Genealogist Lynn Serafinn explains the role of the soprannome in Trentino and other parts of Italy and shows how to recognise them in genealogical records.
Sooner or later, anyone working with Italian genealogy will encounter something called a ‘soprannome’ (plural: soprannomi).
And if you’re working specifically on Trentino family history, you might also hear or read the word ‘scutum’, which is the Trentino dialect word for soprannome.
Despite the fact that EVERY family of Italian origin has a soprannome, many people researching their Trentino (or other Italian) ancestry either don’t know anything about them or fail to recognise them when they see them. And of those who DO know something about them, they often misunderstand the meaning and ‘behaviour’ of their family’s soprannome over time.
I’ve mentioned soprannomi within the context of other articles on this website but have never spoken about them in detail. As this subject is such an important part of Trentino genealogy, I thought it would be helpful to devote an entire article to the subject.
In this article, I will discuss:
- What soprannomi are and why they are used
- Why I think the word ‘nickname’ is not an appropriate term for them.
- The various ways soprannomi are recorded in parish registers
- How soprannomi are ‘born’, change, and what they might mean
- Why soprannomi can be both a blessing and a curse for genealogists
- How to record soprannomi in your family tree
Recording Data – The Computer as an Analogy
Think back to the days when you first started using a computer. Imagine you’ve just created your first Word document. You probably just saved it to the default ‘Documents’ folder without thinking about it. You might not even have given it a title, just calling it something like ‘Document 1.’
But over time, you made lots and lots of Word documents. Perhaps some were business letters. Perhaps others were letters to the family, stories you wrote or genealogy research notes. After a while, it became difficult to find the documents you had written in the past because they weren’t labelled clearly, and they were all in one big folder called ‘Documents’.
So, what did you do? Well, first of all, you probably started renaming the documents, so you knew what was what. But then, you might also have started creating folders inside the main ‘Documents’ folder. Perhaps one folder was called ‘Business Letters’, and another ‘My Research’, etc.
But soon, you created still MORE documents. For example, perhaps your research diversified, and now you wanted to separate your notes for different branches of the family. So, you started to create subfolders inside the folder called ‘My Research’.
By labelling your files clearly and creating a system of folders and subfolders, it became easier for you to identify and find the correct files when you needed them.
In simple terms, we can say that creating a structure is fundamental to being able to identify things and to distinguish one thing from another.
Name, Surname, Soprannome – An Increasing Need for Accuracy
If you think about it, names, surnames and soprannomi serve much the same purpose as the filing system on our computer:
- Our personal names are like the documents, in that each document is an individual entity.
- Our surnames are like the folders in which our documents are stored, in that they group many individuals into different categories.
- And, in the case of Trentino and other Italian ancestry, our soprannomi are like the subfolders within those folders, in that they create sub-groups within the group.
Just as your system for naming files was less complex when you started out using your computer, naming people was also less complex in the past, when the population was smaller, and most people were living in small, rural hamlets or homesteads.
Indeed, in the beginning, people were known mainly by their personal names along with their father’s name and/or their village of origin. Thus, in early records (and sometime even after surnames were already in use), you will see things like ‘Sebastiano of Sesto’, or ‘Nicolo