The genealogy website http://www.familysearch.org now has a large number of historical scanned documents from all over Italy. Many of these documents aren’t indexed so manually searching them is the only way to find specific documents. One of the regions covered is the town of Roseto Valfortore in the province of Foggia. Searching for relevant information means browsing through 1000’s of images. I started browsing the records from 1866 – the earliest year available and I quickly found a marriage record for my great great grandfather’s sister Antonia Menecola. She married Filippo Antonio Sabatino on the 27th of June, 1866. The marriage records for Roseto are written out in long hand, there are no standard forms. Apparently it was a Roman Catholic requirement to post the Marriage announcement or Banns some time before the actual ceremony to ensure there was no legal or religious reason the marriage should not be performed.

I had information pointing to a previous marriage for Antonia Menecola to Antonio Finelli in April of 1852. They had five children, the last born in 1863. Doing some digging in the actual marriage record from 1866 I was able to translate some the the text and discovered that Antonia’s first husband – Antonio Finelli had died in June of 1865. A year after his death she married Filippo Antonio Sabatino. I couldn’t find any record of children born to them.