One Question Leads to Rich Family Tree History

In January I committed to working on 12 genealogy projects in 2026. Before this year, I put off these projects because my source citations project takes up all my time. But each one is something I want to work on; something I want to complete. Putting them on the calendar makes me commit a bit of time to each project. And I have finished some of them 100 percent.

This month's task is "Find new details in family photos". A year ago I used Microsoft Copilot to analyze a few old photos. AI can identify time and place using clothing style, automobiles, landmarks, and more.

Choose a Mysterious Photo

I looked through my Family Tree/photos folder. I found a portrait of my first cousin five times removed, Francesco Saverio Basile, born in 1832. I have his portrait because he was infamous. He was a brigand. Definition? A member of a gang that ambushes and robs people in forests and mountains.

See how you can take a mysterious photo from your family tree and turn it into a rich piece of history.

But he wasn't hiding beside the road robbing wealthy passersby like Robin Hood. He was part of a large group of Southern Italian men who used violence to oppose the 1861 unification of Italy.

Copilot's Analysis

I dropped his portrait into Copilot and asked one question. "What can you tell me about this photo of Francesco Saverio Basile? He was born in Colle Sannita, Benevento, Italy in 1832. In 1861 he was killed by the Piedmontese Army as a brigand."

Whenever you use AI to learn about something, follow the sources. What you'll see is a helpful summary, but follow the sources to learn more.

Copilot confirmed this is a mid-19th-century Italian studio portrait. It pointed me to a website that talks about Francesco Saverio Basile. His nickname was Pilorusso because of his red hair. (I know that is true.) Based in a forest, he led guerilla actions against the new Italian authorities in 1861.

I knew about Pilorusso because a man from my grandfather's hometown wrote a book on the brigands in 2022. When I saw a post about Francesco by this author, Antonio Bianco, I used vital records to see if I have a connection to this man. And I do.

The best source Copilot showed me happens to be an essay written by Antonio Bianco. Reading the essay led me to ask Copilot several follow-up questions. Here's the gist of what I learned as background to this one photograph.

• I knew Napoleon's rule is the reason we have civil records for Italy from about 1809 to 1815. Now I've learned that Napoleon put his brother and then his brother-in-law on the throne in Naples. He must have been busy conquering elsewhere.
• After Napoleon's defeat, things changed. The House of Bourbon (aka the French) ruled the Kingdom of the Two Sicilies from 1816 to 1860. Italy at the time consisted of a few kingdoms, states, and duchies, many under foreign rule.
• This part's a real surprise. The Bourbons' investments made the Kingdom of the Two Sicilies prosperous before unification. I'm surprised because I know the south was not prosperous after unification.
• A pie chart shows that before the 1861 unification of Italy, the Kingdom of the Two Sicilies held 66% of Italy's wealth. This explains why a band of rebels, or brigands, were so opposed to unification and loyal to the Bourbons.
• My cousin Francesco led a series of assaults on local institutions, based in his hideout in a forest.
• The governor of Benevento asked for help, and the military set out to destroy the brigands. By late 1861, my cousin is missing. Historians say the military captured and shot him.
• Another man, Michele Caruso, becomes the leader of the brigands after Francesco's death. His second in command, Antonio Secola, is also in my family tree. They captured and shot Caruso in 1863. Secola surrendered in June 1864.
• I can add to my family tree that Antonio Secola died in prison on the island of Elba in 21 Apr 1885. (I created a source citation for Antonio Bianco's essay and the website.) More research helped me find the prison. It's in what is now a beautiful resort town with stunning views of the Tyrrhenian Sea.

As a test, I tried the same exercise on three other AI platforms.

1. Claude AI

Claude AI impressed me. Here's what it did with the photo and a brief statement:

• It provided a summary of facts, citing another article by Antonio Bianco as its source.
• It led me to another source that says the military executed Francesco by a firing squad. This source contains photographs and paintings depicting the lives of the brigands.
• Claude pointed me to a Wikipedia page that says Francesco was a former officer of the Bourbon Army.

As a follow-up question, I asked for details about Antonio Secola. I learned his marriage date, which is great because it is not found in the 1856 marriages for his hometown. His marriage banns are available, but not the marriage. Antonio's story has some fascinating tidbits. For instance, he went to jail for theft, but since he had helped build the courthouse, he managed to escape. He went home for three years!

2. NotebookLM

Using NotebookLM, I uploaded the portrait and got a response before asking anything. The photo's metadata identifies him as Francesco Saverio Basile. NotebookLM provided a very detailed description of the man and his clothing. It dated the photo in the mid-to-late 19th century.

I added the note I have with Francesco in my family tree. It says: Francesco Saverio Basile was a "briganti" known as Pelorosso (Pilèrusscè in dialect) because he had red hair. At dawn on 10 August 1861, the Piedmontese Army broke up his band of brigands, consisting of about 1,000 men. He may have died on that date.

As a response, NotebookLM:

• went into even more detail about his facial hair
• said his clothing is consistent with the rural brigand style of the mid-19th century in the Italian south
• said, "His ability to lead a band of 1,000 men highlights his significant role during the period of social and political upheaval following the unification of Italy. This image serves as a rare visual record of a figure who participated in the intense resistance against the new Italian state."

It didn't cite any sources, which isn't helpful, but it suggested follow-up questions.

3. ChatGPT

The only other time I tried ChatGPT I hated it. It made up everything. This time I got more details about Francesco Saverio Basile's historical context. It mentions that brigands could be:

1. former soldiers of the Army of the Kingdom of the Two Sicilies (which I now know is Francesco's case)
2. supporters of the deposed House of Bourbon-Two Sicilies
3. peasants resisting new taxes or conscription
4. local outlaws
5. people motivated by political, economic, and personal reasons.

Every analysis of his portrait mentions his tilted hat. It seems wearing it that way was typical of rural southern Italians at the time. That's an amazing little detail I wouldn't have suspected.

Your Turn

Time to go through your family tree photo collection. Which ones hold mysteries for you? Are there any where clothing styles or automobiles may help narrow down the time and place? You owe it to yourself to see what you can learn.

How to Find and Fix Family Tree Inconsistencies

As I continue adding the missing source citations to my family tree, there's a nice side-effect. I get to review how I've recorded people's facts.

There's one type of fact I want to fix, but I need to be able to see the big picture first. Most of the 85,000+ people in my family tree lived in Italy. Between about 1815 and 1865, their birth record can include their baptism details.

I always record the baptism when it's available. But I didn't always put in the name and address of the church. I didn't think of it until I visited some of those Italian churches. I need a way to find all the baptism facts in my tree that are missing the church's name and address.

How can you find everyone in your family tree with inconsistent details? It's easy!

Family Tree Analyzer makes it very easy to get the big picture I need. I opened my latest GEDCOM file in FTA and clicked the Facts tab. I selected only the Baptism fact and all the relationship types. Then I clicked the button with wording that seems confusing*, but it's the right one. It says, "Show only the selected Facts for Individuals who don't have any of the excluded Fact Types".

*The button's wording confused me because I wasn't excluding any Fact Types.

This opened a new window with the results. I have 24,910 people with a baptism fact in my family tree. Since that's such a long list, I exported the results to a spreadsheet. Then I sorted the spreadsheet by the Location column. Now it's easy to see the locations that are town names, not church names.

Here's an example of what I see. Ten people have a baptism location of Apice (Apice, Benevento, Campania, Italy). A few other people have the full address of the church of San Nicola in Apice. A ton more use the church of Santa Maria Assunta in Apice. I need to:

• revisit the birth records of those 10 people
• see if their baptism happened in San Nicola or Santa Maria Assunta
• fix the address.

Why You'd Want to Do This

This exercise is all about consistency and thoroughness. I've been preaching consistency ever since I began this blog in 2017. That's because doing a task with consistency adds quality to the results. And if your family tree is important to you, you'll want its quality level to be high.

Never overlook consistency:

• Make Consistency King in Your Family Tree
• How to Batch Process Your Genealogy Documents
• Organize Your Genealogy Research By Choosing Your Style

To begin, I'm deleting the spreadsheet lines with duplicate church addresses. Instead of 100 lines showing me the location of the church in Pietrelcina, Italy, I'll keep only one line. This will be my reference for any Pietrelcina baptisms that don't name the church. I have 12 of those, so I'll go to each of them in my family tree and make the correction.

With the duplicate church names removed, my spreadsheet has 6,484 lines. Several are references to remind me of the church name in that town. I see that a TON of lines are from four towns whose source citations I haven't added yet. I'll be working on them soon.

Like every other big project I do, I'll chip away at the smaller groups of people first. I'll pick off the 10 from Apice, the five from Alberona, the 13 from Pago Veiano, and so on.

The first town I addressed is the one whose source citations I completed on Friday. It's called Sant'Angelo a Cupolo, and it's a bit sprawled out. While the population is small, the town has a bunch of hamlets, each with its own church. The spreadsheet showed me that I didn't have a street address for two of the churches I've been entering. I used Google Maps to see exactly where they are and made all my updates.

Next I need to find all the marriages that are missing the name and address of the church!

Need Another Option?

If you don't want to use Family Tree Analyzer, you have a few software options. These include:

• Family Historian (this is the best alternative option)
• Gramps (I didn't find an export-to-spreadsheet option)
• RootsMagic (not the free version, as far as I can tell)
• Legacy Family Tree
• Reunion

Think about your family tree. Is there a type of fact you're better at recording now than you were at first? Wouldn't you like to get it right? Export a spreadsheet and tease out the inconsistencies you'd like to fix.

Don't Try This Unreliable Genealogy Practice

Every day is Day One in someone's genealogy journey. And they don't know where to start. They post questions online with minimal details and hope for the best.

You know what that approach gets them? Frustration and confusion. Let's say they're hoping to learn the names of great grandpa's parents. All they know is which country he came from. So they tell you an Anglicized version of his name and ask if anyone out there is his relative. Does anyone expect that to work?

Don't take a shot in the dark when it comes to your family tree. Try these genealogy steps first.

People, I beg you. Back up. You don't have details about great grandpa, but what about grandpa or grandma? Did they live in your country, or were they immigrants in your country? Start with them.

Search for every piece of grandma or grandpa's paper trail. These documents can include:

• a ship manifest showing their arrival
• a marriage record
• census records
• birth or death certificates
• military registration cards
• naturalization papers
• passport applications

There's a good chance you will learn:

• their date of birth
• where they were born
• when they immigrated
• who their parents were

Here's how this method worked for me, and how it can work for you.

My Grandfather's Paper Trail

I knew nothing about my maternal grandfather Adamo Leone's family. The only nugget I'd heard was that he had a brother Noah and a sister Eve. (Adam, Eve, and Noah!) In my earliest days of genealogy, I found his 1914 ship manifest on the Ellis Island website. There he is on line 17, and it says his father is Giovanni Leone in the town of Baselice, Italy. I knew his birthday already. Now his hometown and father's name were all I needed to begin looking up Italian vital records.

My favorite tidbit about this Leone family? There were five children, and besides Adam and Eve and Noah, there were Mary and Joseph! But let's not Anglicize those foreign names. My grandfather was ALWAYS Adamo, and my other grandfather was ALWAYS Pietro. The Leone kids were Adamo, Eva, Noé, Maria, and Giuseppe.

My Great Grandmother's Paper Trail

No one ever told me my great grandmother Maria Rosa's last name until 2003. After I learned her name was Caruso, she was still a tricky puzzle to solve. A cousin-in-law spotted her in my online family tree and wrote to me many years ago. According to my dad's 1st cousin, Maria Rosa said she was from a place that sounded like Pisqualamazza.

I tried something that became a favorite genealogy trick of mine. I searched immigration records for anyone named Caruso arriving in the U.S. in the early 1900s. I scanned the results for any hometown that might be a match. And I found it! The town was Pescolamazza.

Once her town's records came online, I was able to take that branch of my family tree back six generations.

My Great Granduncle's Paper Trail

I've had some lucky breaks. My two grandfather's often mentioned the names of their hometowns. My maternal grandmother's family was a bit tougher. Grandma's parents died before I turned one year old. But their children knew where they came from. The last time I heard this was in 2004 when my great aunt told me her family came from "Pastena and Avellino".

That wasn't quite enough to go on. There's a Pastena and a Pastene in Italy, and both towns have families named Sarracino. That led me to document the wrong family! As for Avellino, that's both a city and a province, so where were they from?

My break came from my great granduncle's World War II draft registration card. Too often these draft cards leave out the name of the town of birth. But this one is very specific. It says he was born in "Tofo, Province of Avellino".

It was easy to discover that the town's real name is Tufo, so I began viewing vital records. I discovered my 2nd great grandparents had seven children in three neighboring towns. Besides Tufo, there was Santa Paolina in Avellino, and Pastene in neighboring Benevento.

At that point, I knew more about my family than my grandmother and her siblings did.

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Yes, you need to back up. Don't post useless requests online before you know what you're looking for. Search the records that are available to you and find the clues you need. This path of discovery is what genealogy is all about. It's why people like me get addicted to the research. It's fun and rewarding, and more important than that, it's based on documented facts.

Start your search the smart way!

The Ancestor Map of My Dreams for Free

Two weeks ago I searched for a website that would show all my ancestors plotted on a map. The best I found was a site called Genomelink with its Your Roots Map feature. But I wasn't satisfied with it at all.

On Saturday I found everything I wanted and much more. TreeLab is a free GEDCOM analyzer with extraordinary mapping features. Much like GEDminer, which I reviewed in March, TreeLab does a deep analysis of your family tree. And it does so in a split second! There's so much to explore with TreeLab, but let's focus on the mapping features today.

Using the TreeLab Maps

First drop your GEDCOM file onto the main TreeLab page. You aren't uploading it anywhere. The analysis takes place in the web browser on your computer in the blink of an eye. (Once again I'm in awe of computer programmers.) Click the Maps tab and then the Ancestor Map button. Identify yourself or whomever you want to analyze. I chose "showing up to 15G" because I could see at the bottom of the page that this plotted all my direct ancestors.

My quest to find the ancestor map I've been dreaming of is finally fulfilled.

The map shows my 4 U.S. ancestors (my parents and grandmothers) and my 413 Italian ancestors. Click the Filters button above the map to understand the colors. Different colored dots on the map tell you the level of ancestor. For example, 6th great grandparents have a purple dot. Larger dots mean more people. For example, one large dot on the town of Colle Sannita represents 132 of my ancestors. Hover over any dot for details. Click the dot for far more detail.

I love this visual. It's everything I hoped to find in my search two weeks ago.

Identifying Missing Places

Here's a project I need to do, and TreeLab is a great tool to help get it done. I have too many people in my family tree with no birth or death location. If you're going to analyze your GEDCOM, it helps to put everyone somewhere on the map.

I've been putting at least the country in blank locations as I come across them. But I have close to 9,000 more people like this. TreeLab to the rescue!

This free surname map is a tremendous genealogy tool.

When I click the Maps tab and the Surname Map button in TreeLab, I see the most common last names from my family tree. Each name shows how many people in my tree have that name. When I click my maiden name, Iamarino, I see all 816 people plotted on a world map. When I scroll below the map, there's a full list of 816 people in chronological order by birth. The details include each person's:

• full name
• year born
• year died
• birth place

This list makes it easy to see who has no birth place recorded at all. They're the ones I want to fix. You can click the Excel button at the top of the list to export these facts to a spreadsheet. When I do so, the Excel file also includes each person's sex and death place.

If your tree doesn't have 85,664 people, you can view these lists without downloading anything. My list of 396 people with the surname Gentile has only 5 people with no birth place. I can correct them without a download.

When I do download a surname, I can filter the spreadsheet to show everyone with an empty birth place.

Note: On TreeLab's Research tab, when I click Research Gaps I see that 77,408 out of 85,664 of my people have a birth place. That means 8,256 people need my attention. My score on death places is much worse.

Why This Matters

In 2008 I learned I could view Italian vital records on microfilm at a Family History Center. Four years later, before these records came online, I added 15,000 people to my family tree. And they all came from ONE TOWN—Baselice. (Here's what that process looked like.)

At the time, I didn't want to assume everyone was born in Baselice. I didn't even want to assume they were born in Italy! Now I know better, and I want my family tree to have better data.

Here's a good example. My 3rd great grandfather, Giuseppe Leone, died in Baselice in 1830. His death record names his parents and says he was born in Baselice. But when I entered his parents into my tree, I left their birth locations blank. After documenting thousands of 19th century Italians, I know they stayed put. No one came to those tiny, remote towns from another country.

Plus, I realized two important facts about Italian death records:

1. When the death record names the deceased's parents, it often says they were "conjugi di detto Terra". That means they were "spouses of the same town". Well, if they married in Baselice, and their child died in Baselice, it's safe to say that child was born in Baselice.
2. If someone died in the town but came from another town, the death record mentions their original town. More modern death records that have a placeholder for the deceased's birth place. On earlier records, it's common to state where the person came from.
   
   Here's an example. My 7th great grandfather's 1749 death record calls him "Domenico Mascia di Campolattaro". Domenico Mascia died in Colle Sannita, Italy, and had seven children there. But his death record states he came from the town of Campolattaro, about 11 miles away.

I'm going to pay extra attention to my direct ancestors who are missing places or using "Italy". A review of their documents may have clues I missed before.

For lots more help with understanding Italian death records, see How to Read an Italian Death Record REVISED.

Let me know if you agree TreeLab has more to offer than GEDminer. I plan to write about TreeLab's other features soon.

The Hidden Meaning of Your Last Name

Whenever he sees an Italian last name for the first time, my husband asks me what it means. Nine times out of ten I tell him, "It isn't a word. It's just a name." That changes now. It turns out there is a meaning to the names, but it isn't always obvious.

You see, I've just finished a book by Joseph G. Fucilla titled "Our Italian Surnames". The book covers more than last names, although they are the main focus. I learned so much that I'm a little ticked off that there are so many naming nuances I'd never learned before.

What books are available for names in your ancestors' countries? After reading a couple of novels by Fyodor Dostoevsky this year, I found Russian patronymic names overwhelming. There's a lot to learn about the names in your family tree.

I'm not talking about baby-naming conventions that vary by nationality. The first son is named after the paternal grandfather. The second son is named after the maternal grandfather. No. I'm talking about the origin of Italy's overabundance of last names.

The meaning of the last names in your family tree may be hidden. Discover their origin with the right resource books.

The author breaks Italian name sources into more than 10 categories. He gives tons of examples, so you can expect to find some names from your Italian family tree. He also distinguishes the meanings of the names by the part of the country.

What a surprise to learn that some last names originated by:

• cutting the end off an ancestor's name (Nicola becomes Cola), or
• dropping the middle out of a name (Bernardo becomes Bardo).

There's a whole section in the book showing how descendants of men named Francesco (and several other names) can have surnames you might not expect:

• Scotto, coming from the variant Francescotto
• Chini, coming from the variant Franceschino
• Cicciarelli, coming from the variant Francisco

The author shows a long list of progressions leading from Francesco to something like Chiccione.

Here are a few of the types of names with examples. See any you recognize?

• Human qualities: Forte = strong
• Plants: Garofalo = cornflower
• Geography: LaMotta = landslide
• Animals: Stallone = stallion
• Insects: Vespucci = wasp
• Jobs: Podesta = mayor
• Objects: Botticelli = barrel
• Anatomy: Capone = head

"Our Italian Surnames" covers thousands and thousands of last names. It's available on Genealogical.com.

I have another book, "Le Famiglie Campane" (The Families of Campania) by Fabio Paolucci. It details the more illustrious surnames from the Campania region of Italy. For example, the book includes the name Iadanza. That's the ancestral last name of American actor Tony Danza. It says the name is common in the town of Pietrelcina (that's where Tony's family came from). The author says the name comes from a female ancestor named Abbondanza.

This book is available on Amazon in Kindle format. You can read it on your computer with the Kindle app if you don't have a Kindle device.

Then there's the 3,379-page PDF I downloaded in 2014 by Ettore Rossoni. The title is "L'Origine dei Cognomi Italiani, Storia ed Etimologia" (The Origin of Italian Surnames, History and Etymology). This is a treasure for me because it offers the best explanation of my maiden name, Iamarino. It's a shortened version of an ancestor's name: Giovanni Marino. Giovanni can have a shorter version: Ianni. Shorten Ianni again and you get Ia. So Pietro, the son of Giovanni Marino, is Pietro Ia Marino, then Pietro Iamarino.

This PDF book is available on the Internet Archive. Don't be put off by the archive.org website not using https security protocol. I assure you, it's fine.

One thing I can't understand is why people kept derogatory last names generation after generation. "Our Italian Surnames" mentions tons of insulting last names:

• Barbaro = barbarous
• Vendetta = spiteful person
• Falso = deceitful person
• Mattina = insane person
• Cafone = uncouth
• Caiazzo = simpleton
• Zingaro = vagabond

In Joseph G. Fucilla's book, my grandmother's maiden name of Saracino is a cruel, wicked, or irreligious man. In Ettore Rossoni's book, Saracino is tied to the Arab Saracens, but the word Saracen seems to derive from the Semitic "thief" or "marauder". Yikes!

It's common for Italian emigrants to alter their names to blend in with their adopted country's culture. So why didn't more people shed their belittling names? Did the bad connotation become meaningless over time?

Whatever country holds your roots, there are unique, fascinating gems of culture for you to discover.

And speaking of names:

• When Did Your Ancestors First Use a Last Name?
• Where Did Your Last Name Come From?
• A Deep Dive into Your Family's Last Names

4 Steps to Make Your Digital Photos More Valuable

In January I wrote about "12 Genealogy Projects to Put on the Calendar". I'm tackling each job in turn, and I'm so glad to get them done. I rearranged a few of the months, and I had to change one project.

That project was to "Digitize more pages" using HandwritingOCR. It turns your document images into text files. I've done this with a few books written in different languages:

• I photographed the pages with my iPhone or scanner.
• I converted them into text with HandwritingOCR, saving the result in a text file.
• I translated the text with Google Translate, saving that result in the same text file.

But I have nothing left to digitize. So I changed my May 2026 task to "Download and categorize my Google Photos". I hadn't done that since March 2023!

Take these 4 steps to add tons of value to photos and genealogy document images.

Years ago my iPhone ran out of room to store new photos. I'd heard about Google Photos and started using it in 2013. A free account gives you 15 GB of storage, and 13 years of my photos take up one third of that. Since Google Photos is always backing up my photos for me, I can remove them from my iPhone if I want. My current phone has plenty of storage, but I'd rather streamline what's on there.

Keep in mind, anything you store on Google Photos is accessible via an app on your phone or the website. So all your photos are still portable.

I created several albums on Google Photos and assigned every photo to one of them. My albums have names like House, Woofie, Family, Cars, Maine 2021, and more. Then I went through the albums and downloaded everything newer than March 2023. But there's much more to do.

Let's concentrate on the genealogy-related photos today. I have lots of family photos and old photos sent to me by my cousins in texts:

• A typical downloaded photo saved from a text has a file name like 20200406_171047_1648666454076_001.jpg. You can see it begins with a date, but the rest isn't helpful.
• Other photos have names like IMG_3806.JPG. That's useless other than keeping photos in chronological order.
• Still other photos have names like 2592.heic. HEIC?

I found out HEIC stands for High Efficiency Image Compression. These don't open on my computer the way JPGs do. For me, they launch Photoshop. I downloaded a free HEIC Viewer from the Microsoft Store, but it keeps asking me to rate it. While it can convert the HEIC files to JPGs, that capability isn't free. So I'm going to use Photoshop to do the conversion.

There are four steps we all need to take with our digital photos:

• Rename your photos to something meaningful. I can identify "DiAnn and Chris Summer 1992" a lot easier than "20211215_115628_1639588924940_001.jpg". I'd know which photo it was without seeing a thumbnail.
• Crop and enhance your photos as needed. Some of my photos from texts are screenshots that a cousin sent. I can crop out the surroundings. And if it's an old damaged photo, I can clean it up.
• Give your photos metadata. Metadata is information you enter into the photo's properties. This information stays with the photo file. It can include a title, tags, a comment, date taken, and more.
• File your photos to make finding them more intuitive. Since I categorized my Google Photos into albums, they're already in good folders. But I can make sub-folders. Then I can keep all the family photos from Bella's 2025 graduation party together.

Let's take a look at these four steps.

1. Rename your photos to something meaningful

I have four photos of my husband Paul and my late cousin Carmine, taken at my cousin Paula's birthday party in 2023. They're all in the HEIC format that iPhones use. My first step is to rename them to include the subjects. I'm keeping it simple: Paul Ohama and Carmine Mollica 1, 2, 3, and 4.

2. Crop and enhance your photos as needed

Opening the photos in Photoshop, I see the color is a bit yellow. When I clicked Image > Auto Color for each one, they looked much better. There's unnecessary space above their heads, so I can crop that out.

With these adjustments, I can save each image in JPG format with its new name. I'll delete the HEIC versions, knowing they're still out there on Google Photos.

3. Give your photos metadata

For years I've been adding metadata to my genealogy document images. I give them a title which carries over to Family Tree Maker when I drop them there. And I add comments that include the source citation.

Not long ago I learned something new about metadata from a video by Thomas MacEntee. You can add metadata to several files at once, as long as they're all getting the same metadata. So I will:

• Select these 4 photos
• Right-click and choose Properties
• Click the Details tab
• Fill in a shared title, the tag "family", a comment about where I took the photos, and the date I took the photos.
• Click Apply to save this metadata to all four files at once.

Having added family as a tag, I can now go to Windows File Explorer (or Finder on a Mac), and type tags:family in the search box. The four photos of Paul and Carmine are at the top of the results list. I'm new to using tags, so I'm keeping it simple for now.

4. File your photos to make finding them more intuitive

These are the only photos I took at cousin Paula's birthday party, so I won't put them in a sub-folder. But I have several photos from cousin Bella's graduation party. I'll give them their own sub-folder. Most of those photos are group shots. I can identify key people in the file name, and identify everyone in the Comments section of the metadata.

I have a lot of work to do, and the plan was to complete this project in May! I'll try to plow through the photos in a few long sessions or commit to an hour or two a day. Then it's on to my June 2026 project (I started it yesterday). That project, "Add more war casualties", was my April project until I reshuffled the deck.

Here's what's involved in the war casualties project. I have a spreadsheet of the men from my ancestral Italian hometowns who died in World War I. The province of Benevento has their actual military records online for download. I'll check to see which military records I haven't downloaded yet for men who are in my family tree. Then I'll add the record and its source citation to my tree.

Which family tree projects have you been putting off? Why not jump into one now and get the ball rolling?