Peter, you are of GREAT HELP to all of us
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Peter,
I have been working on my family genealogy for quite some time. It has been a lot of work but let me tell you that it has been a lot of fun and excitement. – completely worth it. My two great-grandfathers (from my mother’s side) came from Italy. Their names were Luigi Rigali and Francesco A. Sangiovanni. So far I have completed the Rigali genealogy of my family, which was fairly easy because they emigrated to the United States. Fortunately for me, there is a vast amount of information and databases that can be used to locate their past in the States.
My other great-grandfather - Francesco A. Sangiovanni - emigrated to Venezuela and even though I have carried out a very, very extensive research on how to locate the info (ship manifests, etc.) in Venezuela it has been very difficult to make the progress I was expecting. I have located the main (active) ports and railroads during the 1850s – 1915s, to follow his possible routes/ ways in and out of the country during his trips but it seems to be almost impossible to locate information from those ports.
The main problem is that there are no databases available to search. Everything is done by hand and due to the lack of resources, organization and/or control of immigrations records by the government, people may have never been registered as immigrants at all.
I also discovered that Venezuelans were not allowed to have double citizenship; it wasn’t until 2001 when a new constitution was enacted making it possible. Maybe that’s one of the reasons nobody made an effort to locate those Archives before.
Anyway, I am not giving up. I have collected a lot of information about Italian immigration to Venezuela and I think I will build a site in the future to be used as reference.