I am looking for family members. My family name is Canessa from Sicily. Are ther

Question:

I am looking for family members. My family name is Canessa from Sicily. Are there any original Canessa's out t

Best Answer - Chosen by Asker: If you do the basics of genealogy research and find the name of your immigrant ancestor, you'll have no trouble tracing the family and getting all sorts of records. Sicily is a very easy place to research in and the vast majority of Sicilians who immigrated to America came after 1901. So the National Archives have a plethora of information on them that will make your research easy.

The hard part about searching a name like Canessa and just looking for "anyone" with the name is that it isn't uniquely Sicilian and isn't even solely Italian. It's also Spanish and Portuguese. Amongst the Italians there are as many from Naples as there are from Sicily. You could easily hook up with someone and end up getting sidetracked in horribly difficult ways. Researching family members is so much easier when you can ask for descendents of one person rather than anyone from any country who has a given surname. I'll bet with 4-5 phone calls to key family members, you could have the name of your immigrant ancestors. From there it's just one letter to the National Archives, a few calls to Catholic churches and a visit to the county courthouse to have a very good idea of who your family was and where they came from...including the names of all the kids of the grandparents who came over when you pull their will from the Probate Court. The best part is that it's not expensive and it's immensely more accurate than the internet.