words that I cannot pronounce. So everybody has their Bingo cards up. We're gonna go ahead and bring this up to full screen again. And Chris and Frank, does one of you wanna take the first Bingo card and then somebody from the office that take the second one? Okay, I got the first one. You got the first one. Okay, so here we go. So again, for Bingo, all you do is click on, if you have this word, click on. Bingo can be either way, it can be diagonal, it can be down, it can be across. And the first person who types the word Bingo in the chat wins a prize. If you won a prize at Bingo between now and going backwards the last six months, which would be a miracle because we've only been doing it for how long I went with the points. But if you've already won a prize in Bingo, you cannot win again until six months from your last prize date. I hope that made sense, it sounded confusing. So, but you can still play along. Even though you might have won a prize, still play along and I will tell you the prize is a t-shirt or a mug. Your choice. Okay, Chris? The first word is Bingo. Aval, aval. All right, the second word is Monterey. It's like in Spanish. Next one is Registro, okay, Registro. How many people do you think we have in Italy watching this right now? Probably one. You know what, we put in the Italy project on it and she said she would be there. General, okay. Feel free to translate these words. Yeah, so going back really quick. So, Aval is grandfather, madre, mother, Registro, registry or no, register and general is a son-in-law. Yeah. Oh, okay. And Cognomi is last name. Palermo is a city. After D'Naxita, that would be birth act, that would be like your birth certificate. His Waldo is an Italian town. It's also the last name of a crazy musician. His name was Carlo Giozwaldo and he killed somebody. I am dead serious. You're crazy. You're gonna find a lot of crazy musicians in Italy. Unfortunately, La Maseria was the event and it was basically what caused hundreds of thousands of millions of immigrants to go from Italy, specifically southern Italy to the rest of the world because policies after unification allowed for policies up in the north to be better and everything else, but they kind of left the self behind after unification. A great movie, a classic movie about this. I can't remember the name of it, but maybe you guys, it was a great movie about how the southern Italians migrated up to Naples, I want to say. Yeah, well, they didn't think it moved up, they also moved across. One dog, no, right? That's how you say it Frank? Well, I must have misspelled it because it's actually Moldugno and there's no N in the beginning there. Oh, come on. Don't worry, I have misspelled bingo words before, so you're safe. Yep. San Pietro Amida, that is where my dad's paternal ancestors are from. His maternal ancestors are from the town with a crazy eye and I pray that I'm not connected to him. I probably am. My great incognito, that basically means the father was not known because the person who is on the birth certificate doesn't want the father of the baby to be known for whatever reason. And sometimes she just doesn't want to, she's not married obviously and she just doesn't want the guy to be known. It happens a lot, real life. But these are really good terms because as we research, these are terms that we need to understand as we research birth records or death records or what? Absolutely, yeah, you don't need to be like, you don't need to be a native speaker or even fluent in Italian to understand these records because they're very kind of very formula-driven. They all look the same, they're laid out the same. And once you kind of know sort of like the key phrases, key places to look for information, then it's a lot easier to kind of decode things. But definitely having a small working knowledge of vocabulary helps you sort out things. So Rala, that is, Easter. Yeah, there we go, that is. Pismo, that would be baptism. I was gonna say, this word's very familiar to me, but now I know why, because like I said, living near Baltimore, near a lot of Italians, we did go to a lot of baptism ceremonies. And we already talked about this one, that is obviously like a town, it is a town, small town. It's really cool. It's your basic unit of government. Yeah. Registry, parochie. Registry, parochie, chiali. Thank you, right, right? That is it. So yeah, you've got civil records and then you've got church records and these are the church records. Yeah. So this would be church. Yes. Records. See, you're right, because of the formula, I kind of guess because of the PA at the beginning of it. Atodium matrimonium. Well, we already covered the atodium acetate earlier. This would be your marriage certificate, basically. And actually, there's actually two types of atodium matrimonium because this one from the process study, which is like your basic marriage announcement, like you're in a newspaper and like, hey, these two are going to be married in a couple of days. The atodium matrimonium shows that this is when it's going to happen, this is where it happened. And actually, it will list your parents and even your grandparents if you like. Really? Yeah. You can get a treasure trove of information from one marriage record. And that's amazing. And there's also interesting to know for your doing research for the kind of the early period, early period of what I would call Italy after the unification occurred in the 1860s is that there was a separation between civil marriage and church marriage. And to be legally married, you had to have a civil marriage. So if you went to the church and got married, that's great. But for the law, for legal purposes, you're not married yet. And so the church obviously not happy about this, the Catholic church. And so they kind of suggested not very indirectly directly to the faithful, hey, don't follow these laws about having to get civilly married. Just get married in the church. And so a lot of people did, they just get married in the church, wouldn't have a civil marriage. But then the state said, okay, fine. You don't want to get married in a civil ceremony. Guess what? Any children you have are illegitimate. I was just gonna say, that makes it tricky for kids. And if you have illegitimate kids, guess what? They can't inherit property. You still saw for a good period of time, couples who would get married in the church, have a bunch of kids who were legally illegitimate. And then maybe 10, 15, 20, 30 years later, they said, okay, fine, we'll knuckle under it and have the civil marriage. And then the state said, hey, magically, all of your children are not legitimate, so. So today, if I was married in Italy, would I still, if I have a civil and if I got married in a church, I would have two certificates? So the latter impacts that were signed in 1929 kind of cut this problem off in that church marriage was recognized for legal purposes as long as they incorporated a couple of little things into the ceremony to make it kind of bind both together. So in general, now in Italy, if you get married in the Catholic church and a select number of other faith traditions, your religious marriage will automatically be recognized for civil purposes. Well, that's candy. That's good. Well, this one is painfully obvious, Alberto Familiarity, then we trade. That's pretty obvious. I love this one. This one, I love that one. Yeah. Oh yeah, the Trohotello. This is basically, you know how I was talking earlier about the Padre Aconinos? Well, sometimes the kid will have the last name, Toronto, they will have Esposito and they will have, what's the other one, Frank? Oh, I got incognito, incognito. I mean, so these are foundlings, basically abandoned babies. Yes. Not orphans, would these be considered not orphans? Yeah, cause orphans, parents are known but dead. This is, parents are unknown and presumed living. Okay. And sometimes, now I mentioned the whole thing with the church and civil marriage, sometimes parents would have kids and they would register them anonymously. So they will be registered as a foundling, get a made up surname and go through life with that made up surname until maybe some point later their parents got civilly married and the children were legitimized, recognized and all of a sudden their surname changed. Oh yeah, throw out your old surname that you've been using for your life. Now you get your father's surname and you're a normal person again. And with Trobotello, I just won bingo, so. Apparently. Yeah, I won bingo too, but I don't have comments, so, you know. So, anyway, I'll skip Trobotello, no? Okay, we'll just keep going. So somebody in the chat wins. Atodimoto, that obviously is the death certificate. So, because atodimoto is archivo, archivio is archaic. My Latin is starting to come back. I'm having a little PTSD over it. I thought my mom was in handy. I know, Andre, father. Well, you know, Italian, Spanish, French and Romanian all came from Latin, so. What's your name? This is, is this the same word? Yeah. I think it's the same word, just misspelled with two ends. Okay. Yes. Is anybody close to bingo? I'm getting close to a blackout. I would think. I think they just like learning the words. Oh, we got one. Hey. I believe, confirm with me, shit. There we go, there we go. We got one. Okay, Sherry. So what you need to do is, let me come over here. You need to email anyone and tell her that you won the Italy project bingo number one and she will take it from there and get you all the information that you need. Yes. Okay. So while we do, while I bring up the second bingo card for everybody to bring up and get congratulations, Sherry. That was pretty cool. Because I was thinking you were right, Frank. We had to be close to a blackout with that. Yeah. Okay, so while I bring up, let everybody bring up the second bingo card, what areas would you like us wiki traders to help you with? Hoof. I mean, you, Chris, how much do we spend on sourcing all those old fly-dumped GEDCOMs? Oh, a long, long time. And we go through, especially during the connectathon just like last weekend, I was going through there looking off stuff for Anthony and I found that some dogs don't like, cute up like somebody dog at the home work. It was really awful. But you can still read it. It was so good. You still put in the information, so legible. You just have to like take your best guess what the act number was, but it's so good. Yeah, so I guess I would say like for kind of people going forward, no, if you've got, if you have Italian ancestry, one, join the Italy project. Yeah. And two, even if you don't join the Italy project, still make use of all of our great resources. And I think you can show some of the stuff from the resource page. There's some really good apps that have been created for it too. A Gregg Clark has a killer citation app for the Antonati site. You drop in a URL from the site and it helps you mostly construct. You have to do a little bit of filling in of some details, but it'll help you construct either an inline or a footnote citation. So you can spruce up your profiles and don't have to just put in the old, personal recollection of this information from me. But even though this guy was born 150 years ago, I personally remember what happened. I'm not gonna fly because you're not a time board. No way, say those are my favorite profiles. I want to talk to the PMs that personally remember that information back from 1700. Yeah, I feel I want to send them a private message if you'd like a stream troll and be like, so are you a time board from Gallifrey? You the doctor? Yeah. And Erin, I see your message, you know, exactly. Don't worry about, if you don't know much about how to research in Italy, that's why you join because you have us to kind of lean on. And I'll tell you, at any time I see a new name pop up is joining a project, I'll go navigate to their profile and see, well, what do they have so far? And let's see, hey, can I help them, you know, build up a little bit? And so I'll leave some little research presence for them. And I think that's a really good point about WikiTree in general. You might have an interest in a project and the project, the interest level could be anywhere from like 1% to 100%. You don't have to have the full knowledge to join a project because I like what you said, Frank. The reason you join, sometimes you have a lot of knowledge but sometimes you want to gain knowledge. And that's the beauty of WikiTree. The projects that I've joined, they've been so welcoming. What do you need? What can we help with? What can we have you help us with as well? Because there's always work in a project and to help you get to another project better, I like how you leave little things for them, little presence, until you get them started. Like get you started and then maybe, maybe give you the impetus to do some more or say, hey, you know, how can I, what can I do for you all? How can I help? How can I help the next person that comes along? We've had some folks who have joined the project who have just gone gangbusters and all of a sudden like, I mean, dropped in, you know, 200, 300 profiles and some thongs. It's like, all right, here we go. And that would be Danita Sonne. She actually lives in Italy and we have people like Christina Corbillani who's in a chat right now who's been working with Argentina or their record there. And we have some people who live in Brazil. And everything. That's fabulous because like we said, you know, again, we Americans assume that they all migrated here but they didn't. So it's really, really fabulous that the Italy project points out the different regions and you have people working there that know those areas. So if you do have somebody who went to Argentina from Italy, your project has somebody in place to help you out, get you started. You know where you'll have relatives? I recently found out relatives in Australia, actually. It's not that long ago, that was pretty cool. That's pretty cool. Yes, yes. That was very cool. And I asked you guys, I want to let everybody know though. So your Italy connections are your great grandparents? Wow. My paternal grandfather was born in Italy. And then my next closest is my paternal grandmother's father also born in Italy. Yeah, my paternal grandfather was born in Italy and my paternal grandmother's parents were born in Italy. So. So did you both grow up learning two languages? No. That's in front? I can see this with this one. That's where you're starting out, right? Yeah, my grandparents argued in Italian a lot, but I didn't really learn much of anything. I took Spanish in high school and that was very helpful when I really got heavy into Italian genealogy in the last four or five years. So there are a lot of, there's a lot of commonalities, but then again, there's a lot of false friends, false cognates that it's like, oh, nope, that word does not mean what I thought it meant. Yeah. My dad knows a lot of Italian and you will swear I've been Italian and that's all you need to know. Okay. So what would you say that for Americans, the thing that we get wrong about Italy? Yeah, it's not really Italian. Don't say Olive Garden, Chris. Can we just say the food in general? Yeah. That's fair. Well, it's not. I mean, American Italian food is great, but it's not necessarily Italian. And the things that people call, call certain types of foods, if you're up in New Jersey and New York, that's not how you pronounce it in Italian, but that's okay. So when I talk about spaghetti sauce, it's not really called gravy in Italy, correct? Oh, no. You call it gravy? Up in New Jersey, they call it gravy. Well, how funny, I've never heard that. No, they do that. But I don't live in New Jersey, so. Yeah, no, there's a great YouTube channel called Easy Italian, that's just kind of like it's about learning Italian and there's a guy on there who's from Southern Italy, but his girlfriend is English. And so they spent some time back and forth between Italy and England. And one episode, they had him try Italian food in England. Oh, yeah. Chicken Parmigiana, he goes, this is not, this is not exist in Italy. I subscribe to a channel called Colour What's Now, they actually live in Boston, he's from Italy, and they try all these Italian restaurants, and she actually took them to Olive Garden. Surprisingly, they go married. Oh, no, you all are making me hungry, though. I know. The one misconception that you don't probably realize until you start doing Italian research is that you think of Italy and think, oh, I know, there's all this history and it's just thousands and thousands of years of history. And you don't realize that, well, Italy as a country is a pretty new concept, you know, it was only formed in 1861. Yeah. And up until that time. It was the kingdoms, right? Well, there were lots of different kingdoms and duchies and this, that and the other. And it was the playground of all kinds of empires coming through and trying to put a stamp on things, so. Tentry of the centuries. Well, let me ask you another question that just popped up in my, from my own research. So if you have Italy and you have Sicily, those are now considered together as far as research, but before, as you mentioned, there were different kingdoms. And so I would, to find really old Sicilian records that would be going through, I guess, the kingdom of Sicily, was there? Yeah, so the good thing is for the civil records, you know, civil records were started by Napoleon when he kind of blew through Italy in the early part of the 1800s. And, you know, for the most part, all of mainland Italy, you know, on the peninsula had civil record keeping while Napoleon was around. So from about, you know, 1805 to 1809 starting in some places, all through the end of the Napoleonic Wars, 1815. And then after that, everything kind of reverted through the Congress of Vienna. All the kingdoms went back to where they were, more or less. But some places like the, what was the, in the South, the kingdom of Naples, the reign of the Napoli, and the kingdom of Sicily, reign of the Sicilia joined together, became the kingdom of two Sicilies, reign of the due Sicilia, and they decided, hey, you know what, the civil record keeping thing is pretty cool, we're gonna keep this. And so they kept it in the South, they started it in Sicily, and the Antonati site, which has all these records, has not only the records of the kingdom of Italy from 1861 forward, but it also has the records from the civil records from those preceding kingdoms. So from the kingdom of two Sicilies, kingdom of Napoli. So it's got those civil records from those preceding kingdoms going back to the early 1800s. And that's a free site. All free, yep. So what you're saying is, is that I really don't need to go to Sicily or to Italy to go research though through their documents, I can find it online. Absolutely, and then. Well, that's a shame. I know, I know, but you know, if you still wanna go, you should probably go. I think it's important for you to actually be there in person. Yeah, I mean, if you still good. Just, you know, you can only go back so far with civil records. And then we'll now, now you gotta look at church records. Well, to get to church records, a lot of them aren't online, you gotta go in person. Well, it sounds like to me that we need to have you both as our, you know, travel. Travel guides? Yeah. Sounds great, I'm available for a small fee, no problem. Just be there. Oh, honey, we'll take care of it. Okay, does everybody have their second bingo card up? We're ready to go. And not to answer Steve's earlier question. Yeah, there are a list of names that can translate to Italian and English. Hey, I find I'll link it to you, all right? Yeah, it's so weird because, you know, my middle name is Vincent, yeah. And Vincenzo, for whatever reason. It's James. People decided to Americanize it as James. I don't know, I had no idea where that came from, but okay. I'm sorry, it puzzles my dad so much because his name is James, and his grandfather's name is James. That's another thing, Italian naming conventions too. That's the way complicated, more or less. I mean, like, the name is James. It's not, I mean, the system isn't complicated. It's very easy. It just makes things complicated because everybody gets named after their grandfather. And so, you know, if a grandfather's got, you know, seven male grandchildren, they're all named after him and they all have the same name. And so, like, I believe these guys are running around town here. Hey, your name's Giuseppe. Oh, yeah, my name's Giuseppe. Okay, and that's where my great grandfather is. Yeah, and so actually, I mean, to kind of eliminate some of that confusion you see in a lot of civil records is the use of patronymics. So, and by that, you know, I mean, like, so, you know, my patronymic would be, you know, Frank Santoro, son of Frank. You know, so you see, you know, someone's name will be given and then also the name of their father. So you can kind of narrow it down a little bit better. My patronymic. They do this for the women as well as the men, you know, everybody gets a patronymic of their father in civil records. In my case, my patronymic is alternated between Marco and Vicente of the centuries. Yeah, exactly. Yeah. And remember, if those of you came in late, one of the biggest tips that I've learned today are the females, the women, keep their last name at birth. Yes. That was a big one. Okay, we're ready for bingo. All right, let's go. Okay. You're up, Frank. All right, we've got Verona. There were two gentlemen who lived there. Yeah. If you have Verona, which we lay out of scene, Rich and Crutch break the new music. Great. Isn't Verona, Romain and Juliet? Yes, indeed. Torino, which in English we call Turin. Or that crowd was. So you had the Olympics. I think the Olympics are going back. I think so. Ah, I mentioned this earlier. This is Reino Di Napoli or the Kingdom of Naples, which was the reigning kingdom of basically the Southern Italian peninsula for about 700 years from about the 12th century to 1861. Give or take. Reino di Italia, that is the official name of the kingdom of Italy that was formed in 1861 when everything kind of got sucked up together. And this is when it became a united, unified Italy. Correct, yes. So 1861. Yep. After Garibaldi kind of blew through and conquered everything on behalf of the kingdom of Sardinia, which was really kind of the driving force from all this. But anyway, moving on. Parma, they make good cheese. Mm, I am, right? Yeah. Cimitero monumentale. So that is basically a gravestone. Oh, okay. It's really important to note that in Italian cemeteries, they kind of like rotate out your answers through the cemeteries because land is at a premium. So they take the bone out after a certain amount of time and they just kind of rotate it. Unless the family wants to keep the stone. Yeah. So yeah, so yeah, rented graves or time rented graves are a big thing there just because there's premium on space. So how long would a grave be rented for? Is there a limit? I don't think there's a limit as long as you want to pay. But I think typically what you see is around the order of between 40, 50 years. Yeah. And then the grave gets reused, correct? Correct. And then the bone, whatever is left in the grave goes to what's called an ossuary. So giant buildings where all the bones are kind of put together. And in some cemeteries, you'll have little family ossuaries that have centuries of one family's bones. So. Yeah. All right, Genova, which is how we call Genoa in Italian. Bologna, another big city up in the North. Yeah, five good ham there. Not Oscar Mayer. Stato Pontifico. This is the official name of the Papal States, which they had a good chunk of territory in the center of the Italian peninsula from up until Italian unification. And now they just shrank to the little neighborhood in Rome called the Vatican. I was gonna ask my next question. How does that relate to the Vatican? Interesting. Yep, it all emanated from there. And that is what you do, research. Wow, cool. Say that one more time. Ricerca. One more time. Ricerca. Reigno delle due Sicilie. This is the kingdom of two Sicilies that were united, united the kingdom of Sicily and the kingdom of Naples under one banner, which they really were kind of sort of united anyway because they were ruled by the same person and just in kind of, it was like a personal union. They were ruled by the Spanish Habsburgs for a while and then the Spanish Bourbons. So yeah, but this kind of just cemented the deal to say, nevermind, forget the two countries business, we'll just be one country now. Milano or Milan. Another one. Palermo, Europe and actually back to capital of the world. Palermo, hey, I think we saw that last time. We did. This is Sicily, this largest city in Sicily? Largest city in Sicily. Tons, tons of amazing architecture and history there because of the history of the people there. I mean, that's where you get all the blonde-eyed Italian from the Norman conquest that kind of ran over Sicily in the medieval period. Yeah, and it should be noted that if you see on a ship register, someone's coming from Palermo or Naples, that doesn't necessarily mean they were born there. That means the ship manifest was created. Those are the big ports, Napoli, Palermo and then Genova up in the north. Don't hold me to this, but the question is, I believe Sicily is one of the most conquered and reconquered and conquered and reconquered territories in the world. Yes, I would agree with that. You've got just a ton of history from the Greeks to the Normans to Islamic, Muslim conquest. I mean, just Spanish, French, they've all been there. So I would say if you wrote this from Sicily, your DNA is probably fascinating to see where all the regions that they were conquered pretty much. Okay. Let's go, we got a bingo. All right, you're the Calabria. Yeah, it's down in the foot of the boot. It's Irish John. Congratulations, John. So John, what you need to do is come up and email anyone and she will take care of you. Just let her know that you won the Italy Project bingo two and she will get you all hooked up from there. Everything, all your choices, anything you wanna pick, that's a t-shirt or mug, I think under $30. This is a really nice prize that Wiki Tree gives for these bingos. It's very generous and very nice. And I might add that the bingo mug is still popular. You're gonna have to give us ads. I don't know what's the most popular prize. It's definitely the mug. Is it? So congratulations. Now, real quick, does anybody have any questions that maybe we didn't see because we were talking or something just popped in your head that you wanna ask our two experts from Italy here, Frank and Chris, because now's a great time. And I will tell you, I have learned a lot. I thought I knew some of the research of Italy but you guys have really opened my eyes on even more to learn. And giving me a little bit of hope that maybe I can go find a relative Sicilian people, ancestors, especially, I'm gonna assume, Frank, you have Sicily on that research spreadsheet? Oh, yes. Oh, good. And I tell you, and I don't just have civil records on there to, I've got church records on there as well. Family search has a good chunk of church records in Sicily, but there have been some new church collections that have come online recently. The diocese of Agri Gento in Sicily put a ton of church records going back to the 1500s online. The diocese of Reggio Calabria Bova down in the foot of the boot has done similar. So I mean, you've got church records that you can get online for free in some of these places going back to the 16th century. It's just... That's amazing. And what was amazing to me is I can go ahead, go to family search, which I'm very familiar with already for records and find these Italian records. I gotta tell you, I was pretty shocked when you told me that. Yeah, yeah. And just the trick is going to the catalog and not just going to search records because go to search records. I'll tell you that note that while the indexing of the civil records is done by family search, if you enter a name in family search, you're only searching maybe, I would say less than 10% of the available records. Most of them are all just static scanned images that you have to kind of go in and go through. That's a good tip. Yeah, but fortunately, again, on our research and resources page, we've got lots of tips and tricks to help you along, learning how to find... There may not be computer indexes, but there are handwritten indexes for these books, usually one for every year. Sometimes you have tenure indexes that are written up. And so it makes life a little bit easier, searching through 10 years worth of records at once through their indexing system. Sometimes some indexes are better than others. And you made a point that I always tell everybody, no matter where you're researching around the world, indexing happens every day. Every single day, new records come up. So if you might not find something today, you might find something next week. So always keep searching. If you don't find it first and you go after this, everybody starts heading over to family search to the Italian catalogs there. It's not there, keep looking. Probably definitely, because you said more and more records are coming up. Yeah, and I mean, I know family search can't keep up with the records that they add. And I know they're starting to work with AI and machine learning to try to do some of the indexing job because the human indexes just cannot keep up. There's just more, so much coming online. Okay guys, well, I would like, thank you guys. I think that we learned a lot. Oh, one question. I have something to say. I just want to say good job to Sandy because when we were first talking about the bingo stuff, I think it sounded like it would be more game and fun with a little bit of project thrown in, but you've really turned these into really good, like informative, helpful, but yet still fun. I think that's a question. So I've learned, I mean, I learned a lot. And this one, everyone that we've had, it's been really cool to learn. So good job on that. Well, that's so kind of you. I really appreciate it. And I will tell you, it's my curiosity. I think everybody has a curiosity and I really, really love the projects you guys stepped up. So we didn't force these guys. They stepped up and they wanted to be here for Wiki Tree. So I think that's collaborative, communicative and just awesome. Yeah, it's awesome. And I love how much I learned as well. And let me put in a little plug, go to Italy again and make sure that if you have an interest in Italy, reach out. If you have questions, reach out to both of these. Are you both on Discord as well? Yes. Yes, so reach out to them, send them information. If you have a question, if you're nervous about joining, they will help you out. And then don't forget in a couple of hours at the six p.m. Eastern time, we have class that Disney bingo and the second bingo card for that will be trivia. It'll be Disney song trivia. So join us for that as well. And otherwise, thanks, Frank and Chris. We enjoyed it. All right. Bye guys. See you later, buddy.