Documents from any country

A file by descent is a chain of certificates issued by two or three States, and each office which receives it applies to the foreign documents the rules of its own country on legalisation and on translation. The Italian rules are few, and the practice of the consulates adds to them details which differ from one district to another, so that a file prepared for Cologne is not, in every particular, a file prepared for Curitiba or Los Angeles. This page sets out the rules and the variations which matter most.

Legalisation

A public document issued in a State party to the Hague Convention of 1961 is legalised for Italy with the apostille of the authority which that State designates, and the main countries of emigration are all parties: the United States, Brazil, Argentina, Australia, the United Kingdom, South Africa, Uruguay, Venezuela, and Canada since January 2024. A document issued in a State outside the Convention is legalised by the Italian consulate in that State, which also certifies its translation. The civil status certificates of the member States of the European Union circulate without apostille under the regulation of 2016, with the multilingual standard forms, and the multilingual extracts of the Vienna Convention of 1976 need neither legalisation nor translation. The apostille is requested on the certificate itself, issued by the registrar, and the consulates in the countries of emigration ask for it on paper: an electronic apostille is accepted by some offices and refused by others, and the paper one is accepted everywhere.

Translation

Every certificate not in Italian is translated, and the consulates accept two kinds of translation: one made in the country where the document was issued, by a translator authorised there and certified by the consulate or apostilled where the country’s law allows it, or one sworn in Italy before the registry of a court or a justice of the peace. The consulate in Cologne accepts both and refuses a translation made through a third language. The consulate in Curitiba asks for a sworn translator and the apostille on both the certificate and the translation. The consulate in Adelaide asks for a translator accredited by the national authority and tells applicants that apostilles are not translated and translations are not apostilled. The consulate in Los Angeles asks for the translation certified by the Italian consulate in the country of issue. Each translation must be attached to its own certificate, and a certificate issued in Italy needs no translation at all. The page on translations explains what each form of certification means.

Form and validity

The certificates are certified copies of the registers, in the long form where the country issues one, bearing the signature of the registrar on which the apostille is placed. Italian law does not fix a period of validity for the certificates of a line, and most consulates accept the certificates of the ancestors whatever their date, while asking for recent documents of the applicant: the consulate in Los Angeles asks for the applicant’s own birth certificate issued within twenty-four months, and the proof of residence is required within two or three months of the appointment in nearly every district. A certificate which carries an error in a name or a date is corrected by the authority which issued it before the appointment, because the consulate compares every document with the next and stops at the first discrepancy. The page on the common problems with documents lists the discrepancies we meet most often.

The proof that the ancestor did not naturalise

The fact which decides a line is whether the emigrant took the citizenship of the country of arrival before the birth of the next person in the line, and since 2025 whether the parent or grandparent held exclusively Italian citizenship at the applicant’s birth. Each country records naturalisation in its own way, and the consulates ask for the record in the form of that country. In the United States the proof is a letter of no record from the United States Citizenship and Immigration Services and a second one from the National Archives, both with the seal of the office and the variants of the name, for the period from the arrival to the twenty-first birthday of the child, the eighteenth for births after 1975, with a further document which shows the alien status of the ancestor, and where a naturalisation occurred its certificate or the court record, obtained through the genealogy programme of the immigration service. In Brazil it is the certidão negativa de naturalização of the Ministry of Justice, with the apostille and the variants of the name, or the registration of a living ancestor as a foreigner. In Argentina it is the certificate of no naturalisation of the Cámara Nacional Electoral, and where a naturalisation occurred the full judgment. In Australia it is the record of the Department of Home Affairs on the status of the ancestor, in South Africa the statement of the Department of Home Affairs on the absence of South African citizenship with the apostille of the Department of International Relations, and in the United Kingdom the letter of the Home Office and the records of The National Archives. For Canada, Venezuela, Uruguay and the other countries the proof is the certificate or the letter of the authority which grants the naturalisation, apostilled and translated, in the form the consulate of the district specifies.

Send us the list of the countries in which the people of your line were born, married and died, and the documents you hold. We tell you which certificate is needed from each country, in which form, with which legalisation and which translation, and we obtain and translate them with our team of official translators in every language.