6 Steps to Finding Your Living Cousins

When you search for contemporary cousins, your family tree really comes to life.

I'm coming to the end of my one-month subscription to Ancestry Pro Tools. I took the important step of following blog reader Jon Smith's suggestion. I used the "Ancestry DNA Match Table Maker" spreadsheet to download all my matches. (This powerful tool is the creation of Greg Clarke.) Now I have one spreadsheet with 4 tabs containing every DNA match for myself, Mom, Dad, and my husband.

I went through my parents' matches sharing 30 cM or more with them and color-coded everyone who's also on my list. Then I used a neat Excel trick to display those people's research notes from my tab on Mom or Dad's tabs. That ensures that I can see who I've identified and what I know about their families. (Leave a comment if you want me to explain this trick.)

Using tips I shared with you last week (see "How to Solve a DNA Match Using Shared Matches"), I've solved a ton of matches. I've discovered cousins I never knew existed! I solved matches who were a complete mystery with the help of Enhanced Shared Matches.

Researching Living People

I'm so used to researching my long-dead Italian relatives. My recent focus on DNA matches has me locating living people for the first time. I didn't realize how much success I could have in researching the living.

Here are 6 steps to follow when searching for living cousins:

1. Start with an ancestor you can identify. I know, tons of your matches have no family tree to show. But what if their first cousin does? Look for an ancestor you can pin down using a search.
2. Gather every document for that ancestor: immigration, naturalization, censuses, draft registration cards, death records or indexes.
3. Build out their family members through the years using the censuses you found. Add to their details with individual searches for each family member. See who they married and which kids they had.
4. Look for an obituary with the names of children and their spouses, grandchildren, and hometowns. OMG do I love a good obituary! My newspapers.com subscription is essential here. You can't get the full story from an obituary summary. Which names are the deceased's children and which are spouses? I've also been following my own advice to extract text from an obituary instead of retyping it.
5. Search public index records, marriage indexes and announcements, school yearbooks, and more to confirm all you can about family members.
6. Turn to social media to see who you can find. If available, look at their friends and see who comments on their photos. Did the subject post a photo of dad, and did someone comment on it using the dad's name? That's exactly what cracked one mystery DNA match for me.

Discovering Where Your Paths Crossed

Using this process, I've ID'd DNA matches who helped me find my ancestors' lost cousins. Who knew one of mom's Saviano cousins wound up in Cleveland, not far from where dad once lived? A DNA match helped me find my connection (7C1R) to a former bishop of Cleveland I'd heard about many years ago. And I found that my brother went to high school in New Jersey with one of our 7th cousins. You never know where your cousins may be.

This is the value of DNA matches for me. My direct ancestor chart is in fantastic shape. But this research tells me what became of my direct ancestors' closest relatives. It's an exciting, coincidence-filled journey.

In a week I'll return to adding source citations for my thousands of Italian nationals, and doing it efficiently. But I'll also take every opportunity to follow the families of those who emigrated to America.

If you're interested in finding living cousins you've never met, the tools you need are out there.

How to Solve a DNA Match Using Shared Matches

Use shared matches to see how DNA connects you to people near and far.

I've been using Ancestry's subscription-based Enhanced Shared Matches on a one-month paid trial. This powerful tool is free on MyHeritage, but I have only 621 DNA matches on that website.

Using shared matches, I've identified and placed many DNA matches in my family tree. The process comes down to a few basic steps, so I want to share them with you today. It's the same process on MyHeritage as it is with Ancestry's Enhanced Shared Matches.

Note that I'm not trying to find a missing direct ancestor through a DNA match. My family tree is missing one 3rd great grandmother and seven 4th great grandparents. All but one is missing because their hometown didn't keep civil records before 1861. No DNA match of mine will know their names.

So why do I bother spending time exploring my DNA matches? Two reasons:

1. Filling in dead ends. When the available vital records end, I don't know who tons of cousins married. DNA matches can give me answers.
2. Finding surprising connections. I've discovered cousins who lived near me at different times without my knowledge. Talk about a small world!

You may need to your matches to help you find a missing birth parent or an untraceable grandparent. For you, Ancestry's Enhanced Shared Matches will be far more valuable.

The Process for Using Shared Matches

• Start with the closest DNA match you haven't been able to identify.
• First, if they have a family tree posted, see if it contains any familiar names.
• Then check your shared matches to see if they're on the maternal or paternal side of your family tree. You may recognize one of your shared matches and know which side they're on. In my case, my parents have tested, so I can see which one is a match.
• Next, find their closest relations in the list of shared matches. If you see a shared match who is their parent, child, or sibling, make note of it on each person's profile. If you know one of their close matches, you should be able to work out this person's likely place in their family tree. For example, if you know their 1st cousin, then you can narrow down their grandparents to 2 couples.
• Now work through their relations to piece together an extended family. Use Ancestry and Facebook searches to find more clues. If you can ID their grandparents, build out that couple's descendants. Search for everything you can find.

If your family tree has a lot more holes than mine, you absolutely need to explore shared DNA matches.

Tips to Use Throughout the Process

Labels. As you work through this process, label every match you identify with a consistent format. I call it a label because it appears in your list of DNA matches on Ancestry, but it's actually a note you attach to a match. I use a relationship abbreviation and our common ancestors' names. I'll include their real name if they're using an alias. For example:

4C1R thru 4Gs Tommaso Antonio Nigro (1793) and Brigida Donata Zeolla (1795)

This is my 4th cousin once removed (4C1R). Our common ancestors are my 4th great grandparents (4Gs) Tommaso and Brigida. I include the birth years of the ancestors because too many people in my family tree have the same name.

By using a consistent label format, it's easier to find people who share the same ancestors. You may want to add some other bits of useful information to your labels, including who their closest DNA relatives are.

Cousin Rules. Always keep in mind these basic rules for identifying common ancestors:

• 1st cousins share grandparents
• 2nd cousins share 1st great grandparents
• 3rd cousins share 2nd great grandparents
• 4th cousins share 3rd great grandparents, etc.

Do More Research. Your investigations may lead you to research several of your 3rd or 4th cousins' families. These are likely to be branches you haven't researched in full. With any luck, you'll make some discoveries that make the process worthwhile.

I love finding the obituaries of 3rd or 4th cousins and being able to build out their families. Then I search my DNA matches to see if anyone has the same newfound last names in their tree. Or I find the whole family on Facebook.

Not every DNA match has the power to help you in your genealogy research. Focus on those most likely to be helpful, and see what you can discover.

And speaking of DNA matches:

• Which Numbers Help Solve a DNA Match?
• These DNA Sites Expand Your Tree in New Directions
• 4 Best Ways to Learn from Your DNA Matches

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Are Ancestry Pro Tools Worth the Money?

Here's how the new features of Ancestry Pro Tools stack up. Are they worth the price?

When I heard you can sign up for Ancestry Pro Tools for one month and then quit, I knew I had to try out their new features. My main interest is to see how my DNA matches match to one another. This can help you understand which of matches share a common ancestor with each other. That can help you see where they fit in your family tree.

The other Pro Tools give you desktop-like tools for your online-only family tree.

What's Included in Pro Tools?

• Charts & Reports. Family Tree Maker (FTM) provides the same reports as Pro Tools. I'm sure other family tree software programs do, too. A computer-based family tree program is better than building your tree online in so many ways.
• Tree Mapper. This feature has a cool visual representation and several types of filters. But I can do this in the Places tab of FTM. Or you can get really fancy and use this free program.
• Smart Filters. If you use MyTreeTags™ on Ancestry, this is a nice way to see everyone with a particular tag. But I don't use the tags. I didn't see any filters that offer me something I'd like to do but can't do in FTM.
• Tree Checker. This tool's main finding about my tree is that tons of people have no documentation. Yeah, tell me about it! I've been creating source citations for weeks. It also thinks I have 7,040 possible duplicates. I don't. We've all seen towns where everyone has the same name. As I scroll through this list of people, it's plain to see they all have different birth dates. This feature isn't helping me. It can also find many types of errors, and that may seem like a big help. But we already have Family Tree Analyzer to do that for us.
• Tree Insights. These factoids are not something I can generate within FTM, but I've used Family Tree Analyzer to do so. I can't say it's useful. This tool is showing me:
  • the top 5 surnames in my tree
  • the 5 longest-living people in my tree (they're only that old because I can't find out when they died)
  • the 5 couples with the most children
  • the 5 youngest brides or grooms
• Fan Chart Settings. I like the look of the Fan Chart in Ancestry much more than the one in FTM. But the Pro Tools add-ons to the existing Ancestry Fan Chart don't do anything very useful:
  • You can choose the number of generations to display (4, 5, 6, or 7). I have more generations than that.
  • You can show Family Lines, which gives a different color to each of your 4 grandparents' ancestors. I think the non-Pro version does that.
  • If you choose the Hints setting, it uses varying shades of green to show you who has a lot of hints and who has few or none. The Photos setting and Sources setting does the same thing. A range of colors show you the haves and have-nots.
  But check out the more-detailed fan chart I created a long time ago using Charting Companion software.

For me, none of those tools are worth a recurring cost. That brings me back to the reason I jumped on a $7 sale for one month of Ancestry Pro Tools: Enhanced Shared Matches.

For years I've wanted to know why my parents share some DNA with one another. I had to see what Enhanced Shared Matches could do for me. (Note: Each of my parents took an AncestryDNA test, and I manage their kits.)

After a long and frustrating day of comparing Mom and Dad's DNA matches, I came up empty. My problem is the family's IBS segments—that's Identical By State. All my ancestors came from the same small geographical area. These small bits of shared DNA are more from the land itself than blood relationships.

My parents' shared DNA matches need to be my focus. As I worked through them, I hit so many with dead ends in their tree that I couldn't resolve. Do those dead ends hold the magic key?

I don't want to lose the extra insights from Enhanced Shared Matches, but I don't want to pay for it again. What to do? Make a new spreadsheet, of course!

Step 1. Document their Shared Matches

Looking at Dad's shared matches with Mom, I find a list of 21 people, but I'll exclude myself and make it 20 people.

I'll start a new spreadsheet with Dad in column A and Mom in column C. In column B, I'll enter the name of each shared match. I can also add what I know about them, if I've figured out their relationship to me.

Capture and analyze the insights of Enhanced Shared Matches in a spreadsheet while you can.

In each cell of the spreadsheet:

• I'll list the number of shared cMs and Ancestry's predicted relationship.
• I'll note which side of Dad and Mom's families they're on: Maternal, Paternal, Both Sides, or Unassigned. I have to view Mom and Dad's match lists separately for this.

The first big surprise is that I see a lot more shared matches when I view Mom's DNA test. What the heck? I started with Dad's match list because he has more matches than Mom or me. Nine shared matches from Dad's list are not in Mom's list at all.

It makes sense that this is a built-in 20 cM cut off. The 9 people in Dad's list only have fewer than 20 cMs shared with him. The 30 or so people in Mom's list only have fewer than 20 cMs shared with her. I should concentrate on the 11 shared matches with whom both Mom and Dad share 20 or more cMs. The low-cM shared matches must be Identical By State.

These people with the smaller amounts of shared DNA escaped me in the past. I don't know if the Enhanced Shared Matches Pro Tool is the reason I'm seeing them now.

Step 2. Document Highest Shared Matches of the Top 11 People

In the same Excel workbook, I'll document the shared matches of my parents' top 11 shared matches. I'll view Dad and Mom's tests one at a time and note who each person shares with them. I'll add the number of cMs, predicted relationships, and side of family as before. To increase my chances of success, I'll add only the strongest shared matches of the 11 people. They have to share 139 cMs or more. (I chose that number after consulting the Shared centiMorgan Project.) That way, these matches should be no more distant to my subject people than 4th cousins. Plus, I'll skip any matches if they share less than 20 cM with my parents.

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My goal is to find the best common connections. After documenting the first person's shared matches, I found something interesting. He's a close match to another one of the 11 top matches. Now I have 2 people from the same family who match both my parents. Is this the break I needed?

In the end, I'm left with 5 people who share DNA with both my parents and have close matches in the original list. I've already fit 2 of them into my family tree, and I find no connection to Mom's family. Plus, the one who shares 116 cM with Dad is actually more distant than expected. He's Dad's 4th cousin on one side and 5th cousin on the other.

While my parents' shared matches are tantalizing, every clue is pointing toward their being Identical By State. The most amazing thing is how their IBS families came together in a one-block stretch of Morris Avenue in the Bronx, New York.

Before I finish this month of Ancestry Pro Tools, I'm going to keep going through my DNA matches to learn what I can using the enhanced tools. It's a huge help when you can see that this match is the mother of that match. But I don't plan to renew my Pro Tools subscription.

Important Stories Wait for You in Military Records

Even if your people didn't serve, you may discover family treasures in these military record collections.

My ancestors were not in America to fight in the Revolutionary War or the Civil War. My grandfather Leone was the right age to fight in World War I. But as an Italian citizen, he had to go back to Italy to fight for them.

Despite this, I've found great treasures in military records. Are you missing any of these types of records for your family tree?

The Genealogical Benefits of Draft Cards

Grandpa Leone was too old when the U.S. authorities registered him for World War II. There was little chance he'd get the call. His World War II draft card shows the wrong birth date and the wrong place of birth. But I know it's him because the card shows he lives with my grandmother in the house where my mother was born. And he's a shoemaker, which was always his trade.

Grandpa Iamarino was part of the "Young Men's draft," but at 39 years of age, he was unlikely to get the call, too. His draft registration card provided me with the middle name I never knew belonged to my grandmother: Gloria. His card confirms his address as the place where my Dad grew up. It also provides the name and address of his employer at the time. This was a company name I hadn't seen before, but when I looked it up, I found it was a costume jewelry company. That, I know, was Grandpa's occupation in New York. This precise job information can add a whole new chapter to your family story. See "Using Documents to Imagine Your Ancestor's Job."

Search for draft registration cards for all the men in your family tree who lived in the USA and were born between:

• 6 Jun 1886 and 5 Jun 1897 (World War I draft registration)
• 11 Sep 1872 and 12 Sep 1900 (World War II first through third registrations)
• 28 Apr 1877 and 16 Feb 1897 (World War II fourth registration)
• 17 Feb 1897 and 31 Dec 1921 (World War II young men's draft registration)

One World War II draft card gave me the name of a hometown lost to time. I tracked down my uncle's birth record in this town in Italy, and it led to treasure. I discovered the hometowns of my 2nd great grandmother and 2nd great grandfather. It was a massive finding. See "Why and How to Harvest Draft Card Facts."

Flight Record Details My Uncle's World War II Death

I used a free trial on Fold3.com to search for anything about my Uncle Johnny's fatal airplane crash in World War II. All we knew about my mother's only brother was that his plane crashed and he died while serving in the war.

His flight record tells me:

• He was part of the 463rd Bomb Group, 773rd Bomb Squadron. He flew out of the same Italian airbase used by the Tuskegee Airmen.
• His B-17G bomber was last seen at 9:48 a.m. on 7 July 1944 at map coordinates that point to Lovászpatona, Hungary.
• The names and home addresses of the 10-man flight crew. The report designates all the men as KIA, killed in action.
• They were on a bombing run targeting Blechhammar, Germany, now part of Poland. This was the location of chemical plants at the time.
• Two Army Air Corps gunners gave eyewitness descriptions of the aircraft's last moments. While Mom heard 5 of the men bailed out of the plane, these eyewitnesses say no parachutes opened.

If you have a relative who served or died in the military, you may find a detailed description of the events, too.

Fallen Soldier Monuments Tie Up Loose Ends

My grandfathers' hometowns in Italy have memorials to their fallen soldiers from World War I and II. I took extensive photographs of the names on these monuments.

I have many cases where a young man from these towns disappeared from the vital records. Now I can use these monuments to see which of them died in the war.

You can find many of these names in online databases. To search for your loose ends, see "Finding Fallen Soldiers in Your Family Tree."

Foreign Military Records Tell the Rest of the Story

I knew my Grandpa Leone had been a prisoner of war in the Italian Army. But apart from hearing that he ate rats to stay alive, I knew no details.

In 2017, the 100th anniversary of World War I, I did some research into the Italian Army's war efforts. (See "POW: My Grandfather's World War I Experience.") The enemy took 250,000 Italian soldiers prisoner during the Battle of Caporetto. That's horrifying! I thought my grandfather could be among those 250,000 men. I read that the Germans held these prisoners in Mauthausen and Milowitz. At least 100,000 died of starvation or tuberculosis.

One year later I went to Italy and found the answers I needed. Thanks to an online resource, I knew the register and record number of my grandfather's military record. So I went to the provincial archives in Benevento and saw the record for myself.

Wow, I was right! He fought in the Battle of Caporetto and wound up at Mauthausen. I learned he spent a solid year as a POW. He spent another two years at home recovering. Thankfully for me, he became healthy again and came to America where he met my grandmother.

If a soldier from the Benevento province died in World War II, his record is available online. I've used many of these records to fill in the blanks for these men. See how I gained access to my grandfather's military record in "Taking a Do-It-Yourself Genealogy Vacation, Part 1."

My article on "Free Italian Military Records for WWI and WWII" has been getting tons of views lately. If you haven't read it, I invite you to see what it may hold for you.

Don't overlook the treasures military records may hold—even if your family did not serve.

Semi-Automated Process for Downloading Antenati Images

Done in batches, this process lets you download as many Antenati vital record images as you want.

Remember the good old days when you could download an entire town's vital records from Antenati? I'm glad I grabbed all my main ancestral hometowns while I had the chance. But there are still more vital record collections I'd love to have at my fingertips.

Both the Italian Antenati website and FamilySearch block the use of mass-download programs. They may be trying to avoid taxing their web servers. But it could be in their contract with the localities that they prevent these activities. There's nothing we users can do about it.

While mass downloads are gone, we can do…let's call them "group downloads." I've heard from enough readers to know that the desire to collect these groups of files is there. That's why I want to share my semi-automated process for downloading Antenati files.

Granted, if the register book you want has tons of pages, this will be an ordeal. It may scare you away, or you may decide to tackle it over the course of a few days. But, if the book you want is small enough, you'll absolutely want to do this.

Some of my ancestors came from an Italian town with a handful of frazioni. A frazione is like a hamlet—a semi-independent part of a town. Think of a large city like Brooklyn, New York. It's many residential sections each have their own identity. There's Bushwick, Bedford-Stuyvesant, and Liberty Park. These sections are a lot like frazioni in Italy.

Some of the people in my family tree have birth records I'm missing because they came from a frazione of the town. I want to gather the records from the frazioni I'm missing.

Montorso is a frazione with 5 birth registers available on Antenati (1862–1866). In later years, they stored their vital records with the larger town. That's how some people born in Montorso made it into my family tree. The Montorso registers are very small, so I'm going to download all the files.

The 1866 birth register has 6 images, but only 3 contain birth records. The others are the book cover, title page, and a blank page at the end of the book. I want images 3, 4, and 5.

Let's Get Started

Here's the process, and it's the only way to get to the high-resolution images:

1. Go to each image you want to download and copy its URL to a text file on your computer. The URL changes the instant you click a new page, even if the image doesn't render right away.
   • In this case, the URLs are:
     • https://antenati.cultura.gov.it/ark:/12657/an_ua2286280/02R93aK
     • https://antenati.cultura.gov.it/ark:/12657/an_ua2286280/5gGRdap
     • https://antenati.cultura.gov.it/ark:/12657/an_ua2286280/LPa47oY
2. The last 7 characters of each URL on Antenati, the part after the last /, is a code that's unique to that image. Your goal: Put that code in the following template, replacing the word TARGET: https://iiif-antenati.san.beniculturali.it/iiif/2/TARGET/full/full/0/default.jpg
   
   The result is this:
   • https://iiif-antenati.san.beniculturali.it/iiif/2/02R93aK/full/full/0/default.jpg
   • https://iiif-antenati.san.beniculturali.it/iiif/2/5gGRdap/full/full/0/default.jpg
   • https://iiif-antenati.san.beniculturali.it/iiif/2/LPa47oY/full/full/0/default.jpg
3. Click each new link (or paste it into a web browser), give it a moment to display, then right-click and save the image to your computer.

When you create a longer list of image URLs from the same register book, you can complete this task with a more automated process:

• In your text editor, Find & Replace everything before the unique 7-character code with https://iiif-antenati.san.beniculturali.it/iiif/2/ (that's the first part of the template URL). You can do this to the entire list at once because each URL has the same beginning.
  
• Paste /full/full/0/default.jpg at the end of each line in your list (that's the end of the template URL). Take a look at the image at the top of this article to see the before and after text files.
  

There's no download button on Antenati, but here's a download process you can use over and over.

I use a free Windows text editor called Notepad++ (get it at https://notepad-plus-plus.org). As a retired website manager, I used to work in HTML code every day. I still HTML-code these blog articles and my own website. Notepad++ has always saved me tons of time and ensured my accuracy.

A big Notepad++ benefit for this project is that any URL in a text file is a clickable link. When you make a list of URLs, it's easy to click through them, go to the browser page, and right-click to save the file. Be sure to give each file you download a different name:

• First, create a folder for the town. In this case, Montorso.
• Then make a sub-folder for the year and type of document, such as 1866 births.
• When you right-click the high-resolution images in your web browser, save them as 1.jpg, 2.jpg, 3.jpg. This keeps the files in the proper order for you.

Yes, this is tedious for a large town and nearly unthinkable for a big city. But if the town's vital records are important to your research, you'll be happy you went to the trouble. Be sure to take breaks or your mousing arm will get sore!

When I prepared to download the 1865 birth records for Montorso, I saw that the register has 21 images. But looking at the thumbnail images, I found that I needed to download only 12 of them. The rest were cover pages and blank pages. Keep an eye out for duplicate images, too. When this happens, you can decide which one is better and skip the other.

When you have a whole collection at your fingertips, you'll make new discoveries. Like, your 2nd great grandmother and her first cousin were born the same day. Or your great grandmother was a twin and you didn't know it! (That happened to me.)

If you have Italian ancestry and you're not using the Antenati website, you probably haven't gotten very far. Find out exactly how the use the Antenati with these articles:

• How to Use the Online Italian Genealogy Archives
• How to Make the Best of the New Antenati Website