Use a Wide Search to Find New Connections

When your family tree is very large, it's hard to know which people need more research. Usually I don't know which Italian nationals in my tree came to America until a descendant writes to me. DNA matches' trees can also show me who left Italy. Waiting to hear from someone or hoping a good match comes along is a poor research strategy.

Today I'm being proactive about finding Italian immigrants. Most of the Italians in my family tree came from a handful of towns, so I can focus on those towns one at a time.

Cast a Wide Net

Start from the right genealogy record collection and keep your search wide open. Then reap your harvest.

You can use your favorite website to do a broad search for immigrants. I'll use Ancestry.com. I'll start my search from the "New York, U.S., Arriving Passenger and Crew Lists, 1820-1957" database. In the database's search fields I'll enter one thing only: a town of birth. I'll start with my grandfather's hometown of Colle Sannita.

This wide search for one town gives me 263 search results, and I recognize every last name in the list. I'll start with Giovanni Mascia because seeing his name gave me this idea. In the search results list I see Giovanni Mascia has a birth year of about 1883. When I check my family tree for this name, I find one man born in 1883 and two others born in 1882 and 1884. I'll look at the ship manifest to see if I can be sure which Giovanni Mascia made the journey.

The record page for Giovanni's 1934 ship manifest says his wife is Maria Iamarino. My tree says her name was Annamaria Assunta Iamarino at birth, so Maria is acceptable. It also says his daughter is Angiolina. This makes the 1883 Giovanni Mascia in my family tree a perfect match. He happens to be my 4C3R (fourth cousin three times removed). I know Angiolina was born in Colle Sannita in 1903 because her vital record is online.

The 1934 ship manifest says Giovanni is coming to America to join his daughter Angiolina. She's in Cleveland, Ohio, and his wife is home in Colle Sannita.

With this new information, I can do a search of all records for Giovanni. I find that he also came to America in 1909, and that ship manifest says he first came here in 1907. He naturalized in Cleveland, Ohio. His Declaration of Intention gives me lots of details I couldn't access before:

• He and his wife married in Colle Sannita on 17 Jan 1902.
• His son Bartolomeo, born in Colle Sannita on 7 Feb 1910, died by 16 Nov 1936. That's the date of Giovanni's declaration of intention, and Bartolomeo isn't listed.
• He had four children I didn't know about. They were born in years for which the Colle Sannita birth records aren't online. Now I have their names and birth dates.

Other search results tell me that Giovanni became a U.S. citizen on 20 Dec 1940 and died in Cleveland in 1942. When he filed for citizenship on 6 May 1940, his wife and four of his children were still in Colle Sannita. His son Pietro was in Argentina. I found him in Cleveland in the 1940 census living with his daughter Angiolina and her family. (Angiolina's husband is also from Colle Sannita.)

When I found a link for Giovanni on "Italy, Find a Grave" I saw the photo that I TOOK and uploaded in 2018. He and his wife's memorials are there in a crypt in Colle Sannita. I never would have imagined he'd become a U.S. citizen. Note: "U.S., Find a Grave" says he's buried in Cleveland. An Ohio death records index confirms his death date and place, and gives me a certificate number. Someday I may confirm his place of burial through the death certificate.

Add Wide Searches to Your Research Routine

A wide search brought me full circle, from Grandpa's Italian hometown to Cleveland, Ohio, and back again to a photo I took in 2018.

All this information came from picking a random name from a wide-search results list. These are all facts I would never have learned if not for that search.

I can imagine using this technique and choosing one person a day to research. For a year now, I've been adding the tens of thousands of missing source citations to my family tree. With more than 82,000 people in my family tree, most plucked from Italian vital records, I still have a long way to go.

Now, anytime I start to feel as if I'm stuck in a rut, I can toss in a wide search. I can gather details about someone I didn't know had come to America. And if they settled here, I can bring their family forward in time.

That new research may connect me to a distant cousin who happens to find their people in my family tree. And that's what all this hard work is all about.

3 Tips to Master Handwritten Genealogy Documents

Last Tuesday, as "Finding Your Roots" was about to start, my childhood best friend texted me. Could I help her find documents for her husband's grandfather? Of course I could! Sitting on my couch with my phone, trying to pay attention to the TV show, I did my thing. I downloaded census records, draft cards, and an obituary and sent them to her.

A long-time teacher, she said, "I don't know how you read all that old-school cursive handwriting." I answered, "Years of practice."

Spending time with "old-school cursive handwriting" takes the difficulty out of reading it. There is the occasional document that's written so badly it's a struggle for me. And I still dislike Latin documents, although I'm comfortable with the numbers. For the most part, I can find the details I need from an old document without a second thought.

No matter what the language, these 3 tips help you conquer old genealogy document handwriting.

It's like being fluent in another language. You don't have to think about the translation. You understand it as it is.

Tip 1: Comparison

The number one handwriting tip I see online is to look at the whole page. People will post a snippet of an image and ask for help with one word or name. Someone will always say, "show us the whole page". Why? Because you can compare how the writer formed a particular letter elsewhere on the page.

Let say you think a last name begins with the letter C, but you're not quite sure. Scour the rest of the page for a capital C. Does it look the same? If not, is there another letter that does match? What does that word say?

Handwriting comparison can help you rule letters in or out.

Tip 2: Guides

You can find helpful handwriting pages on FamilySearch.org. Go to their Wiki page in the Search menu and type "handwriting". Here are a few direct links by language, not by country. Many of these links take you to other websites, but I found them all on the FamilySearch Wiki:

• Algerian Arabic handwriting: https://www.omniglot.com/writing/arabic_algerian.htm
• Armenian handwriting: https://www.familysearch.org/library/books/viewer/508641
• Cyrillic handwriting: https://www.sggee.org/research/rus_translate/Cyrillic_Handouts.pdf
• Czechia handwriting: https://www.familysearch.org/en/wiki/Czechia_Handwriting
• English handwriting: https://script.byu.edu/english-handwriting/alphabet/alphabet-chart
• French handwriting: https://cfhg-permanent-web-files.s3.us-west-2.amazonaws.com/Script/ExtractionGuides/French_Extraction_Guide/French_Extraction_Guide-Chapter_5.pdf
• Gaelic handwriting (scroll down a bit): https://www.omniglot.com/writing/irish.htm
• German Gothic handwriting: https://www.familysearch.org/en/wiki/img_auth.php/c/ca/German_Gothic_Handwriting_Guide.pdf
• Greek handwriting: https://www.familysearch.org/en/wiki/Greece_Handwriting#The_Handwriting
• Hindi handwriting: https://www.omniglot.com/writing/hindi.htm
• Italian handwriting: https://www.familysearch.org/en/wiki/Italy_Handwriting#Letters
• Netherlands handwriting: https://www.familysearch.org/en/wiki/Netherlands_Handwriting
• Portuguese handwriting: https://script.byu.edu/portuguese-handwriting/alphabet/alphabet-charts
• Scandinavian Gothic handwriting: http://broadcast.lds.org/elearning/FHD/Community/en/FamilySearch/Handwriting/ScandinavianGothic/Lesson_1/GothicAlphabetsamples%20.pdf
• Spanish handwriting: https://script.byu.edu/spanish-handwriting/alphabet/alphabet-charts
• Urdu handwriting: https://www.omniglot.com/writing/urdu.htm
• Welsh handwriting and pronunciation: https://omniglot.com/writing/welsh.htm

Also on the FamilySearch Wiki, check the country you need for a Genealogical Word List. These are the most important words to recognize when you're viewing old records. Memorize numbers and months to hit the ground running. If there is no handwriting help for the country or language you need, the Genealogical Word List is your best bet.

Tip 3: Location

Imagine you find a document that has your female ancestor's missing maiden name. It's the name that will break down your brick wall. But you can't read it!

This is when it's a great help to know which last names are common in that place. Go through the town's vital records collection and scan the index pages. If it's a census, look at the surrounding pages. If the same name is there a few times, you have that many more chances to see it written clearly.

This happened to me. I was so excited to find the name of my 6th great grandmother, born in about 1711. But I couldn't read her last name! As I spent more time viewing other vital records from her hometown, it became 100% clear her last name was Carosa.

Do your homework, read all the documents you can get, and you may never need handwriting help again.

You Must Find Your Ancestor's Hometown First

My first article in this blog—eight years ago—explains the first step to take in your genealogy journey. You must find out where your ancestor came from. If you don't know your ancestor's hometown, you can't be sure any of your search results are the right person.

Most people know where their parents were born, and their grandparents, too. When I was a kid, my grandparents still lived in the building where my mother was born. My father would mention his hometown in Ohio. I knew my grandmothers were born in New York. And I heard the names of my grandfathers' hometowns in Italy many times.

It's your great grandparents who may be your first genealogy obstacle. If you don't know where they came, where will you search? You need to find clues to point you in the right direction.

You can't tell your ancestor from a stranger unless you know where they came from.

My very first article for this blog, "Where Did Grandpa Come From?", lists five resources for finding a town of origin:

• ship manifests
• naturalization papers
• passport applications
• draft registration cards, and
• a website for tracing Italian last names. (I use a better one now.)
  

"4 Key Places to Discover Your Ancestor's Hometown" explores four of those resources. Using them, I broke through brick walls.

• A ship manifest and a phonetic clue led me to my great grandmother Maria Rosa Caruso's hometown in Italy.
• A World War II draft registration card pinpointed a town in Italy no one remembered.
• My grandfather's declaration of intention named his hometown—but I knew that already. What I didn't know was that his birthday was different than the one we celebrated!
• A passport application proved my grandaunt's husband had roots in the same town as her. I knew they both had the last name Sarracino for a reason!

"6 Places to Discover Your Ancestor's Town of Birth" goes a bit further. It shows how birth, baptism, marriage, and military records held important clues.

"6 Ways to Find Your Ancestor's Hometown" adds a few more tips:

• Say your relative died in an English-speaking country. It's likely his death certificate Anglicizes his parents' non-English names. My 2nd great grandmother's last name was Girardi. Every U.S. document that mentioned her had a different version of her name. With a bit of imagination, I finally figured it out.
• A marriage certificate in a person's new country may include their foreign hometown. Or it may have the name of a country you weren't expecting.
• Try a broad search for a last name only. See where everyone else with that name came from. This is how I solved my great grandmother's hometown. And she has a common last name.
• If you can't find a document for your person that has their hometown, search for their siblings. One of them may have extra documents for you to view. And one of those documents may have exactly what you need.

Finally, there's DNA. "How DNA Can Help Find Your Ancestral Hometown" explores how a DNA test can show your ancestors' origins. I'm sure my AncestryDNA communities are so accurate because my tree is so extensive. If you don't have an enormous family tree with lots of references to those towns of origin, there's still hope.

Take a look at the origins of lots of your closest matches. Which areas do you have in common? My DNA matches and I share Southern Italy. That's not too helpful unless you didn't know where your ancestors came from.

Next, take a look at any matches with a decent family tree. Also try searching for your ancestors in other people's family trees. So many people have written to me because they found their ancestors in my family tree. They got very lucky because I had the documents and the names and dates they couldn't find on their own. Be sure to use any new information to do your own research. Confirm everything!

Finding the right place of origin for your ancestors makes all the difference. Don't go down the wrong research path. You must find out where to look.

Finding TV-Worthy Stories in Your Family Tree

Doing the research myself makes this story closer to my heart.

Imagine you're a guest on PBS's "Finding Your Roots." Knowing what you already know, what are the juiciest stories we'd learn about your family?

There's little I can learn about my ancestors before they came to America. They came from small towns where most people were illiterate. I can't imagine they had a local newspaper.

I'll bet the "Finding Your Roots" staff would dig into my grandfather and my two great grandfathers.

The Patriot

My grandfather Adamo Leone sailed to America twice. Between voyages he returned to Italy to fight for his country in World War I.

What we heard: As a child I heard that Adamo had been a prison of war and he had to eat rats to stay alive. That's all any of us knew.

What I discovered: I researched Italian World War I army defeats online. The Battle of Caporetto led to the most Italian casualties and captures. A shocking 275,000 Italians wound up in two different prisoner of war camps in Austria. One of the camps, Mathausen, was also a notorious POW camp in World War II.

Next I found the website of the state archives of Adamo's province of Benevento. A listing for Adamo includes the volume and record number of his military record. The only way to see his military record was to go to the city of Benevento and ask to see it. I did that in 2018.

The page is completely filled with line entries. At age 20, the army assigned him to the 2nd regiment of the infantry. Six months later they gave him one year's convalescence leave, but it doesn't say what was wrong with him. Then there were different calls to arms to which he didn't respond. He was in New York City at the time.

Then in August 1915, he received the order to return to Italy and go to war. Not all Italian men in America responded to that call, but Adamo did. In 1917 the Italian Army promoted him to the rank of corporal. Later that year, as I had guessed from my research, he fought in the Battle of Caporetto. The record confirms that he became a POW in Mathausen in Austria. Adamo's liberation came exactly one year later. The Italian Army granted him an honorable discharge. They sent him home to recuperate.

He left for New York again on 15 Feb 1920. The Italian government paid his fare. Two years later he married my grandmother and worked as a shoemaker.

I watched a movie that took place in Adamo's POW camp during World War II—"The Photographer of Mauthausen". I couldn't stop crying.

The Businessman

My great grandfather Giovanni Sarracino came to New York with no education. He somehow wound up owning a commercial/residential building on a busy corner in the Bronx.

What we heard: All I ever knew was that Giovanni and his wife came from a town called Pastene. No one knew how to spell it, and there is another town with a name that sounds the same. So we never knew where this branch came from exactly.

What I discovered: Eight months after Giovanni married Maria Rosa, they had a child unknown to us. Little Carmine Antonio died within seven months. The couple left for America to join Maria Rosa's family in the Bronx, New York, in 1899. (Her father, my 2nd great grandfather, was my first immigrant ancestor.) Maria Rosa became pregnant right after Carmine Antonio was born. She was six months pregnant with my grandmother when she made that long voyage.

Giovanni worked as a bartender in a saloon, then became the storekeeper of the saloon. Later he was a building painter. During World War I he was a machinist's helper for a construction contractor. This may have been to aid the war effort because he returned to being a building painter after the war.

In the 1940 U.S. census, Giovanni owned a "beer garden". Since he owned the building at 603 Morris Avenue, I can assume the beer garden was the saloon on the ground floor. Giovanni's son Alfredo owned a butcher shop in this building. His other son Amelio owned a photography studio in this building.

I don't know how Giovanni and his brother-in-law Semplicio became property owners. They went from working for a saloon or a brewery to owning the building. I found one legal document that gives me a clue. Semplicio seemed to find a legal loophole in his lease and took extreme advantage of it. They were a couple of shrewd businessmen.

The Man of God

My great grandfather Francesco Iamarino came to America at least five times. On one of his trips, he felt inspired by a church in a Bronx neighborhood. Despite deep Catholic roots, he returned to Italy and founded a non-Catholic church. It carries on to this day.

What we heard: My grandfather Pietro said his father became an evangelical minister. He said the local Catholic church denounced Francesco because of this.

What I discovered: Francesco made his first trip to America in August 1903. He left his pregnant wife and infant son Pietro behind. He joined his brother Giuseppe in the Bronx and was back in Italy in time for his daughter's birth in February 1904.

In 1909, Francesco again joined his brother Giuseppe in the Bronx. He joined Giuseppe another time in late 1913. During one of these visits, in 1903, 1909, or 1913, he had a religious awakening. I learned this story from his granddaughter, my cousin Maria. During one of his stays in the Bronx, he passed by a church and felt moved by their songs and what they had to say. He felt it was his calling to return home to Italy and start a church like this one.

No one was living in his old house in Colle Sannita when I saw it in 2018, but his chapel still exists. The family was renovating the building to benefit the flock Francesco had grown.

Francesco made his last trip to America in 1929, this time going to Ohio. He visited his son Pietro and met Pietro's wife Lucy (my grandmother) and their baby, my Aunt Lillian. Lillian's real name was Libera, named for Francesco's wife. He would also have seen Lucy's father for the first time in years—his second cousin Pasquale.

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Each of these stories deserves mention in my "Finding Your Roots" episode. But The Patriot's story would make the best TV. Imagine the stock footage and newspaper accounts of the disastrous Battle of Caporetto. Picture the still photographs of emaciated prisoners of war looking like skeletons, barely surviving.

Contrast this with Adamo's life in America after the war. He was a shoemaker in Italy before he turned 20. In New York he worked for a 5th Avenue shoe store, owned a store in the Bronx, then made saddles and holsters for the NYPD. His only son Johnny served in World War II. His US Army Air Corps base in Italy wasn't too far from Adamo's hometown. Johnny died during a bombing run not far from Austria and the nightmare Adamo survived.

It's important to stop and reflect on your family stories once in a while. Which of your ancestors' stories would make it into your "Finding Your Roots" episode?

5 Steps to Making a Cousin Connection

It's easy to get sidetracked when searching for a cousin connection. Follow these 5 steps for the best results.

I've been having a conversation on Ancestry.com with a man who found his ancestors in my family tree. Let's call him CP. It's rare that I hear from someone with roots in this particular little Italian town of Santa Paolina. I'm eager to figure out our connection.

I have to remind you that my family tree encompasses entire towns. All my people came from tiny, neighboring Italian towns. Almost everyone from there has a connection by blood or marriage. That's why CP's ancestors are in my tree without a cousin connection to me.

One of CP's ancestors was Rosaria Consolazio. My 2nd great grandmother Vittoria Consolazio's paternal side came from Santa Paolina. But there's a big problem. Rosaria's death record names her parents, but there are no records for her siblings. She's a dead end.

If the most enticing lead to a cousin connection won't work, what should we do next? Let's go through the best steps to take to make a cousin connection. Keep in mind, these steps won't find a cousin connection if there isn't one. But they will build and strengthen a big branch of your family tree. Let's get started.

1. Set a Place at the Table

Work your potential cousin into your family tree in any way you can. Use the details they've told you, their family tree, and online searches. This will give you an important visual of their family.

When I fit CP into my family tree, Family Tree Maker found 2 types of relationships between us:

• 2nd great grand nephew of wife of uncle of husband of 3rd great aunt (a Consolazio) of me
• 3rd great grand nephew of husband of 5th great aunt (a Ricciardelli) of me

2. Take a Good Look Around

Find the last names among your potential cousin's ancestors that mean anything to you. Search for more details about these people and their families.

I see a few last names that I know are common to the town of Santa Paolina. (I know this thanks to the work I've done with the town's vital records.) I also see a few missing generations I may be able to find among the town's vital records. Tons of vital records are available on the Antenati website. I've already downloaded them to my computer and renamed them to make searchable.

It's clear that CP's family tree has something else in common with mine. It has people from Santa Paolina who married people from the neighboring town of Tufo. That means I need to search those vital records, too. I haven't renamed all the Tufo records yet, so some of my searches will be manual.

As I add more parents, spouses, and children to CP's family tree, I keep looking at the index list in Family Tree Maker. Do I already have anyone who may be a match for this new addition? It could help if I add someone who turns out to be a known cousin of mine. That could lead to a common ancestor for CP and me.

3. Search, Search, and Search Some More

Work through your potential cousin's closest families. Keep finding records and sources for all their direct ancestors. You need to build out their families. Find the siblings of their direct ancestors. Find out who they married. Find their children and see who they married. One of those extended family members may already be in your family tree. They could be the piece you need to solve the puzzle.

Keep your focus on the potential cousin's blood relatives. You may find an interesting lead in an in-law's family, but that's unlikely to get you the answer you need.

4. Stay on a Logical Path

Remember to think through your logical plan for each person who's missing an ancestor. Based on what you know so far, search for a person's birth, marriage, and death records. Search for their children and who their children married. Search for their siblings. Build out this one person's family as much as you can.

I had one woman, CP's 3rd great grandmother Giovanna, who was missing her parents. Here's how I expanded her family and added to CP's branch:

• I found Giovanna's death record, giving me the names of her parents and her approximate year of birth.
• I found her marriage record because I knew her husband's name and that she had a child in 1834. (I worked backwards from 1834 until I found her in the town's annual marriage index.)
• I found her 1811 birth record that shows the same parents as her death record and her marriage record. This makes Giovanna's vital records complete and confirms the information I had.
• Armed with her marriage date and death date, I located another 3 children for her.
• I moved up to her parents—CP's 4th great grandparents. I found their 1809 marriage record and learned their parents' names. These are CP's 5th great grandparents who were born in the 1760s. The town's vital records won't let us go any further back. This generation died before civil record keeping began.
• I looked for death records for CP's 4th great grandparents and found two of them. One was Domenico (father of the Giovanna who started this journey), and he was in my tree already. Until this moment, I didn't have enough facts to see he was the same person. That led to my next step.
• I searched for details about Domenico's three wives and his children. I found a ton of facts and added 45 people to CP's branch of my family tree, all based on vital records.

I still can't find a common ancestor for CP and me. We're either completely unrelated or our connection goes back to the 1700s. That's too early for Italian vital records.

5. Use DNA

You can certainly start with this step—you may get lucky. Use what DNA tells you as you run through the previous steps.

If your potential cousin and you have taken a DNA test, are you matches? If so, use your DNA website's estimated relationship to figure out where your connection should be. Consult this relationship calculator to see which of your great grandparents is key.

CP and I are not DNA matches. He's not a match to my mother, and his son is not a match to my mother or me. This could mean we have no connection, or it could mean our connection is too distant. Once again, my research is stuck because I have no vital records to connect our ancestors from the mid 1700s.

My earliest documented Consolazio ancestor from Santa Paolina was born about 1725. Buonaventura Consolazio was my 7th great grandfather. CP and I could have a connection through Buonaventura or one of his children. If so, we'd be 7th or 8th cousins. So far I can't prove anything.

UPDATE: I did it! I found the elusive connection and made CP my 6th cousin twice removed. It's a crazy story. One of his direct ancestors was a dead end because the 1859 death records aren't available. I know she died on 15 Apr 1859 because it's noted on her daughter's 1864 marriage record. But then I discovered the 1859 death index is online. I found her listing with the same date, and it names her parents. Her mother is my 7th great aunt. Her grandparents are my 7th great grandparents. NEVER GIVE UP!

These 5 steps are very important to making a cousin connection. I'll continue to build out my many family branches in the little towns of Santa Paolina and Tufo. You never know what you'll find.