Sometimes Vital Records Are All You've Got

What do you do when there's no mention of your ancestors in the newspapers? When they attended school for a precious few years? When there's the thinnest of paper trails? This has been the story of my family tree.

When I began building my tree, I learned my ancestors arrived in the United States between 1899 and 1920. The 1940 census tells me my paternal grandmother completed the 8th grade at school. She was the most educated member of her generation in my family tree. Three out of four of my great grandparents who came to America never went to school at all. So let's not talk about school records.

Don't be discouraged if your ancestors left behind nothing but vital records.

As for newspapers, the one name I found several times was that of Giovanni Sarracino. He was my maternal grandmother's father, and somehow he managed to buy a whole building in the Bronx, New York. I found his name listed in several real estate transactions. I wish I knew how a man with zero years of school became a successful businessman. But I don't believe I'll ever find that out.

Almost all my ancestors who came to America settled in New York City. You can imagine my delight when the New York City Municipal Archives put a huge chunk of their vital records collection online. I found tons of my relatives' records to download for free!

I wasn't able to go back any further in my family tree because those generations stayed in Italy. Then a particular man in Italy decided to put his country's vital records online. Once I learned about these online records, I never had to view microfilmed records again. Bye-bye, low-quality images. The vital records for my ancestral hometowns are online for free. And the quality of the images is outstanding.

Almost 10 years later, I'm still expanding my family tree using these vital records. Vital records are a government's documentation of births, marriages, and deaths. They can also include divorce records, but divorce wasn't legal in Italy until 1974.

Check out the 1961 comedy "Divorce Italian Style" starring Marcello Mastroianni sometime. Here's the film's description on IMDb.com: "A married Sicilian baron falls in love with his cousin and vows to wed her, but with divorce illegal he must concoct a crime of passion to do away with his wife." In short, your spouse had to die for your marriage to end. So there are no divorces in my family tree except in America.

So often I see people ask if we are researching our family history or merely collecting records. Well guess what? Sometimes that's all you can do. You collect those vital records because that's all there is.

And there's nothing wrong with that. If you're lucky enough to have vital records available for your ancestors, grab them! Piece together their families. You may discover that they lived in one town for many generations. You may learn that your great grandfather was one of 12 children. You may find that your 2nd great grandmother had five children who died as infants. That all says a lot.

At the moment, my family tree has 86,920 people. Yeah. When I started looking at Italian vital records on microfilm viewers, I made a discovery. Almost everyone in my ancestors' tiny, remote towns had a connection by blood or marriage. So I started piecing together the extended families.

I've connected almost everyone in the vital records of my two grandfathers' hometowns. They came from Baselice and Colle Sannita in Southern Italy. I've built the families of my closest relatives in the nearby towns of Pesco Sannita, Sant'Angelo a Cupolo, Apice, and Santa Paolina. And I will keep connecting people in those towns for many years to come.

I love that the names in these towns are all so familiar to me. I love how I can look at a DNA match's last name and know which Italian town holds our shared ancestor. I love how a set of marriage records can take me back two generations and lead me to another town. I love everything I can learn from vital records.

To find vital records for your ancestors' hometowns, start at the FamilySearch Wiki. If you find them, start by searching for the ancestor who was born most recently. It may be your grandparent, great grandparent, or someone from an earlier generation.

Use the vital records to learn the names, ages, and occupations of your ancestor's parents. Look for your ancestor's siblings. Search for their parents' marriage record and their birth records. Then move back in time to the previous generation. This is how I wound up with 86,920 people in my family tree.

You may not care to document the husband of the niece of the wife of the brother-in-law of your 4th great uncle as I've done. But you know why I'm doing that? Because I'm creating a resource that will help descendants of these towns long after I'm gone. That's why I've been working like a fiend to create source citations for all those people.

If you have any Italian ancestry, the Portale Antenati can take your family tree back to the late 1600s as it has for me. I've been writing about it for almost 10 years because I want you to learn how to help yourself. Every day I see people asking the Internet, "Do you know my ancestors?" Instead of casting a weak line like that, you could be finding your people yourself. Take a look at how to do it:

• Where Have You Been All My Life?
• Collect the Whole Set
• How to Use the Online Italian Genealogy Archives
• Why I Recorded More Than 30,000 Documents
• Step-by-Step Discovery of My 5th Great Grandparents
• Finding the Siblings Your Ancestor Never Mentioned
• Becoming Italian Was a Long, Hard Journey
• How to Make the Best of the New Antenati Website

Once you've gathered all the facts you can about your relatives, you can learn more about their lives. Find out:

• What made them leave their home country.
• What their lives were like in the old country.

If birth, marriage, and death are all you can hope to find, don't let it discourage you. There's a lot of meat on those bones.