01/27/2019
The digitization of these parish records went online a year ago. A wealth of information for families born in the Reggio-Bova region of Italy.
On Friday, December 15, in the hall Mons. Giovanni Ferro of the Curia of Reggio Calabria Bova, the official presentation of the website of the Historical Archives of the Diocese of Reggio was held. In the presence of Archbishop Giuseppe Fiorini Morosini and Archbishop Emeritus, Mons. Vittorio Mondello , Dr. Maria Pia Mazzitelli, director of the Diocesan Historical Archive, outlined the steps that allowed the online landing of an archival patrimony made up of over 300 thousand digitized images covering a period from the end of the 16th to the mid-20th century. There are about 625 thousand information contained in the parish registers, divided into baptismal, deceased, marriages and status of souls, which are made available for historical or genealogical research. The digitization project, strongly supported by Mons. Mondello, has the primary purpose of safeguarding documents and making their use by users easier. It is part of a larger renovation project, commissioned by the CEI, which provides access to the archival heritage with the exclusive use of computers. This intention was combined with the idea of making the registers of the parishes of the diocese accessible, since, touching the chronological extremes that precede the introduction of the Napoleonic State by about two centuries, they constitute an indispensable local registry for research. genealogical. This operation makes it possible to respond to the ever-growing demand from the descendants of Italians who emigrated abroad, eager to try their origins to obtain Italian citizenship.
The digitization of the parish registers was carried out by Bernardus Cornelius van Rijswijk , a passionate researcher of genealogical sources, who were later joined by Anna Maltese , expert photographer and arch. Rocco Grillo regarding the selection of images. Since 2011 the registers of 109 parishes out of 137 have been digitized, so it is still a work in progress. The digitization process was followed by the design and creation of the website created thanks to the valuable contribution of the Calabria Training team and in particular from Eng. Antonio Galletta and of the dott. Giorgio Nordo, who took care of the compression and optimization of the images as well as the development of a portal that allowed an easy online consultation of the parish registers and the possibility of purchasing one or more certified copies of the pages of the same online. In particular, the engineer Galletta illustrated how to optimize, compress and standardize in quality and resolution the 305.411 digitization of the pages of the parish registers was necessary a preliminary intervention that required the use of advanced algorithms for the treatment of images and a series of specially written software. In his speech, as president of Calabria Formazione as well as a member of the development team, dr. Giorgio Nordohe summarized the most significant technical aspects of the portal and the online consultation platform of parish registers, underlining the importance of using only Open Source technologies and software , that is, free of charge and - what is more important - from the code to "open source" ", That is freely rewritable in order to perfectly satisfy the design specifications. More specifically, the group of developers, using languages and libraries such as PHP, MySQL, HTML5, CSS3, JQuery and BootStrap, has rewritten more than 11,000 lines of code obtaining a web application that, while managing a patrimony of about one million Megabytes of digitized images, is agile and easy to use.
To access website, go to https://www.archiviodiocesanoreggiobova.it/en/reference-parish-registers/
