4 New GEDCOM Analyzers for Free, and More

Stick me on the fridge because I've become a magnet. My inbox is attracting the creators of new genealogy tools like mad. I've tried out so many in the past two or three weeks that it's high time I shared them with you. Keep in mind that these are new products, so they are evolving. If you contribute your feedback, the programmer may choose to update the tool.

Because I wrote a review of GEDminer ("This Free, Elegant GEDCOM Analyzer Is a Wonder") and TreeLab ("The Ancestor Map of My Dreams for Free"), four programmers wrote to me about their GEDCOM analyzers.

Tree Prism

This one is my favorite. Konstantin Popov's GEDCOM analyzer has lots of charts that make Tree Prism a standout. It read my 102 MB GEDCOM file in a couple of seconds and displayed a beautiful, customizable family tree.

My favorite new GEDCOM analyzer offers countless ways to visualize your family tree.

When I customized the tree to include all my generations, my parents were so far apart that I couldn't find them. So Konstantin added a Compact button in the control panel that brings everyone into view. I love it! You can click a button to save your tree as a PDF or PNG image file.

Then there's the charts. I love fan charts, and you'll have fun trying out and customizing several types of charts. Whatever you create you can download! The Map feature is new since the last time I looked, and it's exactly what I would want. It plots everyone from my tree on a map with bigger circles indicating more people.

Click the Facts tab at the top of the page for customizable cards based on your family tree. These are fun and a great way to share tidbits with your relatives. It reminds me of my article, "Share Your Family History in a Fun New Way", but with a lot more color, imagination, and style.

Then there's the Analysis tab. It finds problems and contradictions in your family tree. I had a few older women giving birth, and when I went to them in my tree, it was a simple mistake. But it was a mistake I hadn't fixed and might never have noticed. I do have an 88-year-old man with a newborn baby, but yikes. There are two documents saying that was the case. And he was a newlywed at 88!

Tree Prism also points out unusually large age discrepancies between spouses. These may be fine, but some may be an error. These potential errors are downloadable as a spreadsheet that you can work through. Don't overlook the left column in the analysis tab. You can see a report on your brick walls, longevity, a date check (I had a baby who seemed to die before she was born! Turns out the death date belonged to her older sister.), and more.

KinSift

Mandy Langley created a GEDCOM analyzer with a focus on making your family tree trustworthy. Amen to that! KinSift's tagline is "Find out which parts of your family story you can trust — before you share it."

Here's a bit of what KinSift will tell you:

• Who's missing a marriage date
• Who needs source citations
• Who has conflicting information
• Which facts have low-quality or derivative source citations
• How well your family tree scores on sources, evidence analysis, contradictions, and more.

Unlike other GEDCOM analyzers, KinSift uploads your tree to their server for analysis. If there are living people in your GEDCOM, they're uploaded—temporarily. KinSift deletes your file when the scan is complete.

The Memory Palace

Bram Nelissen's The Memory Palace features a virtual location to display your family photos. It reminds me of playing Doom many years ago, but it's customized with your personal memories. No bad guys anywhere!

But it's the GEDCOM analyzer you'll want to try first. Your file stays on your computer, and there's a phone app version for those who prefer a tiny little screen. Remember me? The person with more than 86,000 people in her family tree? I'm the ultimate tester of file size limitations. My GEDCOM is a bit over the 100 MB size limitation here, but I'll bet yours is fine. I have smaller versions I can use for testing.

Once you drag and drop your file, scroll down the page to see the analysis. It's so fast you won't see it happen. Here's what my direct ancestors GEDCOM shows:

• 422 people, 241 families, 12 generations, 119 surnames, and a birth year span of 1612–1959.
• My longest line of 12 generations goes from me up my paternal line to Antonio Zeolla born in 1646.
• As the home person, I see details about myself, my parents, and my husband. I can select a different person from my file and see their details.
• My limited direct-ancestor tree has no gaps, woo hoo!:
  • 0 people without a date of birth
  • 0 people without a surname
  • 0 people without a place
  • 0 people not linked to any family

MonuTree

Filip Novotný is on the team responsible for MonuTree, a phone app that provides you with:

• an overview of the whole family tree
• a graphic tree of ancestors and descendants. Tap any person and the tree changes to make them the focus.
• the ability to collaborate with your family members

You can import your GEDCOM into the app for free. You don't need an account, and your GEDCOM stays on your device. I ran into the file size limitation, so I used a smaller, 1 MB file of all my direct ancestors. Many of my early Italian ancestors have no documentation to tell me when they died. So my tree analysis says my oldest person is 371 years old and 190 years is the average age of those still living. But the average lifespan in 69 years, which seems likely.

Go to the People tab at the bottom to see an alphabetical list of everyone in your tree. Tap anyone in your list and you can:

• edit or view their facts
• see them in the family tree
• see a list of their immediate and extended family members
• view, edit, and add source citations
• see how well they score in profile completeness. Want to raise their score? You can add a photo, an occupation, or other facts right there.

If you like what you see, there is a Premium version that gives you much more reporting capability for a low, one-time fee.

Not Only…But Also

I've also learned of a phone app called Unblur Photo from a company called Yiriba. They wrote to me after finding my article, "Which Genealogy Apps Are Right for You?". The app offers several enhancement tools for retouching a photo.

This tool is not free after your first use. But here's their free "How to Scan Old Photos" guide.

Finally, I received an email about a family tree app that puts a research log on every person. It uses "Evidence Explained" templates to help you create good source citations as you go. I have not had a chance to look into AncestorOS yet, and it is not free. If you're a genealogy pro, or would like your work to be more professional, you may want to look into AncestorOS. There is a 7-day free trial.

These GEDCOM analyzers make me want to figure out how to create one myself! I'll need to tear myself away from my family tree long enough to look into it. Meanwhile, I'm reminded of a scene in the 1965 movie "The Great Race". Jack Lemmon is in the middle of a gigantic pie fight, and he's covered in cream and frosting. He tastes some pie on his face and calls out, "Throw more brandy!" (Surely someone knows this scene besides my sons and me.) Well I say, "Throw more genealogy programs!"

Stop and Admire Your Family Tree Milestones

On Saturday I made my backup files and closed down Family Tree Maker a couple of hours early. Why would I do such a thing? Because I reached a big milestone. I wanted to savor it a while before moving on to the next one.

How many milestones have you reached in your genealogy research? Think back to when you started building your family tree. How much did you know?

These types of genealogy victories are important milestones in your family tree journey.

I grew up knowing the names of my eight great grandparents. That's a great start! I'd met only two of them, and I was too young to remember it. Only four of them had emigrated to the United States; the other four stayed in Italy. But I never realized I didn't know one great grandmother's maiden name until 2003 when my aunt said it was Caruso. That was the year I began building my tree.

And that's when I started reaching family tree milestones.

Milestone 1: Locating Ancestors' Place of Origin

My ancestors arrived in America in 1898. First two of my 2nd great grandparents came. A year later, two of my great grandparents came, pregnant with Grandma.

Grandma's last living sibling told me her family came from Avellino and Pastene. That was only a clue in my genealogy trail. You see, Avellino is both a city and a province in Italy. So where did they come from? And Pastene, well, I was hearing it as Pastena, and I headed off in the wrong direction for a while.

Then I found my people. An 1898 ship manifest said my 2nd great grandparents came from Sant'Angelo a Cupolo. It used an abbreviation of the town, but when I found it on the map, I saw a section of that town called Pastene. At last I was on the right track. Grandma's family came from the Pastene in Sant'Angelo a Cupolo, Benevento, Italy.

Figuring out who came from Avellino—and where—took a few more years. But I did it.

Milestone 2: Finding Documents from Another Country

I spent a few years at Family History Centers viewing microfilmed vital records. I viewed only my maternal grandfather Adamo's hometown, Baselice. I knew next to nothing about his family. I had his parents' names and those of two of his siblings.

Once I located Adamo's mother's birth record in 1856, and his father's in 1850, I was ready to start climbing that tree. Soon I realized I should document everyone in this small town's records. Otherwise I wouldn't know who was related to whom. Too many people had the same name. By 2012, I'd added more than 15,000 people from Baselice to my family tree.

Today this is much easier because these records are available online. All my ancestors came from small, neighboring towns with tons of intermarriage. That's why my family tree has 86,957 people today. And there will be many more.

Milestone 3: Breaking Down a Brick Wall

So who came from Avellino and where? It had to be someone on my maternal grandmother's branch, but it wasn't her parents. The answer came from Grandma's uncle's World War I draft registration card. He said he was born in Tufo, Avellino. I rushed off to a Family History Center and by sheer coincidence, they had a reel of microfilm for the town of Tufo. Someone else had ordered it, so I got to view it.

I found Grandma's uncle's birth record, and those of two of his siblings who died young. No one in my living family knew about these children. Grandma's parents were from Pastene. Did her grandmother Colomba come from Tufo? I couldn't find her there.

But I kept on pushing. I found Colomba's brothers living in Tufo. They had children there. But at least one of these documents told me Colomba's brothers weren't born in Tufo. They came from the neighboring town of Santa Paolina, Avellino.

At long last, I found Antonio and Colomba's 1871 marriage record in Santa Paolina. This confirmed that Antonio was born in Pastene and Colomba was born in Santa Paolina. Open up the floodgates!

Milestone 4: Making Quality Source Citations

That brings me to Saturday's milestone. For two years I've been revisiting Italian documents online to create source citations. I used Family Tree Analyzer to export a list of something like 70,000 people in my tree with zero source citations. The horror!

I worked my way through one location at a time, picking off the smaller ones first. On Saturday I finished citing sources for everyone in my family tree from Santa Paolina! That leaves a handful of unsourced people from the USA, England, Ireland, Canada, and Japan. I give them another try once in a while.

But the frightening bulk of what's left are people from two of my Italian towns. From Pesco Sannita, I have a whopping 9,646 people to cite. And, saving the scariest for last, from Baselice, I have 18,594 people to cite.

Let me explain. Those Baselice people came from the microfilm I was viewing way back when. So I cited the microfilm numbers. But guess what? You can't get microfilm anymore. So I threw out those source citations leaving 18,594 people with nothing to show for themselves.

Also, Using Shortcuts!

The good news is, I keep finding ways to be more efficient in this source citation project. I completed Santa Paolina ahead of schedule because of a couple of tricks I put into use toward the end. I can't wait to work on the next town with these new tricks up my sleeve.

Let me share one that's been a huge time saver for me. I'm working with the Italian records on the Antenati Portal. There's a separate collection (a separate web page) for each available year's:

• birth records
• death records
• marriage records
• marriage banns
• extra marriage records—the fabled "wedding packets"

Instead of opening tons of tabs in my web browser, or re-opening a collection I used before, I'm using a new trick. It's a Firefox browser feature—I don't know which other browsers have this. Firefox lets you drag one tab onto another to create a tab group. You can name that group, save that group, expand and collapse that group. Tomorrow you can open all your groups again in a flash.

I created eight tab groups for Santa Paolina death records. I made one group for each decade from the 1810s through the 1880s. Within each group, I arranged the tabs in order. The 1820s group has tabs for 1820, 1821, 1822, 1823, etc. Now it's much faster to locate a particular person's death record and cite the source. Each page is ready and waiting in memory.

My plan is to create similar groups for my 9,646 Pesco Sannita people right from the start.

How About Your Milestones?

What other milestones have you reached or are you trying to reach?

• Are you putting together binders or charts to share with family? I made 40 copies of a large chart to share with my Sarracino/Saviano cousins many years ago. That created quite the buzz.
• Are you separating truth from myth? My sons' 2nd great grandfather was NOT the brother of the captain of the Titanic. The captain didn't even have brothers!
• Are you gathering documents for membership to the DAR or for dual citizenship? I don't qualify for any of that. I'm descended from peasants.
• Are you writing a book or detailed paper about a particular ancestor? I've done a bit of that, and even worked on my own life story. It's a lot of fun to track down all your past addresses, schools, and jobs.

Be sure to celebrate your family tree milestones. You can share your news with friends and family and even on social media. Or go ahead and take the rest of the day off. Cheers to you, intrepid genealogy researcher!

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.

A Clear Map to Your Unsolved DNA Matches

Last week I showed how to limit your AncestryDNA match list to those with common ancestors. Seeing who these shared ancestors are can make it much easier to solve a new DNA match.

I mentioned that these DNA matches can also be seen on Ancestry ThruLines^®. That visualization can be quite helpful. So let's look at how you can see where a match belongs in your family tree, even before you build their branch.

My maternal grandmother's ancestors have a big old brick wall. Their hometown didn't keep vital records before 1861, so I'm stuck. I often wonder if a distant cousin knows something about these undocumented ancestors.

See Where Your DNA Matches Are Hiding

I'll start by going to ThruLines in Ancestry's DNA menu and choosing the horizontal view. This shows my direct ancestors and me, all the way through my great grandparents. I'll expand this view by clicking my great grandmother's name. She's my maternal grandmother's mother, Maria Rosa.

I couldn't place these DNA matches when I saw them in my match list. Here's where to look to solve your best matches.

A little icon tells me that Maria Rosa's grandfather is the shared ancestor of 10 DNA matches. I'll click that icon to see who they are. This provides a new view of an expanded family tree. There are six people descended from my 2nd great grandmother Vittoria. They include my mother and me, my first cousin, and four other DNA matches I've solved before.

But ThruLines also shows DNA matches descended from two of Vittoria's siblings. Descending from her brother Gaetano are three DNA matches. I've figured out two of them (they're siblings), but the third one is new to me. We share only 9 cM. She's the daughter of one of the siblings, so I can place her in my family tree. She's my 4th cousin once removed.

Descending from Vittoria's sister Paolina is one DNA match. Her Scottish last name and 4th cousin connection would have placed her low on my priority list. But thanks to ThruLines, I see exactly how and where she should fit. All I need to do is research her mother and grandfather who are not in my family tree yet. ThruLines tells me their names, dates, and where they fit.

Start Doing Some Guided Research

This branch begins with my first cousin three times removed, Antonio Zuccaro. I have a copy of Antonio's 1881 birth record from the family's hometown of Santa Paolina, Italy. I also have a copy of his 1904 marriage record from that town. He married a Santa Paolina girl named Gioconda Maria Rosa deSpirito. What I didn't know is who Antonio's children were or if he and his wife came to America.

This view of ThruLines tells me exactly what searches I need to conduct. The evidence says Antonio and Gioconda had a son born in West Hoboken, New Jersey. So I'll start by searching for Antonio Zuccaro in America. I found:

• Antonio and Gioconda's 1904 ship manifest. One month after their marriage, they were on their way to join the rest of his family. His parents and brothers had settled in West Hoboken, New Jersey, in 1893.
• Antonio's World War I draft registration card. This card has the same birth date as his Italian birth record. It puts him in West Hoboken, New Jersey, on 12 Sep 1918. And it has a slight misspelling of his wife's uncommon first name of Gioconda.

I'm quite impressed by this young immigrant, Antonio. After a lot of digging in a 1918 New York City directory, I found the company where he was an "agent" in 1918. It was the Lint, Butscher & Ross Realty & Construction Company in Manhattan. A 1929 Union City, New Jersey, directory shows what happened next. Antonio is the president of the A E Zuccaro Development Corporation. Some of his children work for him. That sounds like the American Dream.

Work Your Way to Your DNA Match

One of those children is the next person in the ThruLines tree: Ernesto. To connect to my DNA match with the Scottish last name, I need to document Ernesto and his daughter. I found:

• Ernesto's World War II draft registration card. He was living across the street from where I found the family in the 1929 city directory. His mother Gioconda lives with him.
• A few census records I can use to name Ernesto's siblings.
• His daughter's marriage license and obituary, confirming the dates seen in ThruLines. Now I know her husband's name. I'll bet my DNA match is using her Scottish husband's last name.

Yes! I found my DNA match. I noticed that the family moved from New Jersey to California, and I sure do love the California birth index. It tells you the mother's maiden name. As ThruLines says, this woman is my 4th cousin. Our common ancestors are our 3rd great grandparents Simblicio Conzolazio and Rufina Zullo.

Sometimes ThruLines won't give you all the names to connect the generations. When it does, it's such a powerful tool for solving a DNA match.

And speaking of ThruLines:

• How to Use Ancestry ThruLines for Research Leads
• Using Ancestry's ThruLines to Find DNA Matches
• Attracting a New DNA Match

This Filter Makes DNA Matches Easier to Place

September is half over, and it's time I tackled this month's task from my 2026 Genealogy Calendar. It's a simple goal: Solve more DNA matches.

I manage 4 AncestryDNA tests for my parents, my husband, and myself. Looking at Ancestry, I realized there's a DNA match filter I haven't been using. I can filter the list of matches for any of these tests to include only those with a common ancestor.

The common ancestor label means the match and the test-taker share the same ancestor. That's such a time-saver!

Filter Your List

To start, I went to my mom's list of DNA matches and filtered it to show only those with a common ancestor. As I scrolled through the list of nearly 100 people, I could see I've figured out many of them. I always add a note to a DNA match when I've solve their identity, and those notes are visible in this list.

The first match I see without a note is a potential half 3rd cousin or a 3rd cousin twice removed. The common ancestors are Emanuele Ricciardelli and Giovanna Consolazio. They are my 5th great grandparents (mom's 6th).

It's interesting that Emanuele and Giovanna aren't in this match's family tree. Ancestry must be figuring out the connection using other means. On her Italian side, this DNA match's tree ends at her grandfather. And his last name is not in my family tree.

Looking at this one type of DNA match led to a huge branch of my family tree.

Look for a Connection

Using this DNA match's family tree as a launch pad, I searched for records for this man with the Italian last name. (Note: My ancestors are 100% Italian, so I need to follow an Italian branch.)

I found his 1917 New York City marriage certificate. I'm so grateful for the online records of the New York City Municipal Archives. And guess what? His mother Carolina, whose last name is familiar, is in my family tree! Thanks to her son's marriage record, I now know who Carolina married. And this document tells me she gave birth to a son in Orange, New Jersey.

I checked my tree to see that Carolina's great grandparents are—can you guess?—Emanuele Ricciardelli and Giovanna Consolazio. Then I turned to my handy relationship calculator spreadsheet. To find my relationship to Carolina, I went to column "I" (my 5th great grandparents) row 8 (Carolina's great grandparents). She is my 2nd cousin 4 times removed. This DNA match is 3 generations down from Carolina, so I went down 3 rows in the relationship calculator. That shows this DNA match is my 5th cousin once removed, and my mom's 5th cousin.

Here's what's curious. AncestryDNA says this match and mom share 33 cMs. It predicts the relationship is in the 3rd cousin range. But I went to the Shared cM Project Tool found on the DNA Painter website. I entered 33 as the total number of cMs shared. The result? This tool found a 53% chance mom and her match were no closer than 5th cousins.

In this case, it pays to use all the tools available to you.

I added a note to this DNA match. I marked her as mom's 5C through Emanuele Ricciardelli and Giovanna Consolazio. Now I've got more research to do! I learned who my cousin Carolina married, but he isn't from her town in Italy. I discovered their 1881 marriage record in Italy and found birth records for four of their children. One of those children appears to be the groom from the NYC marriage certificate. The NYC certificate says he was born in Orange, New Jersey, in 1893, but I have his 1893 birth record from Santa Paolina, Italy. I'll keep searching, but so far the 1910 census confirms that the groom was born in Italy.

I'm so lucky to have a ton of Italian vital records available online through the Antenati portal. Without them, my family tree would end at the great grandparent level. How disappointing that would be! Still, the Italian records create many dead ends. Using DNA matches, I can discover who came emigrated and continue documenting branches.

Try Another Avenue

I'll bet some of you are saying, "Why not use Ancestry's ThruLines® to find this relationship?" That did occur to me, and this solved DNA match is there. But the amount of digging it took to find her was ridiculous. I had to keep consulting my family tree. First I worked my way up to Emanuele Ricciardelli and Giovanna Consolazio. Then I had to look at my tree to see that I want the descendants of their son Samuele. And then I want the descendants of his daughter Anna. Once I followed those branches, I did find this DNA match as well as her brother. I didn't even know her brother was in my or mom's DNA match list.

Now that I have drilled down to this level in ThruLines, I see many more DNA matches I need to explore. I should have started doing this earlier in the month!

Have you tried Ancestry's common ancestor filter before? I'm always happy to see "common ancestor" in the match list, but somehow I never realized it was a filter until today.

How to Find Your Ancestor's Place of Origin

"How can I build my family tree when I don't know where my ancestor came from?" It's a common problem for many people when they become interested in genealogy.

My roots in America aren't that deep, so my ancestors told us where they came from. That made it easy for me to dive into vital record collections from their hometowns in Italy. But for those of you with deep roots, your immigrant ancestor's origin may be lost.

In 2021 I offered to research my daughter-in-law's family tree. She had no idea where her last name came from. Was it Italian? It ends in an o. I discovered that her roots in Pennsylvania—where she still lives—go back 12 generations. Because the family was so well established in the area, I found plenty of documentation on them.

As it turns out, she has ancestors from France, England, Germany, and the Netherlands. She has a direct connection to William Rittenhouse—a famous name in Philadelphia. Rittenhouse Square is a public park on the U.S. National Register of Historic Places.

But what if no one has documented your deep-rooted family? How can you find their place of origin?

Discovering your ancestor's town of origin opens up endless family tree research possibilities.

Trace One Line

Start your search by choosing one last name from your ancestry. It may be your last name or any one ancestor's last name.

Trace that family line as far back as the records in your home country allow. Follow the family through census records and other documents. See if the spelling of the name ever changed. Look for documents that say where a person or their parents were born. A census record might tell you where your ancestor and their parents were born.

When you reach a generation born in another country, try a more specific search. Look for immigration or naturalization records. A World War I draft registration card gave me the birth place of my grandmother's uncle. (No one else in the family was born in his town, but it was a critical clue.)

If you can't get a solid lead on a town of origin, here's a good trick to try. Go to your favorite family tree website, such as Ancestry, MyHeritage, FamilySearch, etc. Do a search for the last name you're tracing. Keep the details minimal. If you've discovered the country of origin, include that in your search. If your people arrived in a particular decade, look for others coming at about the same time.

Go through your search results to see if any town names come up again and again. This is a hot lead for you to pursue. This is exactly how I discovered the hometown of my great grandmother. She spoke of her town, but her accent made it hard to understand. When I saw other people with her last name coming from a town that sounded like what she said, I had my breakthrough.

Check Your DNA

Take a DNA test to see which countries are in your makeup. If a good amount of your DNA is from an unexpected area, that may be your first clue. Take a look at your matches for people who share similar origins. One of your matches may have the clues you need.

Lots More Places to Look

Finding that hometown is so crucial to your research that I've written about it many times. Here are 5 articles you should scan for more research tips:

• "Where Did Grandpa Come From?" cites examples from my research. I found town names on ship manifests, naturalization papers, passport applications, draft cards, and more.
• "4 Key Places to Discover Your Ancestor's Hometown" shows how I used a minimal search to find my great grandmother's hometown.
• "6 Places to Discover Your Ancestor's Town of Birth" adds birth, baptism, marriage, and military records to the list of places to look.
• "6 Ways to Find Your Ancestor's Hometown" goes into the value of tracing an ancestor's siblings. If you can't find your ancestor's records, their siblings' records may have the details you need.
• "This Expanded Resource Provided an Elusive Maiden Name" covers the female problem. What was her maiden name? This name can get lost over time, and it's your key to finding her ancestors' place of origin. See how I used one resource to discover my 2nd great grandmother's maiden name and trace her ancestry.

I know it can be difficult to break through this particular brick wall. But don't give up until you've tried all these research tips. The answer may be waiting for you to take a look!

How to Handle Inexplicable Genealogy Documents

I'm still spending hours a day creating the missing source citations for my huge family tree. I use efficiency techniques, such as working through one ancestral hometown at a time.

That's why I noticed a repeating error in one of my hometowns in Italy that is inexplicable. How can this keep happening again and again?

Here's what's happening—and how I'm handling it in my family tree. One of the greatest things about Italian vital records is the "matrimoni processetti". (That translates to pre-marriage inquiries, according to Google Translate.) These are the documents required before a man and woman can marry. All in one place, you can find the evidence to take a family back three generations! These documents include:

• the groom's birth record
• the groom's father's death record, if he's dead
• the groom's father's father's death record, if he's dead (which can include the groom's great grandparents' names)
• the groom's mother's death record, if she's dead
• the groom's previous wife's death record, if there was a previous wife
• the bride's birth record
• the bride's father's death record, if he's dead
• the bride's father's father's death record, if he's dead (which can include the bride's great grandparents' names)
• the bride's mother's death record, if she's dead
• the bride's previous husband's death record, if there was a previous husband

Jackpot, right? Civil record-keeping began around 1809 in Italy, so these documents are priceless.

Where Did This Come From?

As I work on the town of Circello, Italy, I'm finding handwritten copies of vital records that do not exist!

His marriage documents include a handwritten copy of his birth record. Only problem? It does not exist!

Here's an example. A document says Domenico Cerrone was born on 25 Mar 1812 to Giovanni Cerrone and Arcangela diTello, and it's record #45. But when I go to the town's 1812 birth records, record #45 has the same date, but all different people. It's the birth record of Domenico Fiscarelli, born on 25 Mar 1812 to Pietro Fiscarelli and Carmina Iacobacci. Now, I'm the lunatic who indexed every available vital record for this town. So I know there is no civil birth record for Domenico Cerrone, son of Giovanni and Arcangela.

So far this has happened 12 times, all in Circello. In a couple of cases, the copy in the matrimoni processetti contradicts the civil record. Everything's right but the date. What document was the clerk looking at when they made this copy? What do I do with this?

Cite the Source and Acknowledge the Problem

In each case, I created a source citation that points to this inexplicable document. But I went a step further. In "Leave Breadcrumbs for Future Genealogy Research", I explain how to use stock phrases in a fact's description field. For example, it used to be common to reuse a name if a baby died. The next baby of the same sex gets that same name, so you know the first baby had to have died. If there's no death record available, I note that the first baby died before the second baby's date of birth and write: "His brother [Her sister] of the same name was born on this date." Without an approximate date of death and that note, it would look like I made a careless mistake in my family tree again and again.

Stock phrases are the solution to the inexplicable documents problem, too. Each time the marriage papers include a copy that's not in the civil records, I add a phrase to the description field. "This record is not found in the [year] civil records; only in the [year] marriage documents."

When the copy shows a different date than the original civil record, I use the date from the original record. Then I add a note about it in the description field. "The copy of the birth record in the [year] marriage records has a different date of [date]." And I add a source citation for both versions of the birth record.

Why Cite an Error?

If you're wondering why create a source citation for two versions of the same fact, here are two good reasons:

• Citing both documents shows you've done your research.
• You may find another document that proves the inexplicable record was correct.

These stock phrases serve me well. See if the software or website you use for your family tree has predictive typing. It should. With predictive typing, I type "This record is not", and the software shows me the matching phrases I've typed before. I can choose one and change the years as needed. Each time I need to use "His brother of the same name was born on this date.", all I type is "his bro" and choose the correct phrase.

What types of inexplicable documents have you found in your genealogy research? How do you handle them?

Create Your Customized Genealogy Research Guide

I first wrote about using a genealogy Document Tracker in January 2017. It's an efficient way to track your progress and guide your research. At a glance, it shows which documents you have and which you're missing for each person. But I haven't mentioned it in a long time.

Why? It became impractical when my family tree got too big. Today my tree has 86,566 people. About 83,000 of those people lived and died in Italy. I'm lucky to have access to many of their birth, marriage, and death records, but I can't expect to get anything else.

Filter the List As Needed

If I can reduce that list to people were in the United States, I know there will be documents to gather. Here's how I can filter my list of people to show only those with a birth, marriage, or death in the United States.

• Each day I work on my family tree in Family Tree Maker, I export a GEDCOM file. I opened the latest GEDCOM in Family Tree Analyzer.
• I clicked the Export menu and chose Individuals to Excel. This created a spreadsheet I saved to my desktop.
• After converting the file from CSV format to Excel format, I deleted many of the columns, leaving only:
  • Surname
  • Forenames
  • BirthDate
  • BirthLocation
  • DeathLocation
  • MarriageLocation
• I went to the Data menu in Excel. I filtered the spreadsheet to show birth locations that included "United States". This hid all the other lines. I selected the visible rows and gave them a yellow color.
• I removed that filter and showed death locations that included "United States". Many of these lines were already yellow because the person was born in the U.S., but I made them all yellow.
• Once more, I removed that filter and made a new one. This one showed marriage locations that included "United States". I made them yellow and removed the filter.

Here's how you can create a genealogy research guide that's custom-made for your family tree.

When I sorted the spreadsheet to show only the yellow cells, I had a list of 3,034 people who had been in the United States. Yes, there will be some people that this process misses. I expect to discover them as I work to fill in in the spreadsheet.

Here are my past articles on the document tracker:

• Haven't I Seen You Before?
• Track Your Genealogy Finds and Your Searches
• How to Make Your Genealogy Research More Complete
• Why Use a Genealogy Document Tracker?
• Which Genealogy Documents Are You Missing?

Populate the New Document Tracker

To create my new, ready-to-use document tracker:

• I downloaded the master document tracker file I keep online to share with my readers. (Make yourself a copy of it. Don't request Edit permission as this is the master file. Make your own copy and edit that.)
• I deleted a couple of columns I don't want to track (baptism and burial).
• In my filtered spreadsheet, I sorted the results by last name, then first name. I displayed only the yellow cells.
• I copied the last name, first name, and birth date of these lines and pasted them into my new document tracker. The birth date is important because way too many people have the same name.

Salvage Past Efforts

I spent a ton of time on my old document tracker before abandoning it in late 2018. So I want to salvage the old file's contents. I opened the old and the new spreadsheets side by side. Now I can copy the pertinent tracking information from the old file to the new. Yikes. This is gonna take a while.

My passion project for the past two years has been creating my missing source citations. That's still my top priority. But when I do spend time working on people from my tree who lived in the U.S., I will consult and update my document tracker.

If you have access to a decent amount of records from your country, consider using a document tracker. With your document tracker, you can make your in-country research as complete as possible.

Why Did Your Immigrant Ancestors Leave Home?

In January I mapped out 12 small genealogy projects to add to this year's calendar. They're all projects I've wanted to complete, but I never seemed to make time for them. This plan has been worthwhile and productive, so I want to make sure I map out 12 projects every year.

My project for August was "Look into local social conditions". I wanted to find out what was happening in Italy when my immigrant ancestors left home forever.

Those precious vital records in your family tree can't tell you what your ancestor's life was like. This tool can.

I don't have a lot of immigrant ancestors since my roots in my home country are not very deep. I have:

• Two 2nd great grandparents who left Italy for New York in 1898.
• Four great grandparents who left Italy for New York in 1899, 1902, and 1906.
• Two grandfathers who left Italy for New York in 1920.

Based on these eight immigrants, I started a chat with Microsoft Copilot. After answering my questions, Copilot suggested follow-up questions that I pursued.

What Was Going On in 1920?

I asked, "What were the social conditions in the Benevento province of Italy when my grandfather emigrated to New York in November 1920?"

When I visited my ancestral hometowns, I fell in love with them. I wondered how my ancestors could ever want to leave. I've since learned that poverty in Southern Italy was a strong driving force. This chat (which cited its sources) told me about three dominant forces in the area at the time:

1. The political climate left Southern Italy with no opportunities for growth and modernization. These were farming communities, and only the wealthy owned land. That wasn't about to change. In 1919 and 1920 there was unrest over these conditions. There were strikes and social agitation that often ended in violence.
2. The economy in the south took a beating due to post-World War I inflation and unemployment. There were no opportunities for either of my grandfathers.
3. My grandfathers may have felt an obligation to provide for their families. They couldn't do that if they stayed home and worked the land.

It's also worth noting that the Spanish flu lasted from 1918–1920. This caused further hardship and increased the conditions of poverty.

What About Earlier Years?

Next I thought about my maternal great grandparents. I asked, "Were the social conditions any different in 1898 and 1899 in nearby Sant'Angelo a Cupolo, Benevento?"

The answer surprised me. Things were much worse at that time. In 1898 there was rioting over food insecurity. It was a nationwide crisis, but it hit much harder in Southern Italy. It started with a bad wheat harvest and skyrocketing grain prices. Protests in cities as close as Napoli ended with shootings and military intervention.

This was the year my 2nd great grandfather took his whole family to New York. Well, he did leave behind one daughter. She and my great grandfather followed in 1899 after marrying, having a baby, and losing that baby.

And In-Between Years?

My paternal great grandparents didn't meet until they came to America. I asked about my great grandmother's town when she left in 1906. "What was happening in Pescolamazza, Benevento, when my great grandmother emigrated in 1906, following several of her brothers?"

It seems that in 1906, as in 1898 and 1920, poverty was a major factor. Poor people like my ancestors didn't own the land they worked. Their situation sounds like that of the sharecroppers in the U.S. South. They never earned enough money to pay their debts and lived in a state of extreme poverty.

My great grandmother was the last of her siblings to come to New York. It's possible her parents were dead by 1906. Her brothers sent for her in upstate New York. Within four months, she married their friend and paesan, my great grandfather.

As suggested by Copilot, I asked about the daily routine of people in Pescolamazza in 1906. All my ancestors came from rural hill towns, located close together. So the description would fit them all.

Copilot gave me a detailed itinerary of a family's typical day. This includes what they ate, where they worked, and how they interacted with the community. It was a demanding life. I can appreciate how much easier it seemed to them once they came to America. They still worked hard, but they were able to thrive.

I copied the conversation into a Word document to save. I titled it "Southern Italian Social Conditions & Emigration". I'll follow up by chatting about living in a tenement building in the Bronx, New York, in the early 1900s.

What would you like to learn about your ancestors' lives and motivation?

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There was one month's project this year that was a bust—but I still plan to make it happen. I wanted to find more documents to digitize using HandwritingOCR, but I couldn't come up with any! I'd already digitized:

• my handwritten notebook of ship manifests
• a few books about my ancestral hometowns
• my brother's college paper documenting our family history.

I couldn't think of anything else.

Then I had an idea. What about my college thesis (a novel)? I can't seem to find it, but I have a few other items I'd love to turn into Word documents. There are my notebooks from when I was a college film student and two short novels I wrote after college. I'd love to recover these works through digitization.

Which projects have you had on the back burner for ages? What if you scheduled time for a couple of them? What's stopping you?

A Free, New Family Tree Tool for Map Lovers

There's another new website that can do amazing things with your family tree. It's called TreeAlive, and it features a handful of unique genealogy visualization tools.

TreeAlive can tell the story of your ancestor's journey, from birth to death, showing it on a map. It can take you to a place in your ancestor's life and let you overlay historic maps from different time periods. It can animate your immigrant ancestor's journey and put it into historical context. It can show you the locations of all your ancestors at once.

Journey through time visiting the locations in your family tree.

The website is 100% free and you do not need an account. All you do is add your GEDCOM file. (You're not uploading it anywhere—you're bringing it into your web browser on your computer.) Then click through all the visualizations you want to see.

There is a GEDCOM file size limitation of 30 MB, so you may need to exclude images and notes from your file. My family tree of 87,000+ people is too large. So I exported a GEDCOM from Family Tree Maker of all my ancestors and all their spouses—that's 439 people. It's a tiny file. I could filter in more people if I wanted to.

One feature that sets TreeAlive apart is that it works with FamilySearch. FamilySearch doesn't let you export a GEDCOM*. To work around that, use TreeAlive's option of connecting to your FamilySearch tree.

*A page on FamilySearch.org says you can export up to eight generations of your tree in the GEDCOM 7 format. The problem is, not everything is compatible with GEDCOM 7. I don't use FamilySearch, so I can't verify that.

These websites analyze your GEDCOM in your web browser for free, too:

• TreeLab
• GEDminer
• Family Tree Analyzer

Create a Video to Share with Family

The Video feature of TreeAlive puts your ancestor's journeys on the map through the years. It highlights important moments, such as The America Revolution and World Wars. You can click Share With Family to create a treealive.com link to share. Or you can join the Beta list and download your film.

Detail an Ancestor's Journey

The Journey feature lets you choose one ancestor at a time to visualize the facts you've captured. It uses the most appropriate historical map for each place and time in their journey. I've noticed one quirk with these journeys. They seem to show the immigration fact before the emigration fact. So it looks as if my 2nd great grandmother is born in Italy, comes to New York in 1898, then leaves Italy in 1898. It's as if she crossed the ocean twice.

See Who Else Was There

The Crossings feature points out famous people who were in the same place and time as your ancestors. They may have crossed paths. You can click any item in the list to learn more. I clicked the link for my great grandfather Giovanni and Geronimo. Giovanni lived in New York City in the 1905 New York State Census. It turns out Geronimo, the famous Apache, was there, too. He "sold autographs at expositions and rode in Theodore Roosevelt's 1905 inaugural parade". You can also follow links to learn more about the historical event.

Immerse yourself in historical maps for the places in your family tree.

Plot Everything

The Location Quality Explorer feature shows dots for each location in your GEDCOM. By zooming in and clicking different dots, I can confirm it includes locations for:

• baptism
• birth
• burial
• death
• immigration
• marriage
• naturalization
• occupation
• residence

Sometimes clicking a single location dot opens a starburst of facts for many people. (It's such a cool visual.) My tree has an insane number of dots for the Bronx, New York.

Look for orange dots (approximate locations) or red circles (estimated locations). You can choose to report any location you feel is incorrect and provide guidance. I found a few people who were born in the town of Baselice, but their dots were in the city of Benevento. I clicked to report these estimated location and provided the correct map coordinates. The next day, I found them corrected! I now have no approximate or estimated locations on my map. (Note: I updated my GEDCOM, so it is possible my older GEDCOM was to blame for the errors.)

Put Each Generation on the Map

The Generations feature lets you scroll through the generations of your family tree. As you scroll, it highlights general places of birth for each generation. For me, the first generation highlights the place of my birth, New York State. Generation two shows my parents' two states, New York and Ohio. Generation three adds Italy, for my two grandfathers. Before that, I have nothing but Italy. Your map may have a lot more going on than my very homogeneous family tree.

Overlay Those Maps

I saved my favorite feature of TreeAlive for last. The Time Machine feature is an immersive experience because of its historical maps. While in the Time Machine, zoom in and choose a location dot to click. You'll see a particular event for a person in one location. TreeAlive overlays an historical map that dates back as close to the time of the event as possible.

Here's where you can have some fun. Other maps are available! You can select any of them from the list to get a better feel for the place. Since I'm looking at Italian maps, it interesting to see the older maps showing Latin place names. I see some place names that seem to be an error by the person who drew the map. For instance, on one map they wrote the town of Baselice as Baseuce. On some maps, my towns are not included, but I recognize the neighboring towns.

There's even a button that tilts the map. The button icon is a compass needle. When I click it while viewing a particular 1808 map, the mountains it depicts seem to look 3D. Now I can understand why it was so hard for my husband and I to drive from my one grandfather's town to the other. Mountains are in the way!

While viewing a 1714 map, I clicked the Full screen button to get a better feel for the lay of the land. My ancestors all came from neighboring towns. This view makes it easy to see their proximity to one another.

You can share much of what you see on TreeAlive with your family. Set aside a genealogy session to play with his one-of-a-kind new family tree tool. I'm sure you'll have fun with it.