Bring a name.
Leave with relatives.
Thirty years of genealogical work. More than fifty thousand people. One Tuscan valley and the Britain it helped to build — and a real chance that the family branch you thought you'd lost is already on a page in Robert's archive.
Long before he was an author, Robert was a genealogist. For three decades he has been quietly piecing together the family trees of Barga and its surrounding villages — the births, marriages and deaths recorded in church books and town halls across the Serchio valley, the ship manifests of the great migrations to Glasgow, Edinburgh, Newcastle, Carlisle, Liverpool and beyond, the census records of British towns where Tuscan families took root.
The result is a working archive of more than fifty thousand named people — almost all of them blood relatives of Robert's, and almost all of them tied, by some thread, to the same handful of villages tucked into the Apennine foothills above Lucca.
It is, very probably, the largest privately held genealogical archive of the Barga diaspora anywhere in the world.
“If your grandparents — or great-grandparents — came from anywhere near Barga, the odds are higher than you think that we share a great-great-grandfather.” — Robert Rossi
Five sources, woven into one tree
Parish records
Baptisms, marriages and deaths from the Duomo di Barga, San Pietro in Campo, Sommocolonia, Tiglio, Castelvecchio Pascoli and the surrounding parishes — many going back to the 1600s.
Civil registers
Italian state records (stato civile) from 1865 onward — the formal births, marriages and deaths that the state began recording after unification.
Emigration manifests
Passenger lists, alien registration documents, naturalisation papers and consular records tracing the journey from a Tuscan village to a British port.
UK census & BMD
British census returns from 1851 to 1921, plus births, marriages and deaths registered in the United Kingdom — the second chapter of every family that crossed.
Family contributions
Photographs, letters, family Bibles and the oral histories that readers, audiences and Tuscan cousins have shared over thirty years.
War records
Italian Army service records, British Army records, internment lists, Arandora Star casualty records and Commonwealth War Graves entries — including the Donnini family.
Come with a name. Maybe leave with a cousin.
Every "From Barga to Britain" evening has a quiet second life: in the Q&A and during the book signing, someone in the audience says a surname, and Robert recognises it. Within a few minutes a thread is pulled — a great-uncle's village, a sibling who didn't emigrate, a wedding in a Glasgow chapel — and a complete stranger discovers they're sitting six rows from a third cousin.
It happens at almost every event. Bring a surname, a parents' or grandparents' first name, and roughly where in Italy they came from (a village or a province is enough). If they were in or near Barga, there is a real chance Robert already has their record on file.
Even better, fill in the form below before the event — and Robert will arrive already knowing where you fit.
What to bring on the night
- Your family surname (Italian and any anglicised version)
- Names of your parents and grandparents if you have them
- The Italian village or province they came from, even if approximate
- The British city where they first settled
- Any photos, letters or family stories you'd like to share
All shared in confidence — Robert never publishes living relatives' details.
Send Robert your family details before the event
Robert is delighted to look in advance. There's no charge — it's a labour of love built over three decades, and the archive only gets richer as more families share what they know. Fill in as much as you can; even a surname and a rough region of Tuscany is often enough for him to find a connection.
If your family came from any of these…
…there is an excellent chance that Robert already has them, often back to the 1700s or earlier:
Barga · Sommocolonia · Tiglio · Castelvecchio Pascoli · San Pietro in Campo · Filecchio · Albiano · Pegnana · Renaio · Mologno · Fornaci di Barga · Castelnuovo di Garfagnana · Coreglia Antelminelli · Pieve Fosciana · Castiglione di Garfagnana · Fosciandora · Gallicano · Molazzana · Cardoso
The archive also has substantial coverage of the British towns where these families settled — Glasgow, Edinburgh, Greenock, Ayr, Paisley, Newcastle, Sunderland, the Durham coalfield villages, and pockets of Carlisle, Liverpool and London.
Don't see your village? Send the form anyway. The archive is unusually wide for the central Serchio valley, but Robert's research extends well beyond it, and the archive grows every month.
The branches that almost weren't kept
Migration is a kind of editing. Families crossing borders pack what they can carry; they leave behind aunts, photographs, parish certificates, and pieces of a history that no one ever wrote down in English. A generation later, the children — born in Glasgow or Newcastle, fluent in chip-shop English and broken Tuscan — find themselves with surnames they can't quite place, and a sense of a country they were nearly part of.
Robert's archive exists to put those branches back. To say: this is your great-great-grandmother's maiden name. This is the village she walked out of in 1899. This is her brother who stayed.
For some readers, that has been the most affecting part of the trilogy — not the novel itself, but discovering, after the book signing, that the cousin sitting two rows back shares a surname their family had quietly forgotten.
A note on cost
Robert's genealogy work is freely shared with anyone whose family is in the archive. He doesn't charge for lookups. If you'd like to support the project, the most generous things you can do are:
- Buy The Blood Heart Trilogy — every copy funds more research time.
- Tell other families with Tuscan-British roots that the archive exists.
- Share what you have. A photograph or a letter from your family may complete a tree elsewhere.
Hear when new villages and records are added
Robert's occasional letter goes out when a new branch of the archive is opened, or when a reader's contribution unlocks a previously closed line. No spam. Unsubscribe anytime.