ABOUT ME
Introduction
Ruth Lapioli Merriman, BA, MLS, AG Emeritus, is an emeritus Accredited Italian Genealogist with ICAPGen.

She retired from FamilySearch nearly seven years ago after working 35 years as a cataloger, research specialist, and manager of the FHL International floor. Throughout those 35 years she worked with records from many parts of the world, but mostly she worked with Italian records: analyzing them; cataloging them; assisting others with their own research in Italy; and teaching locally, nationally, and internationally. She has a special love for her Italian colleagues with whom she has worked for so many years. Although she has retired from FamilySearch, she has not retired from family history.
She enjoys participating in what she calls “Random Acts of Genealogy” by helping others with brick walls and questions that she finds on the multiple Italian genealogy Facebook pages that she follows. She helped teach over 100 LDS missionaries in COVID lockdown in Italy how to index Italian records and how to do basic Italian genealogy. If you do research in Rome and its province and find your ancestors in a search on the FamilySearch website, you can probably thank these young people, and several “seasoned citizens.”
Her father’s side of the family hails from several towns and villages in the provinces of L’Aquila and Pescara where she has visited several times. She has a neurotic fear of flying (just ask her husband) but her love of family history gets her on the plane and over to Italy—that’s how obsessed she is.