Why My 83,000-Person Family Tree is Growing Again

When your ancestors come from small, isolated towns, everyone there may be your cousin. Or your cousin's cousin.

I realized this in 2008 while recording every vital record from my grandfather's town. The population hovered around 2,000 over the years, and the people stayed put for centuries. All the families intermarried—with one notable exception. The wealthy families only married into other wealthy families. But the population had far more peasants than wealthy people. And I come from peasants.

This tiny village, a ghost town since 1980, is growing like crazy in my family tree. Find out the steps to this rewarding genealogy project.

Even better, everyone on both sides of my family came from neighboring Italian towns. There was intermarriage within each town, and marriage between the towns. That gives me deep ties to several towns, including:

• Baselice
• Circello
• Colle Sannita
• Pesco Sannita
• Sant'Angelo a Cupolo
• Santa Paolina

I'm the fanatic who downloaded ALL the vital records from those towns. I'm the nut who went through and renamed every image to make them searchable. And I'm the lunatic who published inventories of the towns on my For the Cousins website.

But there was another town called Apice that I was saving for a rainy day. My closest tie to Apice is the 1816 birth of my 3rd great grandmother, Rufina Zullo. I thought I wouldn't find a lot of relatives because Rufina left town early.

Side note: Apice suffered an earthquake in 1980 that made the town uninhabitable. While the buildings still stand, the town is now a ghost town. I'm eager to see it someday.

Starting the Process

The rainy day I was waiting for has come. As I've said before, I've been busy creating the thousands of missing source citations for my tree. I polished off the 9,000 citation-less blood-relatives in my family tree. I'm working through the 50,000 citation-less people with more complicated relationships. But I'm mixing things up a bit.

Instead of striving to complete the citations for at least 100 people a day, I'm setting aside time for Apice.

It took a long time to gain traction on renaming the Apice vital records. The handwriting on the early documents is atrocious! I created a spreadsheet of the town's last names. I checked each name on the Cognomix website to see if it still exists in or around Apice. I also checked the spelling.

When I skipped ahead to later years, the handwriting was fine. (The old town clerk was long gone.) That helped me confirm the names I was seeing on the earlier records. Now, finally, I've renamed every vital record—with one important exception. I haven't gone through all the "wedding packets" yet. These are the required documents a couple must present when they get married. They include such treasures as:

• the bride and groom's birth records. This is very important if they were born before civil record-keeping began.
• the death records for any of the bride and groom's parents who have died.
• the death records of the bride and groom's paternal grandfathers. But only if their father has already died.
• the death record of a previous spouse (there was no divorce; only death).

With the files renamed and searchable on my computer, I can build Rufina's extended family. I started this process last week and have added more than 200 new people to my family tree so far. Each time I add a new couple's marriage, I go through their wedding packets and rename those files, too.

Getting Down to Business

The process of documenting a new town goes like this:

1. Open my family tree to my connection to the town: Rufina Zullo. I added her immediate family long ago, but now I can search for her siblings' families.
2. After I add a new relative and their source citation, I search for their marriage, children, and death. This leads me to research each relative's spouse.
3. For each new spouse, I search for documentation on their parents and siblings.
4. It becomes a never-ending puzzle of births, marriages, deaths, children, and siblings. But this time around, I'm very careful to create each source citation on the spot.

My primary focus for well over a year has been my source citation project. During that time, my family tree hasn't grown. It's only gotten stronger and more valuable to others. I'm beyond thrilled to see the Apice population growing in my family tree now.

When I do rename all those wedding packet files, I'll publish an inventory of the Apice vital records, too. After that, who knows? I have looser ties to more towns in the area, like Pietrelcina (home of Padre Pio) and Tufo. Nothing can stop a genealogy fanatic.

What grand projects are you working on? What's next?