Did you know you can tell a lot about an Italian Surnames origin by it's ending?  Or that generally speaking surnames in Southern regions of Italy end in vowels but as one moves North many surnames will end in consonants?  This can possibility be attributed to the fact that Northern Italy borders have changed several times over the centuries and belonged to other European countries so surnames were "grandfathered' in.

Some examples of such surnames and the regions they can found in are:

Anzil - Fruili-Venezia Giulia
Bionaz - Valle d'Aosta
Conchin - Friuli-Venezia Giulia,  Lombardy, Piemonte
De Pellegrin - Fruili-Venezia Giulia
De Sanctis -  Abruzzo, Lazio, Lombardy
Orbel - Piemonte
Perin - Veneto, Lombardy
Rigonat - Fruili-Venezia Giulia
Schiff -  Fruili-Venezia Giulia

Other  surname endings found in Northern regions include:

Suffix		Region		Example
- otti/utti		Fruili, Lombardy		Pascutti
- otti/utti		Emilia Romagna, Lombardy, Trentino		Bortolotti
-aci/ecci/ucci		Tuscany		Ghelarducci
-ai		Lombardy, Tuscany		Mungai
-u, -as and -is		Sardinia		Piccinnu, Marras, Floris, Melis

**Sources**

1. Italian Surname Database - accessed 6 Jul 2013

2. Gens-Italia - accessed 6 Jul 2013

3. Webpages by  Stephen P. Morse , San Francisco - accessed 6 July 2013

4. Wikipedia  - accessed 6 Jul 2013
  

A new search feature has been added to the Italian Surname Database  (thanks to Stephen P Morse's One-Step Search Tool Generator )which offers more flexibility as you can now search not only by surname but by town, province or region.  I don't expect there to be any major bugs with the feature but I am still tweaking it so should you find something not quite right please let me know. 

A widget has also been added to the sidebar so you can now view updated posts to this blog right from the website.  As always, I continue to look forward to any comments, suggestions or feedback about this new look and what can be done to improve it further.

Enjoy!

A reader wrote asking about the surname Molinelli.  It appears that all Molinelli listed on the ship manifests I looked at that went through Ellis Island were from Bertone. There didn't seem to be any others from that area in Pavia so I continued to look at found a discussion about this very thing on the Italian Genealogy Forum.

The surname itself implies windmill (Mulinello) and windmills are found all over the area.  For anyone interested I would have a look at the the discussion board over at Italian Genealogy and look thorugh the ship records at Steve Morse's Site.

*Sources used: Google, One Step Pages by Steve Morse

With the holiday season upon us I thought it would be nice to talk about some holiday inspired names.  Some names that come to mind are Natale (Christmas) Grazia (Grace) and Bifano (Epiphany).  All have been used as first or surnames.

A quick search on Searching the Enhanced Ellis Island Database in One Step using Natale with no variation returns over 2300 persons with the surname arrived through Ellis Island between 1892-1924.  By removing the letter e from the end of the name and searching again, the returns are over 3400.  By doing a search using it as a first name, which does yield some variations, almost 15,000 hits are returned!
Using Gens-Italia, we find the surname is present in over 956 towns with the highest concentration in the regions of Campania and Lombardy.  And of course, if we use the Italian White Pages Pagine Bianche to search the surname, we find that 3317 people are listed.

Let's try the same thing with Grazia. Doing a quick search on Grazia, again with no variation, we find that 3282 immigrants with the surname entered through the New York port.  Gens Italia returns the name is still present in 158 towns with the highest concentration in Emilia Romagna while there are only 423 persons listed in the Italian White pages.

The less popular Bifano still returns 119 hits on Ellis Island, found in 72 towns in Italy and 158 hits on the Italian White Pages.

As a side note - while extracting records from various towns in Reggio Calabria, I often noticed that the first names Natale and  Natalina were given to persons born either near or on Christmas Eve/Christmas Day.  I also found that these births, and many births which took place in late December were not registered until January the following year so my advice is that if you are looking for someone named Natale and are having difficulty locating a birth record, try looking in the months of December and January.  
Name Meaning and History
Bifano

Dictionary of American Family Names, Oxford University Press, ISBN 0-19-508137-4
Grazia
Italian form of Grace.

This post is dedicated to my good friend "Biff" and his family who I now consider a part of my very special Gente family.  God Bless and Happy Holidays.

Morabito
Last name origin & meaning:
Italian (Sicily): nickname for a teetotaler, Sicilian murabbitu, from Arabic murābịt ‘hermit’, ‘ascetic’.


According to the Genealogy Family Education website, this surname is actually a derivative of the Arabic surname of Murabit meaning hermit. Facebook has a whole group devoted to this surname - Morabito.. more tha a name, a way of life.  with over 170 members and open content.

While searching the Ellis Island Website using my favourite search engine One Step Pages by Stephen Morse
and using various spellings, I discovered the surname is most common in parts of Sicily and Reggio Calabria.

According to the RES website, the surname appears in 79 out of 380 towns in Calabria.