About the Research

The goal of this research is twofold:

1. People around the world with roots in the villages of Val Rendena can build reliable reconstructions of their personal ancestry, based upon actual historical records of births, marriages and deaths in the valley. This incorporates three centuries of vital statistics.

2. The database, containing a depth of detail rarely available, will be a starting point for other types of research:

• Social
• Cultural
• Historical
• Epidemiological (possibly)

The 3-part research* that feeds this unique database are being conducted simultaneously. Currently abstraction and indexing of data is centered on the towns of Pinzolo, Carisolo, Giustino and Massimeno, as these four are closely intertwined, although the database already contains a considerable amount of data from Caderzone and Bocenago.

Simultaneously, this abstracted data is being used to construct verifiable genealogical lineages for the families of those towns.

The third arm of the research, the cemeteries project, has already fully documented the cemeteries of Pinzolo, Carizolo, Giustino and Massimeno, through October 2009, as well as the cemeteries of  Bocenago, Caderzone, Strembo and Spiazzo through October 2007.

The objective of the project is to extend the three arms of the research to include all the towns of Val Rendena to preserve a permanent and verifiable record of its people and culture for generations to come.

As time progresses, it is hoped that it will become a searchable resource not only for individuals seeking their own roots, but for sociologists, ethnographers, historians and even medical researchers seeking insight into genetic issues.

It is hoped that this database will continue to grow even after the available historical sources have been fully mined through the voluntary participation of current residents and the world wide diaspora of Rendenese.

*Database 1: marriage, birth, death records, 2: genealogical lineages for individual families, and 3: a visual database documenting the cemeteries of the valley as they exist today.

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