Finding Immigrant Cousins Strictly by Hometown

This month's task on my 2026 Genealogy Projects Calendar is "find more immigrants". Sure, I've already found and documented my direct ancestors' passage from Italy to New York. There weren't a lot of them to find:

• 1 my mother's father
• 2 my father's father
• 3 & 4 my mother's mother's parents
• 5 & 6 my father's mother's parents
• 7 & 8 my mother's mother's mother's parents

No one else in my direct line emigrated, other than a great grandfather who was a bird of passage. But that doesn't mean there aren't countless cousins who left home for good. There are three great things about finding immigrant cousins:

• They may show you where your ancestors lived at that time.
• They may lead you to their spouses and children.
• They may lead directly to DNA matches you haven't solved.

When the hometown records end for someone in your family tree, this type of genealogy search can fill in the rest of the picture.

A search for immigrants can pay off if your family tree extends beyond your immediate family. It's best to include all the siblings you can find from each family unit. Then search for who they married, and pad out their families. And this is why my tree has 86,986 people. Everyone from my ancestral hometowns is related, and I've got the receipts.

I use Ancestry.com for my searches. I've yet to find an Italian in my huge family tree who arrived at any port other than New York. So I went to the database called "New York, U.S., Arriving Passenger and Crew Lists". In the search form I entered only a town name in the "Lived In" field. Then I sifted through the results for anyone I could identify.

I entered the town Circello, Benevento, Italy. My closest ancestor born in Circello is a 3rd great grandfather born in 1813. That's pretty far back, so I know my connections to his hometown need more exploration. Ancestry gave me 455 search results. One at a time, I tried to match the basic information about each person to someone in my family tree.

After a few tries, I found a result for a man I could identify with certainty: Luigi Golia. I opened another web browser tab to search for more information about Luigi, now that I knew he had come to America. What I found was a heartbreaking story.

Luigi arrived in New York at age 18 to join his hometown friend on East 148th Street in the Bronx, New York. The first search result I found was for Find-a-Grave, showing that Luigi died at the age of 30. He's buried in the same cemetery as my grandparents and most of my Bronx relatives. His grave marker contains a photograph of him, as is the tradition in Italy.

Now I know he arrived in New York in 1913 and died in 1925. What else can I learn about his life?

A summary of his 1925 Bronx death certificate lists his cause of death. It says "Traumatic Rupture of The Liver Probably Automobile". Oh no. I went to the New York City Municipal Archives website to see his death certificate. On the line for contributing causes it says, "Investigation Pending". His death certificate names his wife as Martha Golia.

I searched the Municipal Archives for a Bronx marriage using only the name Golia. I found them. The couple had married only a year earlier on 20 Jan 1924. They never even made it to their first anniversary. They married in my family's church—the one where I was baptized. On their marriage certificate, "Martha" is using the name Margaret. She signed the certificate as Immacolata Margarita Zadienla. The witnesses both have last names I know from Circello. Note: Other documents tell me Immacolata's last name was Gaudiello, which is a name found in my family tree.

When they married, Luigi lived right in the middle of the neighborhood where my parents grew up. His bride lived eight blocks away. In a year she would be a 21-year-old widow.

But it gets worse. It's rare that I find court records for anyone in my family tree. But there was legal action on "Margaret's" behalf once Luigi died. Here I found an explanation for his cause of death. Margaret was suing Martin Burke "for personal injuries sustained by the deceased on the 24th day of December, 1924, by reason of having been knocked down and run over by an automobile belonging to the proposed defendant, and which injury was a direct result of the deceased's death."

So Luigi died 12 days after a car ran him over. Just when I thought this story was as sad as it could get, I turned the page in the legal document. There I found that the couple had a three-month-old baby named John. Further research shows that John lost his mother when he was only 12 years old, yet he persevered.

In the end, I'm happy to discover that baby John lived a full and admirable life, dying in 2023 at the age of 98. To quote his obituary, "John's priorities in life were clear and ever present - Family, the Catholic Faith and Perseverance."

This entire story came from a search for immigrants from a specific town. Luigi went from a name and date of birth in my family tree to a tragic figure whose only child lived a life of education and service Luigi might never have imagined.

Luigi is not a blood relative of mine, so I don't expect to find any DNA matches connected to him. I can't find a World War I draft registration card for him, although there should be one. And I can't find him in the 1915 New York State census or the 1920 Federal census. But what I have found ties up another loose end in my family tree and adds depth that is priceless.

Where will your immigrant search take you?

4 New GEDCOM Analyzers for Free, and More

Stick me on the fridge because I've become a magnet. My inbox is attracting the creators of new genealogy tools like mad. I've tried out so many in the past two or three weeks that it's high time I shared them with you. Keep in mind that these are new products, so they are evolving. If you contribute your feedback, the programmer may choose to update the tool.

Because I wrote a review of GEDminer ("This Free, Elegant GEDCOM Analyzer Is a Wonder") and TreeLab ("The Ancestor Map of My Dreams for Free"), four programmers wrote to me about their GEDCOM analyzers.

Tree Prism

This one is my favorite. Konstantin Popov's GEDCOM analyzer has lots of charts that make Tree Prism a standout. It read my 102 MB GEDCOM file in a couple of seconds and displayed a beautiful, customizable family tree.

My favorite new GEDCOM analyzer offers countless ways to visualize your family tree.

When I customized the tree to include all my generations, my parents were so far apart that I couldn't find them. So Konstantin added a Compact button in the control panel that brings everyone into view. I love it! You can click a button to save your tree as a PDF or PNG image file.

Then there's the charts. I love fan charts, and you'll have fun trying out and customizing several types of charts. Whatever you create you can download! The Map feature is new since the last time I looked, and it's exactly what I would want. It plots everyone from my tree on a map with bigger circles indicating more people.

Click the Facts tab at the top of the page for customizable cards based on your family tree. These are fun and a great way to share tidbits with your relatives. It reminds me of my article, "Share Your Family History in a Fun New Way", but with a lot more color, imagination, and style.

Then there's the Analysis tab. It finds problems and contradictions in your family tree. I had a few older women giving birth, and when I went to them in my tree, it was a simple mistake. But it was a mistake I hadn't fixed and might never have noticed. I do have an 88-year-old man with a newborn baby, but yikes. There are two documents saying that was the case. And he was a newlywed at 88!

Tree Prism also points out unusually large age discrepancies between spouses. These may be fine, but some may be an error. These potential errors are downloadable as a spreadsheet that you can work through. Don't overlook the left column in the analysis tab. You can see a report on your brick walls, longevity, a date check (I had a baby who seemed to die before she was born! Turns out the death date belonged to her older sister.), and more.

KinSift

Mandy Langley created a GEDCOM analyzer with a focus on making your family tree trustworthy. Amen to that! KinSift's tagline is "Find out which parts of your family story you can trust — before you share it."

Here's a bit of what KinSift will tell you:

• Who's missing a marriage date
• Who needs source citations
• Who has conflicting information
• Which facts have low-quality or derivative source citations
• How well your family tree scores on sources, evidence analysis, contradictions, and more.

Unlike other GEDCOM analyzers, KinSift uploads your tree to their server for analysis. If there are living people in your GEDCOM, they're uploaded—temporarily. KinSift deletes your file when the scan is complete.

The Memory Palace

Bram Nelissen's The Memory Palace features a virtual location to display your family photos. It reminds me of playing Doom many years ago, but it's customized with your personal memories. No bad guys anywhere!

But it's the GEDCOM analyzer you'll want to try first. Your file stays on your computer, and there's a phone app version for those who prefer a tiny little screen. Remember me? The person with more than 86,000 people in her family tree? I'm the ultimate tester of file size limitations. My GEDCOM is a bit over the 100 MB size limitation here, but I'll bet yours is fine. I have smaller versions I can use for testing.

Once you drag and drop your file, scroll down the page to see the analysis. It's so fast you won't see it happen. Here's what my direct ancestors GEDCOM shows:

• 422 people, 241 families, 12 generations, 119 surnames, and a birth year span of 1612–1959.
• My longest line of 12 generations goes from me up my paternal line to Antonio Zeolla born in 1646.
• As the home person, I see details about myself, my parents, and my husband. I can select a different person from my file and see their details.
• My limited direct-ancestor tree has no gaps, woo hoo!:
  • 0 people without a date of birth
  • 0 people without a surname
  • 0 people without a place
  • 0 people not linked to any family

MonuTree

Filip Novotný is on the team responsible for MonuTree, a phone app that provides you with:

• an overview of the whole family tree
• a graphic tree of ancestors and descendants. Tap any person and the tree changes to make them the focus.
• the ability to collaborate with your family members

You can import your GEDCOM into the app for free. You don't need an account, and your GEDCOM stays on your device. I ran into the file size limitation, so I used a smaller, 1 MB file of all my direct ancestors. Many of my early Italian ancestors have no documentation to tell me when they died. So my tree analysis says my oldest person is 371 years old and 190 years is the average age of those still living. But the average lifespan in 69 years, which seems likely.

Go to the People tab at the bottom to see an alphabetical list of everyone in your tree. Tap anyone in your list and you can:

• edit or view their facts
• see them in the family tree
• see a list of their immediate and extended family members
• view, edit, and add source citations
• see how well they score in profile completeness. Want to raise their score? You can add a photo, an occupation, or other facts right there.

If you like what you see, there is a Premium version that gives you much more reporting capability for a low, one-time fee.

Not Only…But Also

I've also learned of a phone app called Unblur Photo from a company called Yiriba. They wrote to me after finding my article, "Which Genealogy Apps Are Right for You?". The app offers several enhancement tools for retouching a photo.

This tool is not free after your first use. But here's their free "How to Scan Old Photos" guide.

Finally, I received an email about a family tree app that puts a research log on every person. It uses "Evidence Explained" templates to help you create good source citations as you go. I have not had a chance to look into AncestorOS yet, and it is not free. If you're a genealogy pro, or would like your work to be more professional, you may want to look into AncestorOS. There is a 7-day free trial.

These GEDCOM analyzers make me want to figure out how to create one myself! I'll need to tear myself away from my family tree long enough to look into it. Meanwhile, I'm reminded of a scene in the 1965 movie "The Great Race". Jack Lemmon is in the middle of a gigantic pie fight, and he's covered in cream and frosting. He tastes some pie on his face and calls out, "Throw more brandy!" (Surely someone knows this scene besides my sons and me.) Well I say, "Throw more genealogy programs!"

Stop and Admire Your Family Tree Milestones

On Saturday I made my backup files and closed down Family Tree Maker a couple of hours early. Why would I do such a thing? Because I reached a big milestone. I wanted to savor it a while before moving on to the next one.

How many milestones have you reached in your genealogy research? Think back to when you started building your family tree. How much did you know?

These types of genealogy victories are important milestones in your family tree journey.

I grew up knowing the names of my eight great grandparents. That's a great start! I'd met only two of them, and I was too young to remember it. Only four of them had emigrated to the United States; the other four stayed in Italy. But I never realized I didn't know one great grandmother's maiden name until 2003 when my aunt said it was Caruso. That was the year I began building my tree.

And that's when I started reaching family tree milestones.

Milestone 1: Locating Ancestors' Place of Origin

My ancestors arrived in America in 1898. First two of my 2nd great grandparents came. A year later, two of my great grandparents came, pregnant with Grandma.

Grandma's last living sibling told me her family came from Avellino and Pastene. That was only a clue in my genealogy trail. You see, Avellino is both a city and a province in Italy. So where did they come from? And Pastene, well, I was hearing it as Pastena, and I headed off in the wrong direction for a while.

Then I found my people. An 1898 ship manifest said my 2nd great grandparents came from Sant'Angelo a Cupolo. It used an abbreviation of the town, but when I found it on the map, I saw a section of that town called Pastene. At last I was on the right track. Grandma's family came from the Pastene in Sant'Angelo a Cupolo, Benevento, Italy.

Figuring out who came from Avellino—and where—took a few more years. But I did it.

Milestone 2: Finding Documents from Another Country

I spent a few years at Family History Centers viewing microfilmed vital records. I viewed only my maternal grandfather Adamo's hometown, Baselice. I knew next to nothing about his family. I had his parents' names and those of two of his siblings.

Once I located Adamo's mother's birth record in 1856, and his father's in 1850, I was ready to start climbing that tree. Soon I realized I should document everyone in this small town's records. Otherwise I wouldn't know who was related to whom. Too many people had the same name. By 2012, I'd added more than 15,000 people from Baselice to my family tree.

Today this is much easier because these records are available online. All my ancestors came from small, neighboring towns with tons of intermarriage. That's why my family tree has 86,957 people today. And there will be many more.

Milestone 3: Breaking Down a Brick Wall

So who came from Avellino and where? It had to be someone on my maternal grandmother's branch, but it wasn't her parents. The answer came from Grandma's uncle's World War I draft registration card. He said he was born in Tufo, Avellino. I rushed off to a Family History Center and by sheer coincidence, they had a reel of microfilm for the town of Tufo. Someone else had ordered it, so I got to view it.

I found Grandma's uncle's birth record, and those of two of his siblings who died young. No one in my living family knew about these children. Grandma's parents were from Pastene. Did her grandmother Colomba come from Tufo? I couldn't find her there.

But I kept on pushing. I found Colomba's brothers living in Tufo. They had children there. But at least one of these documents told me Colomba's brothers weren't born in Tufo. They came from the neighboring town of Santa Paolina, Avellino.

At long last, I found Antonio and Colomba's 1871 marriage record in Santa Paolina. This confirmed that Antonio was born in Pastene and Colomba was born in Santa Paolina. Open up the floodgates!

Milestone 4: Making Quality Source Citations

That brings me to Saturday's milestone. For two years I've been revisiting Italian documents online to create source citations. I used Family Tree Analyzer to export a list of something like 70,000 people in my tree with zero source citations. The horror!

I worked my way through one location at a time, picking off the smaller ones first. On Saturday I finished citing sources for everyone in my family tree from Santa Paolina! That leaves a handful of unsourced people from the USA, England, Ireland, Canada, and Japan. I give them another try once in a while.

But the frightening bulk of what's left are people from two of my Italian towns. From Pesco Sannita, I have a whopping 9,646 people to cite. And, saving the scariest for last, from Baselice, I have 18,594 people to cite.

Let me explain. Those Baselice people came from the microfilm I was viewing way back when. So I cited the microfilm numbers. But guess what? You can't get microfilm anymore. So I threw out those source citations leaving 18,594 people with nothing to show for themselves.

Also, Using Shortcuts!

The good news is, I keep finding ways to be more efficient in this source citation project. I completed Santa Paolina ahead of schedule because of a couple of tricks I put into use toward the end. I can't wait to work on the next town with these new tricks up my sleeve.

Let me share one that's been a huge time saver for me. I'm working with the Italian records on the Antenati Portal. There's a separate collection (a separate web page) for each available year's:

• birth records
• death records
• marriage records
• marriage banns
• extra marriage records—the fabled "wedding packets"

Instead of opening tons of tabs in my web browser, or re-opening a collection I used before, I'm using a new trick. It's a Firefox browser feature—I don't know which other browsers have this. Firefox lets you drag one tab onto another to create a tab group. You can name that group, save that group, expand and collapse that group. Tomorrow you can open all your groups again in a flash.

I created eight tab groups for Santa Paolina death records. I made one group for each decade from the 1810s through the 1880s. Within each group, I arranged the tabs in order. The 1820s group has tabs for 1820, 1821, 1822, 1823, etc. Now it's much faster to locate a particular person's death record and cite the source. Each page is ready and waiting in memory.

My plan is to create similar groups for my 9,646 Pesco Sannita people right from the start.

How About Your Milestones?

What other milestones have you reached or are you trying to reach?

• Are you putting together binders or charts to share with family? I made 40 copies of a large chart to share with my Sarracino/Saviano cousins many years ago. That created quite the buzz.
• Are you separating truth from myth? My sons' 2nd great grandfather was NOT the brother of the captain of the Titanic. The captain didn't even have brothers!
• Are you gathering documents for membership to the DAR or for dual citizenship? I don't qualify for any of that. I'm descended from peasants.
• Are you writing a book or detailed paper about a particular ancestor? I've done a bit of that, and even worked on my own life story. It's a lot of fun to track down all your past addresses, schools, and jobs.

Be sure to celebrate your family tree milestones. You can share your news with friends and family and even on social media. Or go ahead and take the rest of the day off. Cheers to you, intrepid genealogy researcher!

Sometimes Vital Records Are All You've Got

What do you do when there's no mention of your ancestors in the newspapers? When they attended school for a precious few years? When there's the thinnest of paper trails? This has been the story of my family tree.

When I began building my tree, I learned my ancestors arrived in the United States between 1899 and 1920. The 1940 census tells me my paternal grandmother completed the 8th grade at school. She was the most educated member of her generation in my family tree. Three out of four of my great grandparents who came to America never went to school at all. So let's not talk about school records.

Don't be discouraged if your ancestors left behind nothing but vital records.

As for newspapers, the one name I found several times was that of Giovanni Sarracino. He was my maternal grandmother's father, and somehow he managed to buy a whole building in the Bronx, New York. I found his name listed in several real estate transactions. I wish I knew how a man with zero years of school became a successful businessman. But I don't believe I'll ever find that out.

Almost all my ancestors who came to America settled in New York City. You can imagine my delight when the New York City Municipal Archives put a huge chunk of their vital records collection online. I found tons of my relatives' records to download for free!

I wasn't able to go back any further in my family tree because those generations stayed in Italy. Then a particular man in Italy decided to put his country's vital records online. Once I learned about these online records, I never had to view microfilmed records again. Bye-bye, low-quality images. The vital records for my ancestral hometowns are online for free. And the quality of the images is outstanding.

Almost 10 years later, I'm still expanding my family tree using these vital records. Vital records are a government's documentation of births, marriages, and deaths. They can also include divorce records, but divorce wasn't legal in Italy until 1974.

Check out the 1961 comedy "Divorce Italian Style" starring Marcello Mastroianni sometime. Here's the film's description on IMDb.com: "A married Sicilian baron falls in love with his cousin and vows to wed her, but with divorce illegal he must concoct a crime of passion to do away with his wife." In short, your spouse had to die for your marriage to end. So there are no divorces in my family tree except in America.

So often I see people ask if we are researching our family history or merely collecting records. Well guess what? Sometimes that's all you can do. You collect those vital records because that's all there is.

And there's nothing wrong with that. If you're lucky enough to have vital records available for your ancestors, grab them! Piece together their families. You may discover that they lived in one town for many generations. You may learn that your great grandfather was one of 12 children. You may find that your 2nd great grandmother had five children who died as infants. That all says a lot.

At the moment, my family tree has 86,920 people. Yeah. When I started looking at Italian vital records on microfilm viewers, I made a discovery. Almost everyone in my ancestors' tiny, remote towns had a connection by blood or marriage. So I started piecing together the extended families.

I've connected almost everyone in the vital records of my two grandfathers' hometowns. They came from Baselice and Colle Sannita in Southern Italy. I've built the families of my closest relatives in the nearby towns of Pesco Sannita, Sant'Angelo a Cupolo, Apice, and Santa Paolina. And I will keep connecting people in those towns for many years to come.

I love that the names in these towns are all so familiar to me. I love how I can look at a DNA match's last name and know which Italian town holds our shared ancestor. I love how a set of marriage records can take me back two generations and lead me to another town. I love everything I can learn from vital records.

To find vital records for your ancestors' hometowns, start at the FamilySearch Wiki. If you find them, start by searching for the ancestor who was born most recently. It may be your grandparent, great grandparent, or someone from an earlier generation.

Use the vital records to learn the names, ages, and occupations of your ancestor's parents. Look for your ancestor's siblings. Search for their parents' marriage record and their birth records. Then move back in time to the previous generation. This is how I wound up with 86,920 people in my family tree.

You may not care to document the husband of the niece of the wife of the brother-in-law of your 4th great uncle as I've done. But you know why I'm doing that? Because I'm creating a resource that will help descendants of these towns long after I'm gone. That's why I've been working like a fiend to create source citations for all those people.

If you have any Italian ancestry, the Portale Antenati can take your family tree back to the late 1600s as it has for me. I've been writing about it for almost 10 years because I want you to learn how to help yourself. Every day I see people asking the Internet, "Do you know my ancestors?" Instead of casting a weak line like that, you could be finding your people yourself. Take a look at how to do it:

• Where Have You Been All My Life?
• Collect the Whole Set
• How to Use the Online Italian Genealogy Archives
• Why I Recorded More Than 30,000 Documents
• Step-by-Step Discovery of My 5th Great Grandparents
• Finding the Siblings Your Ancestor Never Mentioned
• Becoming Italian Was a Long, Hard Journey
• How to Make the Best of the New Antenati Website

Once you've gathered all the facts you can about your relatives, you can learn more about their lives. Find out:

• What made them leave their home country.
• What their lives were like in the old country.

If birth, marriage, and death are all you can hope to find, don't let it discourage you. There's a lot of meat on those bones.

A Clear Map to Your Unsolved DNA Matches

Last week I showed how to limit your AncestryDNA match list to those with common ancestors. Seeing who these shared ancestors are can make it much easier to solve a new DNA match.

I mentioned that these DNA matches can also be seen on Ancestry ThruLines^®. That visualization can be quite helpful. So let's look at how you can see where a match belongs in your family tree, even before you build their branch.

My maternal grandmother's ancestors have a big old brick wall. Their hometown didn't keep vital records before 1861, so I'm stuck. I often wonder if a distant cousin knows something about these undocumented ancestors.

See Where Your DNA Matches Are Hiding

I'll start by going to ThruLines in Ancestry's DNA menu and choosing the horizontal view. This shows my direct ancestors and me, all the way through my great grandparents. I'll expand this view by clicking my great grandmother's name. She's my maternal grandmother's mother, Maria Rosa.

I couldn't place these DNA matches when I saw them in my match list. Here's where to look to solve your best matches.

A little icon tells me that Maria Rosa's grandfather is the shared ancestor of 10 DNA matches. I'll click that icon to see who they are. This provides a new view of an expanded family tree. There are six people descended from my 2nd great grandmother Vittoria. They include my mother and me, my first cousin, and four other DNA matches I've solved before.

But ThruLines also shows DNA matches descended from two of Vittoria's siblings. Descending from her brother Gaetano are three DNA matches. I've figured out two of them (they're siblings), but the third one is new to me. We share only 9 cM. She's the daughter of one of the siblings, so I can place her in my family tree. She's my 4th cousin once removed.

Descending from Vittoria's sister Paolina is one DNA match. Her Scottish last name and 4th cousin connection would have placed her low on my priority list. But thanks to ThruLines, I see exactly how and where she should fit. All I need to do is research her mother and grandfather who are not in my family tree yet. ThruLines tells me their names, dates, and where they fit.

Start Doing Some Guided Research

This branch begins with my first cousin three times removed, Antonio Zuccaro. I have a copy of Antonio's 1881 birth record from the family's hometown of Santa Paolina, Italy. I also have a copy of his 1904 marriage record from that town. He married a Santa Paolina girl named Gioconda Maria Rosa deSpirito. What I didn't know is who Antonio's children were or if he and his wife came to America.

This view of ThruLines tells me exactly what searches I need to conduct. The evidence says Antonio and Gioconda had a son born in West Hoboken, New Jersey. So I'll start by searching for Antonio Zuccaro in America. I found:

• Antonio and Gioconda's 1904 ship manifest. One month after their marriage, they were on their way to join the rest of his family. His parents and brothers had settled in West Hoboken, New Jersey, in 1893.
• Antonio's World War I draft registration card. This card has the same birth date as his Italian birth record. It puts him in West Hoboken, New Jersey, on 12 Sep 1918. And it has a slight misspelling of his wife's uncommon first name of Gioconda.

I'm quite impressed by this young immigrant, Antonio. After a lot of digging in a 1918 New York City directory, I found the company where he was an "agent" in 1918. It was the Lint, Butscher & Ross Realty & Construction Company in Manhattan. A 1929 Union City, New Jersey, directory shows what happened next. Antonio is the president of the A E Zuccaro Development Corporation. Some of his children work for him. That sounds like the American Dream.

Work Your Way to Your DNA Match

One of those children is the next person in the ThruLines tree: Ernesto. To connect to my DNA match with the Scottish last name, I need to document Ernesto and his daughter. I found:

• Ernesto's World War II draft registration card. He was living across the street from where I found the family in the 1929 city directory. His mother Gioconda lives with him.
• A few census records I can use to name Ernesto's siblings.
• His daughter's marriage license and obituary, confirming the dates seen in ThruLines. Now I know her husband's name. I'll bet my DNA match is using her Scottish husband's last name.

Yes! I found my DNA match. I noticed that the family moved from New Jersey to California, and I sure do love the California birth index. It tells you the mother's maiden name. As ThruLines says, this woman is my 4th cousin. Our common ancestors are our 3rd great grandparents Simblicio Conzolazio and Rufina Zullo.

Sometimes ThruLines won't give you all the names to connect the generations. When it does, it's such a powerful tool for solving a DNA match.

And speaking of ThruLines:

• How to Use Ancestry ThruLines for Research Leads
• Using Ancestry's ThruLines to Find DNA Matches
• Attracting a New DNA Match

This Filter Makes DNA Matches Easier to Place

September is half over, and it's time I tackled this month's task from my 2026 Genealogy Calendar. It's a simple goal: Solve more DNA matches.

I manage 4 AncestryDNA tests for my parents, my husband, and myself. Looking at Ancestry, I realized there's a DNA match filter I haven't been using. I can filter the list of matches for any of these tests to include only those with a common ancestor.

The common ancestor label means the match and the test-taker share the same ancestor. That's such a time-saver!

Filter Your List

To start, I went to my mom's list of DNA matches and filtered it to show only those with a common ancestor. As I scrolled through the list of nearly 100 people, I could see I've figured out many of them. I always add a note to a DNA match when I've solve their identity, and those notes are visible in this list.

The first match I see without a note is a potential half 3rd cousin or a 3rd cousin twice removed. The common ancestors are Emanuele Ricciardelli and Giovanna Consolazio. They are my 5th great grandparents (mom's 6th).

It's interesting that Emanuele and Giovanna aren't in this match's family tree. Ancestry must be figuring out the connection using other means. On her Italian side, this DNA match's tree ends at her grandfather. And his last name is not in my family tree.

Looking at this one type of DNA match led to a huge branch of my family tree.

Look for a Connection

Using this DNA match's family tree as a launch pad, I searched for records for this man with the Italian last name. (Note: My ancestors are 100% Italian, so I need to follow an Italian branch.)

I found his 1917 New York City marriage certificate. I'm so grateful for the online records of the New York City Municipal Archives. And guess what? His mother Carolina, whose last name is familiar, is in my family tree! Thanks to her son's marriage record, I now know who Carolina married. And this document tells me she gave birth to a son in Orange, New Jersey.

I checked my tree to see that Carolina's great grandparents are—can you guess?—Emanuele Ricciardelli and Giovanna Consolazio. Then I turned to my handy relationship calculator spreadsheet. To find my relationship to Carolina, I went to column "I" (my 5th great grandparents) row 8 (Carolina's great grandparents). She is my 2nd cousin 4 times removed. This DNA match is 3 generations down from Carolina, so I went down 3 rows in the relationship calculator. That shows this DNA match is my 5th cousin once removed, and my mom's 5th cousin.

Here's what's curious. AncestryDNA says this match and mom share 33 cMs. It predicts the relationship is in the 3rd cousin range. But I went to the Shared cM Project Tool found on the DNA Painter website. I entered 33 as the total number of cMs shared. The result? This tool found a 53% chance mom and her match were no closer than 5th cousins.

In this case, it pays to use all the tools available to you.

I added a note to this DNA match. I marked her as mom's 5C through Emanuele Ricciardelli and Giovanna Consolazio. Now I've got more research to do! I learned who my cousin Carolina married, but he isn't from her town in Italy. I discovered their 1881 marriage record in Italy and found birth records for four of their children. One of those children appears to be the groom from the NYC marriage certificate. The NYC certificate says he was born in Orange, New Jersey, in 1893, but I have his 1893 birth record from Santa Paolina, Italy. I'll keep searching, but so far the 1910 census confirms that the groom was born in Italy.

I'm so lucky to have a ton of Italian vital records available online through the Antenati portal. Without them, my family tree would end at the great grandparent level. How disappointing that would be! Still, the Italian records create many dead ends. Using DNA matches, I can discover who came emigrated and continue documenting branches.

Try Another Avenue

I'll bet some of you are saying, "Why not use Ancestry's ThruLines® to find this relationship?" That did occur to me, and this solved DNA match is there. But the amount of digging it took to find her was ridiculous. I had to keep consulting my family tree. First I worked my way up to Emanuele Ricciardelli and Giovanna Consolazio. Then I had to look at my tree to see that I want the descendants of their son Samuele. And then I want the descendants of his daughter Anna. Once I followed those branches, I did find this DNA match as well as her brother. I didn't even know her brother was in my or mom's DNA match list.

Now that I have drilled down to this level in ThruLines, I see many more DNA matches I need to explore. I should have started doing this earlier in the month!

Have you tried Ancestry's common ancestor filter before? I'm always happy to see "common ancestor" in the match list, but somehow I never realized it was a filter until today.