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.