Maria's grandfather left Palermo in 1903. Last week, she held his birth certificate for the first time — found in 7 minutes.
From $49 per search · Live quote before you pay
What you receive
Original handwritten image, AI transcription, family relationships, and exact dates — ready to use for your application or research.
Born 14 April 1875 · Termini Imerese, Palermo
Father: Giuseppe Mascari
Mother: Maria Lo Cascio
The handwritten record itself, exactly as it was written by the comune scribe in the 1800s.
Names, dates, parents, places of birth — all extracted by AI and verified.
Every record links back to the official Antenati archive so you can verify and download.
Parents, marriages, and siblings are surfaced — letting you trace your lineage step by step.
Real discoveries
Three of the people who came to Atavium looking for their roots.
Birth record · Termini Imerese · 1903
“My grandfather Vincenzo arrived at Ellis Island in 1909, age six, refusing to look back at Sicily. After he died, I spent four years and $1,500 searching for his birth record. Atavium found it in seven minutes — Termini Imerese, 1903, parents Giuseppe and Rosa Mascari. I cried when I saw his name written by the village priest. Now I am filing for citizenship, and my children will hold Italian passports.”
Marriage record · San Lucido · 1881
“For three generations, my family wondered who Nonna Antonia really was. The censuses only listed her first name. Through Atavium, I traced her marriage record to a tiny village in Calabria — San Lucido, 1881. I found her parents, her witnesses, even the comune scribe's signature. Last summer, my mother and I visited the chapel where they were married. She lit a candle. We both cried.”
Death record · Termoli · 1898
“Five years of dead ends with researchers in Italy. They charged $200 per record and sent me black-and-white photocopies six months later. With Atavium I found four direct ancestors in one weekend — three in Termoli, one in a comune renamed in 1929 (the AI handled that automatically). My family tree now reaches back to 1812. I have ten new cousins to write to.”
Stories illustrate common discoveries by Atavium users. Names and locations changed for privacy. Photographs are illustrative.
Why I built this
In 2024, my friend's grandmother died waiting eight months for a paid researcher in Italy to find her father's birth certificate — the document she needed to claim her own Italian citizenship. She was 89.
The records existed. They had existed for 120 years — public, scanned, sitting in an Italian government archive any computer could read. Only the people qualified to read them charged $200 per document and worked at a pace measured in seasons, not minutes.
I spent the next year building what should have existed all along: an AI that reads handwritten 19th-century Italian civil records the way a human researcher would, at a fraction of the cost and a thousand times faster.
This won't bring her grandmother back. But it might mean fewer families wait. Fewer descendants miss their chance. Fewer stories die with the people who could have told them.
Records sourced from Antenati, the Italian Ministry of Culture's civil records archive (1800–1949)
How it works
No Italian language. No paleography skills. No 6-week wait.
Select the Italian provincia, then choose from indexed comuni. Set the year range and record type (birth, marriage, death).
Our AI reads every handwritten record in the relevant registers, transcribing 19th-century Italian script into searchable text.
Receive the full transcription with parents' names, exact dates, and a high-resolution image of the original record.
More than data
Behind every record, a piece of your family's story.
The exact stroke of ink she put down on her marriage day, preserved 140 years later.
Civil records often name the precise street and house. Some still stand today, in the same village.
Witnesses and siblings on records reveal whole branches of family — sometimes alive in Italy now.
Marriage and death records mention emigration — the ship, the year, the new world.
Pricing
Live quote before you pay. No subscriptions. No hidden fees.
Most searches up to a few years and one comune.
Deep multi-decade research. Live quote before you pay.
Live price calculated from indexed registries before you pay. How does pricing work?
“I'd already paid $400 to a researcher who took 8 weeks. Atavium found two missing records in 7 minutes for $98. Should have started here.”
For law firms & genealogy services
Italian-American firms processing 50+ JS cases per year save thousands of hours and tens of thousands in researcher costs by using Atavium for document retrieval.
$39/search at 100+/month
Integrate into your existing case management workflow
Direct line to our team for priority cases
Branded transcriptions ready for your clients
Frequently asked
We count the exact number of indexed pages that match your criteria (comune, year range, record type) and quote based on that. Searches with up to 250 pages are $49 flat (Quick). Searches over 250 pages are $0.20 per page (Custom). The price is shown on the form before you pay — no surprises after the fact.
We process every page in your selected range and deliver complete results — including pages where no match was found. Our coverage is strongest for southern Italy (Sicily, Campania, Calabria) and growing weekly. If you're unsure whether your comune is well-indexed, drop us a line at hello@atavium.ai before purchasing.
The three stories on our homepage are composites built from common patterns we see — names and locations are changed, photographs are illustrative. The records, dates, and discovery types reflect what real users experience. As we collect explicit permission from customers, we'll replace these with attributed testimonials.
Records come from Antenati, the Italian Ministry of Culture's public digital archive of civil status records (1800–1949). Atavium is independent and not affiliated with the Italian government — we provide the AI search layer over publicly available records.
No. The interface is in English (also Italian and French). All transcriptions are delivered with Italian original text plus English translation of dates, names, places, and family relationships.
Traditional services charge $150–500 per record and take 4–8 weeks. They use human researchers (you pay for their hours, not the result). Atavium uses AI to read the same records in 5 minutes for $49. We don't replace lawyers — we replace the slow, expensive document retrieval step.
Law 74/2025 introduced a 2-generation limit for new applications. Atavium remains essential for: (1) the 60,000+ pending pre-March 2025 applications still under old rules, (2) court cases under judicial path including 1948 cases, and (3) new 2-generation applicants who still need their grandparent's birth certificate from Italy.
We use Claude Opus 4.7 (the most accurate vision model available) with a two-pass verification system. Every record is delivered with the original handwritten image so you can verify yourself. Confidence scores are displayed per field.
440,000+ records indexed across 2,500+ Italian comuni. Find yours in 5 minutes.
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