Giulia Desiderati was the name given to a foundling girl who was born in Pisa, Italy, in May 1859. For decades, her descendants searched for more information about her life and parentage, but the paper trail seemed to end with an extract of her civil birth record.
Like many long-running family mysteries, Giulia’s story came with inherited “facts” that turned out to be a mix of truth, transcription errors, and family lore. Earlier notes contained some correct anchors (such as the day and year of birth, and sometimes the hospital name), but other key details drifted—wrong names were used in early attempts, the month of birth was wrong, and assumptions hardened into “facts.” Add a language barrier and unfamiliarity with Italian record terminology, and even strong clues could sit in plain sight without anyone recognizing what they meant.
When I reconnected with my cousin Laurie in March 2025, I had two things going for me: I’d just come back energized from my first Rootstech conference, and I’d recently read David Kertzer’s books Sacrificed for Honor and Amalia’s Tale. Those books made one idea hard to shake: a foundling system as extensive as Italy’s had to leave records—somewhere.
Step 1: Find the original birth record, not the extract
Laurie had an extract of Giulia’s birth record. I tracked down the original 1859 entry in the Pisa civil registers and immediately noticed a detail that no one had paid attention to before. The original act identified that the newborn belonged to the “Popolo” of “Spedali”—that is, the parish/community designation (“popolo”), used for territorial identity in that era, associated with “Spedali,” an abbreviated reference to the Regi Spedali di Santa Chiara in Pisa, the historic foundling hospital.
That clue changed the question completely. I was no longer just looking for a civil birth entry—I was looking for the institutional records created by Santa Chiara’s foundling and custody system, and I needed to figure out whether they survived and where they were conserved.
A quick reality check about foundling research
For many foundlings, the civil birth record may turn out to be the end of the paper trail—but you don’t know that until you look. When I first reached out to Santa Chiara, Laurie’s hope was modest and completely reasonable: maybe we could learn how Giulia was named, where and when she was baptized, who had raised her, and where she had been sent. Even that would have been a meaningful victory.
And sometimes that really is all you get. Some infants were abandoned anonymously—especially at a ruota (foundling wheel)—leaving no parentage to recover. Even then, institutional records may preserve surprising clues: a description of clothing, a note about circumstances, or a token left with the child that could matter later. In one case involving a member of my Italian Genealogy Special Interest Group, the foundling record for her great-grandfather contained no identifying information at all—until she broadened her search into Atti Diversi (in Cefalù, Sicily) and discovered a record showing the baby’s mother returned three days later to reclaim him. The lesson is simple: you don’t know what survives—or where it’s filed—until you go looking.
Practical tip: If the main series seems to be a dead end, always scan the “miscellaneous” series (atti diversi / allegati / fascicoli). That’s where returns, reclaiming, and administrative notes often end up.
Step 2: Ask the right place the right question (and get lucky)
I began by writing to the Archivio di Stato di Firenze. I knew that Tuscany’s historical civil holdings are often centralized in Florence, and I hoped the archivists there could at least confirm where Santa Chiara’s baliatico series was conserved. Whether that was insight or dumb luck, it worked: a knowledgeable archivist replied quickly and told me that the baliatico (wet nurse/foster custody) records for Santa Chiara were still held at Santa Chiara and provided a link to the hospital archive page.
I tried contacting Santa Chiara using the information provided for several weeks but didn’t connect with the right office. At that point, I reminded myself of something that turns out to be true in genealogy more often than we’d like: sometimes you have to try more than one door.
Step 3: Try a different door
Instead of approaching the archive directly, I contacted the hospital through a different channel—its public-facing administrative/communications office. That change made all the difference. Eventually I learned that the previous archivist had retired, which helped explain why my earlier attempts hadn’t gone anywhere—but what mattered most was the takeaway: when one channel doesn’t work, you don’t have to stop. You can try another path within the same institution.
Step 4: The form, the wait, and the moment it arrived
After some back-and-forth, the hospital sent me a request form. I was so excited to get it that I remember exactly what I was doing when it arrived. I filled out the form, explained my purpose (genealogy), and provided identification (a copy of my U.S. driver’s license). After about three months, in August 2025, the record arrived—by PEC email (Italy’s certified email system, similar to registered mail in electronic form).
What the record revealed (and why this case was solvable)
Before I share what it revealed, it’s important to explain why this case produced identifying information at all. Giulia wasn’t anonymously abandoned at a ruota. She was formally presented to Santa Chiara by the midwife who delivered her, and the midwife supplied key personal details—the identities of Giulia’s mother, her maternal grandfather, and their place of origin. If Giulia had been left anonymously at the wheel, the record might have contained only an assigned name, the date and place of baptism, a description of clothing or a token, and the custody placements—with no recoverable parentage.
The record itself was readable and astonishingly complete. It contained a chronology of Giulia’s interactions with Santa Chiara from the day of her birth in 1859 through her marriage in 1878.
Even more important: it identified her mother and maternal grandfather and gave their origin information—precisely what had been missing from the civil paper trail.
- Mother: “Adele Regali,” unmarried
- Maternal grandfather: “Paolo Regali” (deceased)
- Origin: Valico / “Le Fabbriche,” Comune of Gallicano (Lucca area)
It also documented the human reality of the system:
- names and locations of wet nurses
- three foster family placements
- administrative returns to the institution
- and finally, her marriage and discharge from the system
(As a small example of how easily misinformation can take root when you’re reading across languages and handwriting styles: at one point a word was misread as “incesto”(incest) when it was actually “incerto” (unknown/uncertain). What a difference one letter makes.)
Step 5: Why we had to pivot to parish records
Normally, I’d try to reconstruct a family through civil records first, and only then move to parish registers. But in Giulia’s maternal home area, civil coverage before unification was uneven and often thin. There are Napoleonic-era civil records (1809–1815), but during the Restoration era (1816–1866) that followed, Fabbriche di Vallico fell under Lucca, which did not produce the consistent, locality-rich civil series we rely on elsewhere. Some civil registration appears again around the 1850s, but it isn’t consistent enough to rebuild a maternal line confidently. Many entries were compiled by “Agenti Speciali”—outsiders tasked with recordkeeping—and the records often show obvious gaps compared with the richer mid-19th-century civil acts you might see elsewhere in Tuscany.
In practice, that meant that to reconstruct Adele Regali’s family, we had to treat parish records not as a “later step,” but as the only realistic path to proof.
Step 6: The parish records problem (and the solution that worked)
The next step—confirming Adele Regali in parish records—was harder than finding the hospital file. Political boundaries had shifted several times in the 1800s, and duplicate register copies were not deposited with the Archdiocese of Lucca. To make my search exhaustive, I also contacted the Archdiocese of Pisa and the Diocese of Massa, because affiliations can change. Their archivists didn’t know where the records were either, and weren’t even sure if they had survived World War II. (Parts of this area, known as Garfagnana, were deeply affected by the war.)
With the help of a local genealogist, we traced the registers to the parish church in Fabbriche di Vallico itself (not to be confused with nearby Fabbriche di Sopra, Fabbriche di Sotto, and Fabbriche di Vergemoli). The parish priest did not respond to me directly. The local genealogist, Sylvia, was able to reach him and made two visits. He mostly refused direct access to registers and would only share extracted information in a spreadsheet—until the second visit, when he allowed photographs of two records directly pertinent to Adele. Not surprisingly, church records enabled us to trace Giulia’s maternal line back several generations, to the early 1700s.
The midwife’s report of names turned out to be close but not exact—good enough to enable us to identify the family. “Adele” was really Adelaide, and her father “Paolo” went by “Paolino.” The family surname, “Regali,” is more commonly spelled Rigali in Fabbriche di Vallico.
Conclusion (Why this mattered)
Giulia’s descendants had searched for decades because the usual records didn’t contain the answers. The breakthrough came from recognizing a structural truth: foundling systems generated their own records, and those records can remain outside ordinary civil archive pathways.
This success wasn’t just “one weird trick.” It took the better part of a year, from start to finish. It was a mix of:
- finding the original act, not the extract
- using it to identify the institution
- locating the institution’s records and negotiating access
- and—when one channel didn’t work—trying another door within the same institution
And yes: we were lucky, too. But if we hadn’t looked, we would not have found anything. If we could change one thing, we’d bring back Laurie’s “Nonno” Severino—just for a moment—so we could share the good news with him.
If you have foundling ancestors in Italy, you are not alone. A foundling ancestor is not necessarily a permanent brick wall. The research may be difficult, and success is never assured, but these cases show that it is sometimes possible to recover much more than descendants expect—including important details about the abandonment itself. In Italy, foundling institutions often kept their own records, and those records can be surprisingly revealing. In another case from my Italian Genealogy Special Interest Group, a participant searched the Atti Diversi in her Sicilian ancestral town and discovered that the child’s mother had come back just three days after abandoning him to reclaim him, and that the woman who raised him was actually his biological mother. Stories like this are an important reminder: when the standard civil records run out, the trail may not be over.
Further reading
Kertzer, David I. Sacrificed for Honor: Italian Infant Abandonment and the Politics of Reproductive Control. Boston: Beacon Press, 1993.
Kertzer, David I. Amalia’s Tale: An Impoverished Peasant Woman, an Ambitious Attorney, and a Fight for Justice. Boston: Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, 2008.
About the author
Janet Tognetti Schiller teaches Italian genealogy at the Washington, D.C. FamilySearch Center. She holds a doctorate in education from Harvard University and has completed several advanced genealogy courses. For more information, or to join the Italian Genealogy Special Interest Group, visit the FamilySearch Center’s website at WDCFSC.com.
Acknowledgments
We owe a debt of gratitude to Sylvia Hetzel (The Italian Genealogist) for research performed on site at the Chiesa di San Giacomo in Fabbriche di Vallico, Gallicano, Lucca.
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