Contact Cindy Balbi Oliver

Welcome to my Balbi Family website. I had two primary objectives in creating this website.

First, based my historical research, I wanted to share the very interesting story of the Renaissance Balbi family of Genoa from whom many of today’s Balbis descend. The circumstances surrounding that family including their residences, businesses, art collection and wealth are discussed in the website.

My second objective was to create a location for Balbis throughout the world to connect with each other with the goal of finding their common ancestors. Balbis have written to me asking for help as they search for their relatives. With this in mind, I created a section in the website entitled “Today’s Balbis.” Those pages now contain more than 180 Balbis from 21 countries who provided summaries of their Balbi ancestry. Happily, in a number of cases, Balbis from one location discovered their relatives in another location, sometimes a different country altogether. Thereafter they have been able to communicate and share their ancestry.

The other opportunity for Balbis to connect is through DNA testing. Toward that end I established a Balbi DNA project. The DNA page in my website describes the project. Through DNA testing Balbis can determine whether their Y-chromosome DNA is a match with other Balbis in the project. A “match” indicates that they share a common Balbi ancestor. The test results also provide the approximate number of generations back to when their common ancestor lived. It is very satisfying to report that some Balbis have discovered the genetic relatedness to other Balbis previously unknown. Those who are eligible to participate are encouraged to do so because as the Balbi DNA database grows, more related Balbis will be able to find one another and we will alsohave a clearer picture of how Balbi branches throughout the world are connected.

Thank you for visiting. You may contact me or request to be added to Today’s Balbis at [email protected]. Please email in English, if possible.