Antenati: the portal for the genealogical research in the Net

The Project Antenati is coordinated by the General Direction for the Archives of MIBAC (Ministry for the Goods and the Cultural Activities) and is managed by Cineca on the occasion of the project Digital Library.

Like other national portals about the familiar story, promoted in several Countries, the Portal Antenati of the National Archive Keeping System (SAN) was borne to organize and make available  the huge documentary keeping of the records of civil State existing in the Archives of State. It allows to conduct registry or genealogical researches aimed at the reconstruction of the families and persons'  history. Objective of the Portale is  to publish millions and millions images relating to the civil State Registries. The images come from the digitalizatione of micro-films and from the scan of paper registries taken from the Fondo Napoleonico (since 1806 to 1815), from the Restauration Fund (since 1815 to 1866) and from the Italian one (scanned  until the first of 1900).

The project is to  make available, in the space of a quinquennium, by the means of the Digital Library  piatform, carried out and maintained by Cineca:

• about 120 millions digitalized images coming by the scans and accession by micro-films of the interesting registries;
• a data base of the names contained in the images of the Registries of the civil State, designed for easing the researchers of registry or genealogical kind and created thanks to the work of a group of volunteers.

The Portal is organized in four thematic areas:

• The Portal: descriptive area of the project and of its aims;
• The Territory and its  Fonts: section that collects the list of the State Archives  which retain the registries of Civil State and of the Draft Lists;
• Look through the Registries: research mask  for the navigation through the pages (digitalized) of the Civil State Registries;
• Find the names: research mask of the names of person drawn out from the Civil State registries.

Launched  officially in December 2011, in May 2014 the portal already collected the registries of Civil State for 17 State Archivies (Ascoli Piceno, Bari, Campobasso, Catanzaro, Como, Cuneo, Firenze, Genova, L'Aquila, Lucca, Mantova, Messina, Modena, Napoli, Pesaro-Urbino, Section of Fano, Turin, Treviso, Udine ) in a period ranging between the first 800 to the first 900.
 The images in the portal are more than 19 millions.

Cineca coped with the  development and management of the technological platform, foe which a system was set up, based on 2 virtual servers (one for the production and one other for the development ) and a storage area network with a current capacity of about 60 TB. The portal' s interface was developed in Drupal, and the software open-source Gallery was used for the management of the digital objects . E' prevista During 2014, the migration on the new technological Digital Library platform of Cineca, named Giotto should take place.