15 September 2017

How to Create Your Ancestral Hometown Database

What genealogy fan wouldn't be thrilled to find their ancestor's hometown records online?

That moment came for me when I learned about the Italian website, Antenati. Antenati has birth, marriage and death records for my handful of ancestral towns in Italy. Other genealogists are finding their ancestor's records on FamilySearch.org.

A free computer program called GetLinks (no longer works with Antenati) makes it easy to download these digitized records from both FamilySearch.org and the Antenati site. It's written in Portuguese, but don't let that worry you. I've written several times about using these records and the program. See:
If you've downloaded documents from your ancestral hometown, you may have hundreds or thousands of images on your computer.

Now what?

Once you download all the records from your town, imagine how many of your relatives are in these folders!
Once you download all the records from your town, imagine how many of your relatives are in these folders!

If you're looking only at each year's index and finding what you know you need, you're missing the boat. And that boat is overloaded with your ancestors!

My recommendation: Make a spreadsheet database of every important fact in each document.

My database-in-progress for several towns' birth, marriage and death records.
My database-in-progress for several towns' birth, marriage and death records.

What's the point? With a spreadsheet of facts, you can sort an entire town's birth records by last name. If you sort by last name and father's name, you will see all the children born to your ancestor.

There will no doubt be ancestors in your spreadsheet that you never knew existed.

Here are 5 steps to creating your ancestral hometown database from your downloaded files:
  1. Examine the records for the fields you want to capture. For example, birth records may contain the baby's name and birth date; father's name, age and occupation; mother's name and age; the address where the baby was born or where the father lived (not always the same); and the baby's baptism date. Death records will contain different facts, and so will marriage records.
  2. Create columns in your spreadsheet to hold all the facts. I keep birth, death and marriage records on different sheets in my Excel file so they can have different column headings.

    TIP: The best way to be able to sort your records by date is to keep the year, month and day in separate columns.
  3. Enter information from the documents into your spreadsheet. This takes time, but I found shortcuts as I did this last night.
    • I went through one year's birth records, entering only the baby's name into the spreadsheet. I put the baby's last name in one column and first name in another. (I record parents' names as last-name-first to help with sorting.)
    • On my second pass through the records, I entered the birth and baptism dates.
    • On my third pass, I entered the mother and father's information.
    Why is this better? I was always looking in one specific spot on the page for the information I wanted. It felt faster than going one document at a time, picking out facts from all over the page.
  4. Sort the data by any column to uncover hidden facts. You may find an unknown sibling. You may find that a man had several wives over the years. You may find several siblings for your ancestor who died young.

    See Dr. Daniel Soper's YouTube channel for tips on using Excel. Many tips will apply to other spreadsheet software.
  5. Share your database! Years ago I documented the facts from the vital records for my grandfather's hometown. I gathered these facts while sitting at a microfilm viewer in a Family History Center (for years!), so I used a simple text file. You can't sort a text file, but at least you can search it. I shared this file, as well as a GEDCOM for the whole town, with other descendants of that town.

    Your spreadsheet can be a valuable resource to other family tree researchers. Once you're done, I encourage you to share it everywhere you can think of.
I documented two years of records while watching the Yankees slaughter the Orioles last night. I expect to get much further tonight because of the shortcuts I found.

When you have your database, find an appropriate Facebook group or other place, and put the data out there. Genealogy is a collaborative sport!

13 comments:

  1. I've used a similar spreadsheet for years. One thing I do differently is that I put the ages of the parents in a separate column, then in another column, calculate their estimated date of birth using a formula subtracting the age column for the document year column.

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    1. Doh! Now I have to add a few more columns, but I love this idea.

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  2. Thanks for your post. I did something similar for the Antenati records for families from Montecorvino Rovella that might be related to me. It's available at https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/1-cGuBVdQaNva3EZWBQQag5yu3uxUxaQtR3cv6UG2dVE/edit?usp=sharing. I added different worksheets for the different types of records: Napolenico, Restaurazione, and Civile with the Nati, Morti, and Matrimoni records on separate worksheets. It may be helpful for people researching families such as Vassallo, Conte, Salerno, Lupo, Leo, Trezza, Marmora, Di Vece, Chieffo, Buoninfante, etc.

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    1. Don, thanks for your comment! I just realized I'm not getting notifications of new comments, so yours was sitting unnoticed for a month. I apologize. Your spreadsheet has a lot in common with mine. It makes me feels less crazy for working on mine. :-)

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  3. I salute your ambition and determination! I think it will pay big dividends for you.

    On FamilySearch, do you ever use the Export Results button when you're viewing the list of records that a search has returned? I confess that I haven't -- but SHOULD -- for downloading an XLS spreadsheet of the results. It wouldn't have the exact same columns that you use, but I think you could use it as a skeleton and add in the additional columns.

    I keep meaning to use the feature to create a checklist of records that I need to view and then add my comments about what I found. Maybe today I shall!

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    1. Thanks, Marian! That sounds like a good tip. As a long-time Ancestry.com subscriber, I've barely scratched the surface with FamilySearch, but it looks like it's gotten better and better.

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  4. A friend who does Italian research says that FamilySearch has a lot of Italian records in image form. I checked the catalog for "Italy, sant'angelo a cupolo" and didn't find anything, but there of lots of other towns that are there, and they are adding things continuously. I don't do Italian research myself, but possibly there are also regional record collections that would interest you. You can type in your place names here to see what's in the catalog for them:
    https://www.familysearch.org/search/catalog/search

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  5. I should mention that you'll need to get a (free) account and sign in when you are ready to look at the records themselves. (This is a new requirement from about a year ago.)

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    1. Hi, Marian. Yes, anyone who's interested in family history would be crazy not to have a FamilySearch free membership. I have downloaded all available records from Sant'Angelo a Cupolo and its hamlet, Pastene, from the free Antenati website. I'm only lately getting into the habit of checking FamilySearch, too.

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  6. If doing research other than Italian, does this report (and others listed) work?

    Run This Genealogy Report To Help Clean Up Your Dates

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    1. Absolutely! My articles give mainly Italian examples because my ancestry is all Italian. But Family Tree Analyzer (http://ftanalyzer.com) uses the genealogy GEDCOM standard to help you improve your family tree in many ways.

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  7. Thanks for this encouragement. Knowing that the process will be long and the villages more than one, do you have a suggested order of processing records to deliver the biggest bang for the buck? I imagine marriages, perhaps, to rapidly build 2 family units at a time? That is, assuming there is a good index. My guess is that it would be best to hit all of the well-indexed registries first prior to the simple alphabetical indexes. Legible handwriting must be another consideration. So many variables...and I've noticed differences from village to village! :-)

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    1. You made a great point about handwriting. If you notice better handwriting in one town, start there. I have one town with atrocious handwriting! But my closest relative there is a 3rd great grandmother, so I won't find as many connections there as my other towns. One town has more record years than any other, so that one's very satisfying to work on.

      Other than that, I believe the best way to start is with your own family. Find all the siblings of your ancestors, find who they married, and get their spouses' siblings and parents. You'll begin to learn the last names in your town, and figure out relationships. Because I had this solid base, I can now find a place in my tree for almost anyone from town.

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