Create Your Customized Genealogy Research Guide

I first wrote about using a genealogy Document Tracker in January 2017. It's an efficient way to track your progress and guide your research. At a glance, it shows which documents you have and which you're missing for each person. But I haven't mentioned it in a long time.

Why? It became impractical when my family tree got too big. Today my tree has 86,566 people. About 83,000 of those people lived and died in Italy. I'm lucky to have access to many of their birth, marriage, and death records, but I can't expect to get anything else.

Filter the List As Needed

If I can reduce that list to people were in the United States, I know there will be documents to gather. Here's how I can filter my list of people to show only those with a birth, marriage, or death in the United States.

• Each day I work on my family tree in Family Tree Maker, I export a GEDCOM file. I opened the latest GEDCOM in Family Tree Analyzer.
• I clicked the Export menu and chose Individuals to Excel. This created a spreadsheet I saved to my desktop.
• After converting the file from CSV format to Excel format, I deleted many of the columns, leaving only:
  • Surname
  • Forenames
  • BirthDate
  • BirthLocation
  • DeathLocation
  • MarriageLocation
• I went to the Data menu in Excel. I filtered the spreadsheet to show birth locations that included "United States". This hid all the other lines. I selected the visible rows and gave them a yellow color.
• I removed that filter and showed death locations that included "United States". Many of these lines were already yellow because the person was born in the U.S., but I made them all yellow.
• Once more, I removed that filter and made a new one. This one showed marriage locations that included "United States". I made them yellow and removed the filter.

Here's how you can create a genealogy research guide that's custom-made for your family tree.

When I sorted the spreadsheet to show only the yellow cells, I had a list of 3,034 people who had been in the United States. Yes, there will be some people that this process misses. I expect to discover them as I work to fill in in the spreadsheet.

Here are my past articles on the document tracker:

• Haven't I Seen You Before?
• Track Your Genealogy Finds and Your Searches
• How to Make Your Genealogy Research More Complete
• Why Use a Genealogy Document Tracker?
• Which Genealogy Documents Are You Missing?

Populate the New Document Tracker

To create my new, ready-to-use document tracker:

• I downloaded the master document tracker file I keep online to share with my readers. (Make yourself a copy of it. Don't request Edit permission as this is the master file. Make your own copy and edit that.)
• I deleted a couple of columns I don't want to track (baptism and burial).
• In my filtered spreadsheet, I sorted the results by last name, then first name. I displayed only the yellow cells.
• I copied the last name, first name, and birth date of these lines and pasted them into my new document tracker. The birth date is important because way too many people have the same name.

Salvage Past Efforts

I spent a ton of time on my old document tracker before abandoning it in late 2018. So I want to salvage the old file's contents. I opened the old and the new spreadsheets side by side. Now I can copy the pertinent tracking information from the old file to the new. Yikes. This is gonna take a while.

My passion project for the past two years has been creating my missing source citations. That's still my top priority. But when I do spend time working on people from my tree who lived in the U.S., I will consult and update my document tracker.

If you have access to a decent amount of records from your country, consider using a document tracker. With your document tracker, you can make your in-country research as complete as possible.

Why Did Your Immigrant Ancestors Leave Home?

In January I mapped out 12 small genealogy projects to add to this year's calendar. They're all projects I've wanted to complete, but I never seemed to make time for them. This plan has been worthwhile and productive, so I want to make sure I map out 12 projects every year.

My project for August was "Look into local social conditions". I wanted to find out what was happening in Italy when my immigrant ancestors left home forever.

Those precious vital records in your family tree can't tell you what your ancestor's life was like. This tool can.

I don't have a lot of immigrant ancestors since my roots in my home country are not very deep. I have:

• Two 2nd great grandparents who left Italy for New York in 1898.
• Four great grandparents who left Italy for New York in 1899, 1902, and 1906.
• Two grandfathers who left Italy for New York in 1920.

Based on these eight immigrants, I started a chat with Microsoft Copilot. After answering my questions, Copilot suggested follow-up questions that I pursued.

What Was Going On in 1920?

I asked, "What were the social conditions in the Benevento province of Italy when my grandfather emigrated to New York in November 1920?"

When I visited my ancestral hometowns, I fell in love with them. I wondered how my ancestors could ever want to leave. I've since learned that poverty in Southern Italy was a strong driving force. This chat (which cited its sources) told me about three dominant forces in the area at the time:

1. The political climate left Southern Italy with no opportunities for growth and modernization. These were farming communities, and only the wealthy owned land. That wasn't about to change. In 1919 and 1920 there was unrest over these conditions. There were strikes and social agitation that often ended in violence.
2. The economy in the south took a beating due to post-World War I inflation and unemployment. There were no opportunities for either of my grandfathers.
3. My grandfathers may have felt an obligation to provide for their families. They couldn't do that if they stayed home and worked the land.

It's also worth noting that the Spanish flu lasted from 1918–1920. This caused further hardship and increased the conditions of poverty.

What About Earlier Years?

Next I thought about my maternal great grandparents. I asked, "Were the social conditions any different in 1898 and 1899 in nearby Sant'Angelo a Cupolo, Benevento?"

The answer surprised me. Things were much worse at that time. In 1898 there was rioting over food insecurity. It was a nationwide crisis, but it hit much harder in Southern Italy. It started with a bad wheat harvest and skyrocketing grain prices. Protests in cities as close as Napoli ended with shootings and military intervention.

This was the year my 2nd great grandfather took his whole family to New York. Well, he did leave behind one daughter. She and my great grandfather followed in 1899 after marrying, having a baby, and losing that baby.

And In-Between Years?

My paternal great grandparents didn't meet until they came to America. I asked about my great grandmother's town when she left in 1906. "What was happening in Pescolamazza, Benevento, when my great grandmother emigrated in 1906, following several of her brothers?"

It seems that in 1906, as in 1898 and 1920, poverty was a major factor. Poor people like my ancestors didn't own the land they worked. Their situation sounds like that of the sharecroppers in the U.S. South. They never earned enough money to pay their debts and lived in a state of extreme poverty.

My great grandmother was the last of her siblings to come to New York. It's possible her parents were dead by 1906. Her brothers sent for her in upstate New York. Within four months, she married their friend and paesan, my great grandfather.

As suggested by Copilot, I asked about the daily routine of people in Pescolamazza in 1906. All my ancestors came from rural hill towns, located close together. So the description would fit them all.

Copilot gave me a detailed itinerary of a family's typical day. This includes what they ate, where they worked, and how they interacted with the community. It was a demanding life. I can appreciate how much easier it seemed to them once they came to America. They still worked hard, but they were able to thrive.

I copied the conversation into a Word document to save. I titled it "Southern Italian Social Conditions & Emigration". I'll follow up by chatting about living in a tenement building in the Bronx, New York, in the early 1900s.

What would you like to learn about your ancestors' lives and motivation?

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There was one month's project this year that was a bust—but I still plan to make it happen. I wanted to find more documents to digitize using HandwritingOCR, but I couldn't come up with any! I'd already digitized:

• my handwritten notebook of ship manifests
• a few books about my ancestral hometowns
• my brother's college paper documenting our family history.

I couldn't think of anything else.

Then I had an idea. What about my college thesis (a novel)? I can't seem to find it, but I have a few other items I'd love to turn into Word documents. There are my notebooks from when I was a college film student and two short novels I wrote after college. I'd love to recover these works through digitization.

Which projects have you had on the back burner for ages? What if you scheduled time for a couple of them? What's stopping you?

A Free, New Family Tree Tool for Map Lovers

There's another new website that can do amazing things with your family tree. It's called TreeAlive, and it features a handful of unique genealogy visualization tools.

TreeAlive can tell the story of your ancestor's journey, from birth to death, showing it on a map. It can take you to a place in your ancestor's life and let you overlay historic maps from different time periods. It can animate your immigrant ancestor's journey and put it into historical context. It can show you the locations of all your ancestors at once.

Journey through time visiting the locations in your family tree.

The website is 100% free and you do not need an account. All you do is add your GEDCOM file. (You're not uploading it anywhere—you're bringing it into your web browser on your computer.) Then click through all the visualizations you want to see.

There is a GEDCOM file size limitation of 30 MB, so you may need to exclude images and notes from your file. My family tree of 87,000+ people is too large. So I exported a GEDCOM from Family Tree Maker of all my ancestors and all their spouses—that's 439 people. It's a tiny file. I could filter in more people if I wanted to.

One feature that sets TreeAlive apart is that it works with FamilySearch. FamilySearch doesn't let you export a GEDCOM*. To work around that, use TreeAlive's option of connecting to your FamilySearch tree.

*A page on FamilySearch.org says you can export up to eight generations of your tree in the GEDCOM 7 format. The problem is, not everything is compatible with GEDCOM 7. I don't use FamilySearch, so I can't verify that.

These websites analyze your GEDCOM in your web browser for free, too:

• TreeLab
• GEDminer
• Family Tree Analyzer

Create a Video to Share with Family

The Video feature of TreeAlive puts your ancestor's journeys on the map through the years. It highlights important moments, such as The America Revolution and World Wars. You can click Share With Family to create a treealive.com link to share. Or you can join the Beta list and download your film.

Detail an Ancestor's Journey

The Journey feature lets you choose one ancestor at a time to visualize the facts you've captured. It uses the most appropriate historical map for each place and time in their journey. I've noticed one quirk with these journeys. They seem to show the immigration fact before the emigration fact. So it looks as if my 2nd great grandmother is born in Italy, comes to New York in 1898, then leaves Italy in 1898. It's as if she crossed the ocean twice.

See Who Else Was There

The Crossings feature points out famous people who were in the same place and time as your ancestors. They may have crossed paths. You can click any item in the list to learn more. I clicked the link for my great grandfather Giovanni and Geronimo. Giovanni lived in New York City in the 1905 New York State Census. It turns out Geronimo, the famous Apache, was there, too. He "sold autographs at expositions and rode in Theodore Roosevelt's 1905 inaugural parade". You can also follow links to learn more about the historical event.

Immerse yourself in historical maps for the places in your family tree.

Plot Everything

The Location Quality Explorer feature shows dots for each location in your GEDCOM. By zooming in and clicking different dots, I can confirm it includes locations for:

• baptism
• birth
• burial
• death
• immigration
• marriage
• naturalization
• occupation
• residence

Sometimes clicking a single location dot opens a starburst of facts for many people. (It's such a cool visual.) My tree has an insane number of dots for the Bronx, New York.

Look for orange dots (approximate locations) or red circles (estimated locations). You can choose to report any location you feel is incorrect and provide guidance. I found a few people who were born in the town of Baselice, but their dots were in the city of Benevento. I clicked to report these estimated location and provided the correct map coordinates. The next day, I found them corrected! I now have no approximate or estimated locations on my map. (Note: I updated my GEDCOM, so it is possible my older GEDCOM was to blame for the errors.)

Put Each Generation on the Map

The Generations feature lets you scroll through the generations of your family tree. As you scroll, it highlights general places of birth for each generation. For me, the first generation highlights the place of my birth, New York State. Generation two shows my parents' two states, New York and Ohio. Generation three adds Italy, for my two grandfathers. Before that, I have nothing but Italy. Your map may have a lot more going on than my very homogeneous family tree.

Overlay Those Maps

I saved my favorite feature of TreeAlive for last. The Time Machine feature is an immersive experience because of its historical maps. While in the Time Machine, zoom in and choose a location dot to click. You'll see a particular event for a person in one location. TreeAlive overlays an historical map that dates back as close to the time of the event as possible.

Here's where you can have some fun. Other maps are available! You can select any of them from the list to get a better feel for the place. Since I'm looking at Italian maps, it interesting to see the older maps showing Latin place names. I see some place names that seem to be an error by the person who drew the map. For instance, on one map they wrote the town of Baselice as Baseuce. On some maps, my towns are not included, but I recognize the neighboring towns.

There's even a button that tilts the map. The button icon is a compass needle. When I click it while viewing a particular 1808 map, the mountains it depicts seem to look 3D. Now I can understand why it was so hard for my husband and I to drive from my one grandfather's town to the other. Mountains are in the way!

While viewing a 1714 map, I clicked the Full screen button to get a better feel for the lay of the land. My ancestors all came from neighboring towns. This view makes it easy to see their proximity to one another.

You can share much of what you see on TreeAlive with your family. Set aside a genealogy session to play with his one-of-a-kind new family tree tool. I'm sure you'll have fun with it.

How to Use Hints Without Making a Mess

Now and then I develop family trees on Ancestry so I can collaborate with their owner. For my own tree, I do all the work in Family Tree Maker on my computer. I synchronize my work with my tree on Ancestry each day to benefit anyone who shares some of my roots.

When working on Ancestry, I take advantage of hints for one reason. They save keystrokes. I would never accept a hint without a thorough investigation. However, if I find the evidence I need, and I see a hint that matches what I found, I'll use it. It's a time-saver.

For my own tree, I don't even look at the hints. Most of my tree's facts come from Italian vital records that are sitting on my computer. If I were to find one of these documents in a hint, there's a strong chance it'd be the document image from my own tree. (People borrow them from me all the time. I want them to!)

You can use family tree hints, but they are hints, not verified facts. Do the genealogy research to find the facts and documents.

While looking at my tree overview on Ancestry, I noticed I had a total of 26,154 hints. That's a lot of things to ignore! I decided to take a look at the document hints, also called stories, since there are only 34 of that type.

Find an Interesting Hint

The first hint I opened was an image of a New York City death certificate for a man named Giuseppe from my family tree. I can see it's the same Giuseppe because his date of birth and his parents' names are a match. The only documentation I have for him is his Italian birth record. The great thing about this hint is the new information it provides:

• Giuseppe's occupation was art embroiderer. That's a first in my family tree.
• He died in Queens, New York, on 8 Oct 1918 of broncho pneumonia.
• He married a woman named Alfonsina.
• He spent 15 years in New York City before he died.

If I were the type of person to accept a hint, it would say nothing but Ancestry Family Trees. That's no good at all. The posted document image is a photocopy. I can see the staple holding the pages together. I went to Giuseppe's profile in this family tree and saw they had cited the death index record found on Ancestry. I can do better than that. I can get a clean PDF version from the website of the New York City Municipal Archives. I can cite that website as my source and attach the pristine document image.

And speaking of hints:

• 3 Ways to Tell If That Hint is No Good
• Spinning a Hint into Genealogy Gold
• 3 Ways to Best Use Family Tree Hints
• How to Tell if a Hint is Any Good

Never accept a hint and move on. Use the information to find the actual document and cite that source. No mess, no assumptions, no compounding of someone else's mistakes. I followed the hint to the source instead of accepting it.

Push to Learn More

Now this hint opens up new research opportunities:

• Can I find Giuseppe's arrival in New York in about 1903?
• Can I find him in the census in 1905, 1910, and 1915?
• Who is his wife Alfonsina?
• What other documents are available for him?

To help answer these questions, I looked at Giuseppe's profile page in the hinter's family tree. Four facts had sources attached, linking to Ancestry records. I opened them all.

One. A link to a marriage index helped me use the NYC Municipal Archives site again. I downloaded his marriage certificate. Now I know his wife's full name and date of birth (that's a big bonus), and her parents' full names.

Two. A link to the 1915 New York State Census is promising, but needs verification. If it's the right one, Alfonsina is using the name Frances, and her mother Gaetana is using the name Aida. It's possible.

Three. A link to Giuseppe's World War I draft registration card has the name and address of the company where he worked. It says he did "art needle work". His home address is the same as the one on his death certificate.

Four. A link to a 1906 immigration record appears to be Giuseppe. (He's from the right town, he's the right age, and he lists a brother named Giovanni.) The 1906 date doesn't agree with his death certificate saying he was in New York for 15 years. What more can I find?

Records on Ancestry often show related results in a side column. There I found Giuseppe's 1914 Declaration of Intention to become a citizen. It has his correct date of birth even though it leaves out his hometown. It confirms the 1906 ship manifest! It says he arrived aboard the Cretic on 29 Jul 1906. Now I can add the immigration record to my tree with confidence.

Reap the Harvest

In the end, I added eight document images to Giuseppe in my tree and detailed source citations. I hope my tree will provide hints to my hinter. He has a great portrait of Giuseppe, but not his Italian birth record or his declaration of intention. (Note: If I borrow a photo from someone's tree, I make it private in my tree so it does not get uploaded to Ancestry.)

The New York City death certificate piqued my interest in this hint, but Giuseppe isn't my cousin. What is his relationship to me? He is the nephew of the wife of the first great uncle of my Aunt Stella's husband. So what is he to Aunt Stella's kids, my first cousins? He is the nephew of the wife of their half second great uncle. And that, my friends, is why you do genealogy until the day you die.

Adding GPS Coordinates to Your Family Tree

Entering an address into Google Maps and Bing Maps can show you two very different locations. In most of these cases, Google can't find the place and shows the same-named street in another city.

In a past article I explained why I prefer to use Bing Maps to locate streets in my ancestors' Italian towns. The other day I was looking at one town with a very dense cluster of buildings. I knew there had to be alleys running between all the buildings. How else would someone walk around? Google Maps showed no street or alley names in the cluster. Bing Maps showed a ton.

But I love using Google Street View to see what it looks like to stand where my ancestors stood. It's rare that Bing Maps lets me click to see the view from the street. This is why I often search both map sites side by side.

Why Latitude and Longitude Coordinates Matter

Here's what made me want to add coordinates to my family tree. There are too many cases where I look at a location in the Places tab of Family Tree Maker, and it's wrong. The map isn't showing the address I entered. It's doing what Google Maps sometimes does—showing me a similar street name in another town. Which is weird because Family Tree Maker uses Bing Maps as its database.

Seek out the missing and incorrect GPS coordinates in your family tree with this free tool.

I want to return to my ancestral hometowns in Italy. There are places I still want to see—and a couple of hometowns I've never visited. When I get there, it would be fantastic to pull out my iPhone and know exactly where to go. I don't want to risk getting there and finding an error in the FTM map.

See What You Have and What You're Missing

My family tree has been growing again as I work through missing source citations and add more facts. My tree now has 86,188 people, and the vast majority are from small towns in Italy. My tree includes 10,269 places. Family Tree Analyzer shows you the places in your tree that have latitude and longitude coordinates.

To see which locations in your tree have coordinates and which ones need them:

• Open your GEDCOM file in Family Tree Analyzer.
• Click the Locations tab. This puts you on the Tree View tab in the second row of tabs.
• Click the Places tab that's on the same level as Tree View. It's the last one on the right.

You will see different icons:

• A blue question mark means you need more information. I have soldiers who died in Ethiopia and Armenia. The map in Family Tree Maker is showing the right place, but Family Tree Analyzer marks them as Not Searched. I will add GPS coordinates in Family Tree Maker so they'll be in my next GEDCOM export.
• A green check mark means the place is on the map and shouldn't need any attention. In the Locations/Countries tab, you'll see the coordinates and a Geocode Status of Google Matched.
• A white check mark inside a green circle means GPS coordinates are in place. You should see the coordinates there in the table.

You will have places showing a blue question mark that don't need anything from you. Why? Because they don't have any facts attached to them. For instance, a man in my family tree was born in Coleman, Crowsnest Pass, Alberta, Canada. I have GPS coordinates for Coleman. But Crowsnest Pass and Alberta have no facts, so they need no coordinates.

There may be other blue question marks you can't resolve. In my tree, an Italian soldier died in Kosovo, and I know the name of the town. But Serbia doesn't recognize the independence of the Republic of Kosovo. So the map in Family Tree Maker doesn't know what to do with it. That's above my pay-grade, so I'll leave it alone. I have another type of problem with a soldier who died in Libya. I have a town name, but I can't locate the town or its state on the map for certain.

Work Through the Project

In Family Tree Analyzer, click the Export menu at the top of the window and select Locations to Excel. Then sort the spreadsheet by the Geocoded column. Doing this, I see:

• 1,374 locations with latitude and longitude coordinates (way more than I expected).
• 774 Google Matched locations that show coordinates in Family Tree Analyzer. I plan to check a bunch of them to make sure Family Tree Maker is showing the right place. If not, I'll add the coordinates.
• 8,198 locations with no coordinates. They say they are Not Searched. The first one I checked looks correct in Family Tree Maker, so I'm hoping most of them are fine. I'm an optimist.
• 121 locations marked as Partial Match. There are different kinds of partial matches:
  • 73 Partial Match (Google)
  • 30 Partial Match (Levels)
  • 18 Partial Match (Ord Surv)

I didn't find a definition of the three types of Partial Match, but I checked a few against Google Maps. They seem fine. In a few cases, the address no longer exists. For instance, my parents' first home is now the site of a sports arena, so the best I can do is estimate the spot. (I found a map from the right year, but it ends a short distance before the sport arena.) If I add coordinates to Family Tree Maker, I should be able to clear up all the partial matches.

Copy and Paste the Coordinates

To copy and paste the coordinates into your family tree:

• Pinpoint the location you want in Google Maps or Bing Maps.
• Right-click at that location to reveal numbers that look something like this: 30.56951350255699, 49.039306549833455.
• Click those numbers to copy them. You can paste them in the Location field found on the Places tab in Family Tree Maker. See what the best spot is for these numbers in your family tree software.

When I don't have a specific address, I do the best I can. I put my mouse in the approximate center of the town, state, or country and right-click for coordinates.

Important! GPS coordinates in the Places/Location field are not available outside of Family Tree Maker. You can't get to them from your tree on Ancestry or in the Ancestry app.

You can make your GPS coordinates accessible from your smartphone with a feature of Family Tree Analyzer. Do this after you've entered all the coordinates you want. Here's how:

• From the Maps menu, choose Export to Google MyMaps. This will save a *.kml file to your computer.
• Go to Google Maps and click the Saved tab, then the Maps tab.
• At the bottom of the window, click CREATE MAP.
• Click Create.
• Click Untitled map to give your map name and description.
• Click Import and upload your *.kml file.

With this custom Google Map, you can use your smartphone to navigate to any location in your family tree! Open the Google Maps app and tap You at the bottom of the screen. Scroll way down and tap Maps (it's next to Timeline). Your new custom map will be there, ready to use.

Fix These Genealogy Errors Before They Multiply

If you've tried the new in-browser family tree analysis programs, you know your tree has some errors to fix. I've written about GEDminer and TreeLab. Now the ever-popular Family Tree Analyzer has an in-browser version. It limits the size of the GEDCOM file you can analyze, but I recommend taking a look at it.

Every once in a while, you should check your family tree for certain errors. If you don't, you may wind up with quite a headache from trying to sort out a complicated mess. Errors can pile on top of one another, messing up a whole family.

Here are 5 of my favorite and most important family tree clean-up projects.

Don't let overlooked errors wreak havoc in your family tree. Any of these 5 genealogy clean-up projects can set things right.

1. Your Family Tree Checkup/Tune-up List

Follow these instructions to check for these types of errors in your family tree:

• dates
• places
• media
• sources
• names

If you've ever found a ton of information to add to your tree, there's a chance you made errors due to your excitement.

2. Another Way to Find Errors in Your Family Tree

Use the available error reports in your family tree software or Family Tree Analyzer. This exercise may uncover errors you thought you'd fixed or errors you never knew you made.

3. 2 Ways to Give Your Family Tree a Checkup

If you're working on your family tree pretty often, consider doing this checkup about once a month. You may find that you made a typo on a birth year that threw all that person's ancestors out of whack. You can do this checkup with Family Tree Analyzer or your family tree software program.

4. 3 Little Fixes for Your Family Tree

Sometimes I spot an error in a person's fact description. I know there's a good chance I made the same mistake other times in my tree. It might be a typo that gets repeated or a poor choice of words. Here are 3 different corrections you'll want to make in your family tree.

5. An End-of-Year Tune Up for Your Family Tree

We're only human, so we do make mistakes in our family tree. (Not everyone can FEEL themselves making a typo the way I do.) Here are a few data errors you may not have been looking for, but you'll be happy to find and fix them.

Dive into any of these 5 articles and your family tree's quality will improve.