On my last trip to Italy, I took tons of cemetery photos in my ancestral hometowns. At home I uploaded them to Find a Grave. Today I decided to see who might have had the same idea as me.
I started my search on Ancestry, choosing the database "Italy, Find a Grave® Index, 1800s-Current". I didn't enter any names or dates. Instead, I selected a town I haven't visited yet. Santa Paolina, in Avellino, Italy, was the birthplace of my 2nd great grandmother. She and her husband are my earliest immigrant ancestors, settling in New York City in 1898.
Last year I tried a wide search on Ancestry. (See "Use a Wide Search to Find New Connections".) I used Grandpa's hometown and focused on Ellis Island records. This yielded a ton of results because so many people from that town came to America.
This time I'm looking at Italian Find a Grave results and choosing a different town.
 |
| This search expanded a dead end in my family tree. They were in a town I couldn't have imagined. |
There are two search results for Santa Paolina, and I have no faith in the first one. It claims this woman was born in Santa Paolina on 22 Nov 1869, but she wasn't. I checked all available birth records from the town. (See "How to Create Your Ancestral Hometown Database" to find out how I did that.) She wasn't born in Santa Paolina on that date or any documented date, even though her last name comes from the town.
The second result is for a woman who is in my family tree—Maria Felicia Spinelli. She was born in 1836 in Santa Paolina. When I followed the link to Find a Grave, I found the names of her husband and three children. I didn't know their names before because she married a man from another town and moved there. I never would have looked for her in a town that's a 90-minute drive away on today's roads. Unless she could afford to take the train, she may never have seen her family again.
This is the type of discovery I love. Most of the time it takes a DNA match's family tree to show me what happened to someone who left the towns I know. (See "Why Care About Your DNA Matches?") Using the Find a Grave entries as clues, I had no trouble at all locating:
- Maria Felicia's marriage to Leonardo Capozzi in her adopted town of Faeto in 1856
- her husband's birth in that town in 1832
- their son Giovanni's birth in 1857 and death in 1860
- their son Donato's birth and death in 1859
- their son Donato's birth in 1860. Find a Grave says this son and two of his siblings died in Chicago, so that opens up more search possibilities.
- their son Giovanni's birth in 1862 and death in 1864
- their daughter Raffaela's birth in 1865. Her birth record includes an extra document saying she died in Faeto in 1948.
- their son Vito Antonio's birth in 1869
- their son Michele's birth in 1872
Here's an entire branch of someone's family, someone who may share DNA with me, that was hiding. I needed this one search result to break it all wide open.
But what is my relationship to Maria Felicia Spinelli? I've added a lot of Santa Paolina people to my family tree, but many of them are not my actual relatives. Maria Felicia has four different connections to me. She is the:
- niece of the wife of the husband of my 5th great aunt Maddalena Consolazio
- 1st cousin of the husband of my 1st cousin 5 times removed Carolina deGuglielmo
- 1st cousin of the wife of my 1st cousin 5 times removed Carmine Alessandro Ricciardelli
- 1st cousin of the wife of my 1st cousin 5 times removed Ponziano Luigi Ricciardelli
All four of those relationships involve my 2nd great grandmother, Colomba Consolazio, from Santa Paolina.
If you know your family has deep roots in one town, try searching for only the town in a limited database. This research technique can help if you think someone left their hometown. Or if you're wondering why their trail went cold. It can be a great way to find more family members. This works especially well with smaller towns. And it always helps if you're familiar with the last names from your ancestral towns. (To learn how to get familiar with the last names in a town, see "Searching for Family in a New Town Takes Practice".)
So, who's been hiding from you? Can you find them by their town?