When Unrelated People Finally Fit Your Family Tree

What do you do when that unattached branch takes root in your family tree?

Before 1900, all my ancestors came from small towns in Italy. In the 1800s there was very little moving around. Each person stayed in one town their entire life. Unless they arranged an inter-town marriage. And even then, the spouse was usually from a town or two away.

Because of all the intermarrying, I'm related to entire towns. By blood or marriage, I can find some relation to nearly everyone in each of my town's vital records. (Find out how to download vital records from your ancestor's Italian hometown.)

I found this out by recording every vital record for my grandfather's town. The documents ranged from 1809 to 1860 and included the names of more than 15,000 people.

As I added people to a separate Family Tree Maker file, I saw how they were all related. I connected more than 10,000 people to my grandfather. Then I imported them to my main tree.

That'll boost your family tree size!

Lately, as one of my 2019 genealogy goals, I've been adding a bunch of unrelated people to my family tree. I'm adding every baby born in my other grandfather's hometown who has the last name Pozzuto. (That name has some strong DNA matches.)

The idea is to figure out their relationship to me. I add a baby and its parents. I look for the baby's siblings and then for the parents' marriage. If I find the marriage, I can learn the baby's grandparents' names. I may even learn the great grandfathers' names. (Not sure why you'd want to add unrelated people to your tree? See "2 Reasons to Add Unrelated People to Your Family Tree".)

As I add each person to my tree, I:

• Compare their facts to anyone in my tree with a similar name.
• Attach my "No Relationship Established" image as their profile image. (Find out how to find the unrelated people in your family tree using Family Tree Analyzer.)

If I can't find my connection to that random Pozzuto baby's family, I move on to the next baby.

About 200 people in my family tree are sporting that "No Relationship Established" image. But there are magical moments that make it so worthwhile.

In Family Tree Maker, it's easy to see who's attached to any image.

I'll be building out a family. The bride was already in my tree, and now I know who the groom is. When I attach them to one another, boom! Suddenly the guy's description goes from "No direct relationship found" to something wild, like "Grand nephew of wife of 1st great-uncle of husband of paternal grandmother of husband of 1st great-aunt" of me!

Now the groom, his siblings, their spouses, his nieces and nephews, his parents and grandparents, are ALL related to me in some way.

But they still have that big blue "unrelated" image. That has got to go.

It's beyond tedious to view each newly related person and remove that image.

So I found a shortcut. While looking at the family in tree view in Family Tree Maker:

• Click each person and put a 1 at the beginning of their last name. Onofrio 1Pozzuto, Donato 1Pozzuto, Rosa 1Martuccio, and so on.
• Choose one person and click to see their Media tab.
• Select the "No Relationship Established" image and click the link icon.
• Click the checkbox for each person at the top of the list whose last name begins with a 1.
• Click the "Unlink Selected" button. If you select a lot of people, you may have to wait a minute for the process to finish.
• Remove the 1 from the beginning of each last name.

You'll love this tip when a big branch suddenly has a relationship to you.

I get such a rush out of this. I took a random baby and turned him into 50 new distant relatives.

I've visited my ancestral hometowns and felt a deep, strong connection. That's what inspired my endless, giddy pursuit of tons of relatives. My DNA is 96% from this Southern Italian region with just a touch of Greece. These towns ARE my DNA. They are me.

That's my inspiration, and it's why I'll be practicing genealogy until I can no longer use a computer.

I hope this tip will help you turn prospective relatives into deep-in-your-bones relatives.

Searching for My Only Missing 3rd Great Grandparent

What can I do to find my closest unidentified ancestor?

It bothers me that I'm missing the name of only 1 of my 32 3rd great grandparents. It's amazing to have that column of my grandparent chart all filled in. But one of the spaces says "mother of Maria Luigia Muollo"—my 2nd great grandmother.

Come along with me as I try to find her.

My Muollo family comes from a tiny little hamlet called Pastene—part of a small town in southern Italy. Because the town is so small, it seemed to fly under the radar. It didn't start collecting civil records in 1809 like the rest of Italy.

All I can access on the indispensable Antenati website are:

• 1861–1915 birth records
• 1931–1942 death records
• 1931–1942 marriage records

Those gaps in the record collection are enough to make me cry. I even hired a pair of Italian genealogists to go to the local church for records. What they found was wonderful. But they also discovered a huge lack of records.

I know that my 2nd great grandmother's father was Antonio Muollo. He was born in about 1818. I don't know when he died.

I've been piecing together families from the records I have. I've found only one other Muollo who's father is an Antonio. Maria Saveria Muollo was born in 1859.

Could she be my 2nd great grandmother's younger sister? There's a 16-year age difference between them. That's common in Italian families of the 19th century. And my Antonio was only about 41 when Maria Saveria was born. I know that Maria Saveria married Orazio Sarracino.

This is a TINY town. My 2nd great grandparents were Maria Luigia Muollo and Giuseppe Sarracino. If this theory pans out, the 2 Muollo sisters each married a Sarracino.

How can I prove Maria Saveria's relationship to my 2nd great grandmother, Maria Luigia?

The first step is always to gather as many documents and pieces of evidence as you can about the person. Let's see what I can learn about Maria Saveria Muollo.

To find more clues about Maria Saveria, I gathered the birth records for her children.

Birth Records

I have the Pastene birth records for Maria Saveria's 9 children with Orazio Sarracino:

• Maria Giuseppa, 1880
• Maria Assunta, 1884
• Antonio, 1886 (who must have died before 1892)
• Antonia, 1889
• Antonio, 1892
• Francesco, 1894
• Carmine, 1896
• Rosaria, 1899
• Maria Luigia, 1903

The last birth record, dated 24 November 1903, says Orazio was not present. He was domiciliato all'estero—living abroad. Sure enough, I found Orazio's 1903 ship manifest.

Immigration Records

Orazio and his daughter Maria Assunta left for New York THREE DAYS before his 9th child was born. I already can't stand this guy. Ships left for New York often. He had to leave when his wife was 9 months pregnant? Sheesh.

Orazio never sent for his wife to join him. Maybe he planned to return to Italy. Maybe he did return to Italy. Orazio died between 1910 and 1920. I don't know where.

In 1920, Maria Saveria and her 2 youngest daughters boarded a ship. They went to the Bronx to join her son Francesco. I like to think of her saying, "Who needs you? I'm going to America anyway."

This lady made that difficult voyage to America at 61 years of age.

Census Records

Back in the 1910 U.S. census, Orazio and his son Antonio are living in the Bronx. They're in the home of Orazio's eldest daughter Maria Giuseppa and her husband.

In the 1915 New York State Census, Antonio Sarracino is still living in the Bronx. He is married and has one child. His father is not with him.

In the 1940 U.S. census, Maria Saveria is 80 years old. She's living with her daughter Rosaria and Rosaria's family. It's amazing to find her at age 80. I would guess she didn't live a whole lot longer.

Death Records

One death record shows up on Ancestry.com that's promising. If it's Maria Saveria, she died in the Bronx in 1944 at age 84. The same record on FamilySearch.org offers more information. It says that her husband was Orazio Sarracino and her father was Antonio Muollo. It's her, alright.

But it also has the most important piece of information I'd been hoping to find: her mother's name. There it is.

Is Giuseppina Torrico my 3rd great grandmother? Is she the only 3rd great grandparent whose name I'm missing?

A check of the vital records in Pastene shows no one with that last name. Was it transcribed incorrectly because it was hard to read? What names do I have from the town that are close?

I can't accept a stranger's transcription blindly. That is not quite the right name.

My best guess, without seeing the actual death certificate, is that her last name was Errico. Maybe the E was all fancy and hard to read. Errico is a fairly common name in Pastene. There used to be a neighborhood with that name in the 1860s.

After all that research, I'm left with a theory. A stronger theory than I had before. I'm still missing marriage and death certificates from Pastene, so I can't prove anything.

But perhaps—just perhaps—Maria Saveria Muollo is the younger sister of my 2nd great grandmother. And perhaps Giuseppina Errico is my missing 3rd great grandmother.

It's a good enough theory to record in my family tree.

My Cousin Has a Genealogy Surprise in Store

Sometimes your family tree research can uncover uncomfortable secrets.

Growing up, my mother had a cousin who was her dear friend. But she had no idea how they were cousins. My mom would tell me, "Oh, she's a Saviano, but I don't know how."

Angela's identity became clear when
I spoke to my mom's 3rd cousin.

When this cousin asked me to look into her family tree, I learned about her tragic grandmother, Angela Letizia Saviano.

• On 21 May 1898, Angela sailed from Italy to New York. She was with my great great grandfather, Antonio Saviano, his wife and 2 of his children.
• Angela was 18 years old and from the same small town as my Saviano family.
• She listed another of Antonio Saviano's children as her cousin.
• Antonio Saviano was her uncle; Angela's grandparents were my 3rd great grandparents.
• Angela's 1880 birth record shows that her mother had the same last name as my grandmother. Was she a double cousin?
• Angela married a man from the same little town, and her mother-in-law was on that ship in 1898, too.
• Angela had one child, a daughter Catherine, in New York City in 1899.
• Angela died at the age of 21 of a leaky heart valve. She'd been under a doctor's care for 1 month.

Angela's only daughter is the reason my mom's cousin "was a Saviano." Angela was this cousin's grandmother.

One of my 1st genealogy finds had the mysterious Angela.

Last week this same cousin asked if I'd found out anything about her father's side of the family from Bari in Italy.

I can do that research now. With online access to Italian birth, marriage and death records, it should be easy. (If you have any Italian ancestors, find out about the Antenati site.) I started by looking at the U.S. documents I'd collected for my cousin's father and his brothers. I had their names and approximate ages, their father's name (Francesco), and their hometown (Alberobello).

I searched the Alberobello birth records for the 3 brothers and found them all. Now I knew their mother's name was Isabella. But there was something unusual written on the side of the first-born son's birth record.

It's right there on his birth record:
his parents married later.

Vincenzo's 1891 Birth

His birth record said his parents married in December 1891—that's 6 months after he was born. It says they got married to make this baby legitimate.

OK, maybe that's not such a big deal (although this was 1891). But the couple's marriage document shows that the mother of the baby—the new bride—was 14 years old. The father, Francesco, was 25.

As ewww as that is, there's more. Francesco first got married in 1888 to a woman who must have died by mid- to late-1890. And while this wasn't uncommon, the then 13-year-old girl he got pregnant in late 1890 (that part IS uncommon) was the half-sister of this first wife.

How do you think that went? The little girl is consoling him over the loss of his wife, her sister, and it winds up getting physical? Bye-bye childhood, Isabella. It's mommy time.

Francesco's 1866 Birth

I found one more twist to this tale. Another shotgun wedding. Francesco, who made baby Vincenzo with 13-year-old Isabella, was also born out of wedlock. His birth record also says that his parents married to make the baby legitimate.

Francesco's father, also named Vincenzo, was 30 years old when he married for the first time. His wife, already the mother of his child, was a widow and only 23 years old. Maybe this is how they consoled widows and widowers back in the day!

My cousin who wanted this information isn't online. I'll have to print out the information and documents and mail them to her. I'm still trying to figure out how to lay out these facts as clinically as possible.

I want to keep digging into this family's vital records. I'd like to find the relationship between Francesco's grandmother and Isabella, his child bride. They have the same last name. (Of course they do.)

I'm expecting a few more plot twists ahead.

And speaking of surprise babies:

• My 5th Great Grandfather: A Random Act of Kindness?
• When I'm Sixty-Four (I'll Still Have Only Two Children)
• Finding Your Ancestor's Lost Babies

My Genealogy Jigsaw Puzzle: DNA Matches and Vital Records

Like any big puzzle, it helps to start with the edges and find pieces that fit one another.

Last time, I told you about a DNA color-clustering method. It shows you visually how you're connected to your DNA matches. This method, and the online tree of a crucial DNA match, showed me where I need to focus. Right down to a specific last name.

You see, my parents share DNA. This was a surprise to them, and I'm eager to be able to show them exactly which set of ancestors they share.

I'm focusing on the last name Pozzuto in the town of Colle Sannita, Italy. There were a lot of people in town with that name. And they must have been distinct families, because a high number of men married women with the same name.

I began by looking at the parents of one key DNA match, both named Pozzuto. The tree is not well sourced, and much of the information comes from my 97-year-old DNA match herself.

I have 77 people in my tree with this last name, but that's not enough pieces for this puzzle.

I turned to the massive collection of Italian vital records that I have on my computer. When you've got all your ancestral town's documents on a local drive, research is fast and easy. (Find out how you can download a collection like mine.)

I've been trying to confirm the names and birth dates of the people on both sides of the Pozzuto-Pozzuto tree. I find a person's birth record, then try to find their father's birth record and their grandfather's birth record. The goal is to identify someone who is already in my tree with a blood relationship.

After adding several people to my tree this way, I realized something. I have a cousin in Italy who's about my age and is named Pozzuto. His mother's side of the family is related to my father's side of my family. So his being a Pozzuto is a coincidence.

But…I've always thought he looks like my cousin on my mother's side of my family. What if this cousin, related to my dad but with a resemblance to my mom, is the key?

I started digging into the little bit of information he'd given me about his father. I quickly found his father's parents' 1932 marriage documents. I learned my cousin's grandparents' names and kept going until I had some of his great grandparents' names.

But I couldn't tie this Pozzuto family to that of my DNA match. Time for a new strategy.

Last summer I read about a genealogist's massive effort to build out family trees for everyone in his DNA match list. I think the Pozzuto family is my key. Why not put together every Pozzuto family sitting in my collection of vital records?

That's how I built a tree of 15,000 people from my maternal grandfather's hometown. I took the information from each vital record and entered people into a Family Tree Maker file. I placed babies with their parents. I found the parents' marriage records and gave them their parents. After a while, all the families fit together.

These are some of the files I've identified with this name so far. Lots more work to do!

I'm going to pick a year, like 1860, and find each Pozzuto baby born in the town. I'll put them in my tree and give them my "no relationship established" marker (find out why that's important). As I go from year to year, I'll find babies that are siblings to the babies I found earlier. I'll build each family.

This will take lots of hours, but I'll wind up grouping together Pozzuto families. Some of them will be people I have in my tree already. Eventually I will find a direct line to my DNA match.

Still, that's not the goal. I need to find someone in that gene pool who married someone with a last name from my mother's side of the family.

All my ancestors came from neighboring towns. The prospect of marrying someone from the next town is very real. I've seen it. I'm eager to find a girl from Colle Sannita who married a guy from either Baselice or Pastene (most likely).

It's exciting to have all those documents waiting for me to read them. The answers are there! I simply need to dig and dig until I find them.

Can you do this with your ancestors' towns and your DNA matches?

And speaking of piecing together families:

• How I Gained 2 More Generations in 1 Day
• 5 Steps to Grow Your Italian Family Tree
• How to Find More Great Grandfathers for Father's Day

3 Ways to Find Your Ancestors in a Huge Pile of Documents

You've downloaded thousands of vital records from your ancestor's birthplace. How do you find your people in all those files?

My genealogy research changed dramatically in 2017. I decided to put my U.S.-based research on hold. Why? Because a new door opened wide. Now I have access to my ancestors' birth, marriage and death records in the old country.

Finally! I'm able to take my great grandparents back many, many generations. So far, I've discovered the names of:

• 4 of my 8th great grandparents
• 7 of my 7th great grandparents
• 34 of my 6th great grandparents
• about half of my 128 5th great grandparents

And I will discover many more.

A brief explanation: FamilySearch.org ended their microfilm program. They used to send rolls of microfilm to your local Family History Center. You could visit these rolls during your center's limited hours and view them on antiquated machines.

But in 2017 they began digitizing everything.

Earlier, I spent 5 years viewing microfilmed vital records from my grandfather's hometown. I typed all the important facts into a laptop. Suddenly those thousands of records are available as high-resolution images online. Free! And so are records from the towns of all my ancestors. You can find them on FamilySearch and on an Italian website called Antenati (ancestors).

I started viewing images from my grandfather Iamarino's town and downloading them. One by one. It was going to take forever!

Then I learned about a simple program called GetLinks. This program runs on any type of computer. It's compatible with FamilySearch and Antenati. For a full explanation and a link to the program, see How to Use the Online Italian Genealogy Archives.

Now I have well-organized image files from all my ancestors' hometowns. They range in time from 1809 to as late as 1942. But they include rewritten documents of births and deaths from the 1700s. That's how I've found such early ancestors.

Simplify your search by organizing your downloads.

I'm limited to documents written as early as 1809 only because it's Italy. If your ancestors are from other countries, you may find much older records on FamilySearch.org.

So let's say you've downloaded thousands of images containing oh-so-many of your ancestors.

• How do you find your people?
• How can you efficiently pull out the people and facts you need? 
• What's the best way to find your needles in those haystacks?

I'm approaching my 8 haystacks (individual Italian towns) in 3 different ways. You might choose one or two, or want to do them all.

1. Most time-consuming; best long-range pay-off

I'm typing the facts from each document into a spreadsheet. In the end, I'll have an easily searchable file. Want to locate every child born to a particular couple? No problem. Want to find out when a particular 4th great grandparent died? No problem.

But it is slow-going. I've completed about 6 years' worth of birth, marriage and death records for one town. I return to this project when I'm feeling burned out on a particular ancestor search and want a more robotic task to do.

There is another benefit to this method. Spending this much time with the documents has made me very familiar with the names in my ancestors' towns. I can recognize names despite the awful handwriting. And when a name is completely unfamiliar, I often discover that the person came from another town.

A well-organized spreadsheet is best for making records searchable.

2. Takes a few extra seconds; pays you back again and again

Whenever I find a particular record, I like to edit the name of the image file to include the name on the document. If it's an image of a single birth record, I add the baby's name to the end of the file name. If the name is common, I also add the baby's father's name. (I use the Italian word "di" as a shorthand for "son of" or "daughter of".) If it's an image of 2 birth records or a marriage record, I'll add both names to the file name.

The benefit of renaming the files comes later. When you're making another search in the future, the renamed file can save you time. You can either spot the name you're looking for, or use the search box in that file folder. You can even use the search box at a higher folder level.

Imagine you're looking for my grandfather's name, Pietro Iamarino. You can search his entire town at once and let your computer find every file you've renamed to include "Pietro Iamarino".

When I began downloading the files, I renamed each file containing anyone named Iamarino. Now I can always find the Iamarino I want. Quickly.

Adding people's names to the file names makes the collection searchable.

3. Efficient, fast and fruitful; makes you want to come back

To my mind, this is the most important lesson. You'll be more efficient at finding what you need in this massive amount of files if you put blinders on.

Search with a tight focus. Ignore the people in the index with your last name. You'll get back to them. But at this moment, when you're searching for someone in particular, don't look at anyone else. Zero in on that one name and complete your search.

Use this focused approach and find your ancestors faster. The moment you find them, rename the file and get that person into your tree.

My many folders of vital records hold countless discoveries for me. But I've found that choosing one family unit and searching only for them is highly effective. Here's an example.

I've found the birth record of a particular 2nd great grandparent. I know their parents' names (my 3rd great grandparents), but I don't know when they married or their exact ages. I'll search the surrounding years for more babies born to this couple. Now I'm putting together their family. I'm also trying to identify which is the eldest child. Now I can search a year before the eldest child's birth for the couples' marriage. There I can find their ages, and possibly see a rewritten copy of their birth records.

With that set of marriage records and my 3rd great grandparents' birth records, I've now discovered the names of 2 sets of my 4th great grandparents. And if they weren't born too early, I may be able to find their birth records, too!

Having built out one family unit as far as I can, I'm even more eager to pick a new family to investigate. Sometimes I'll choose a family with a dead end, and work to find that missing piece of the puzzle.

Which method will work best for you? Or will you combine all 3 as I'm doing?

And speaking of working efficiently:

• Work in Batches to Strengthen Your Family Tree
• How To Run Your Genealogy Research Like Clockwork
• How to Create Your Ancestral Hometown Database

4 Tips to Help You Find that Missing Ancestor

Here's how I'm finding the missing connections for my newly discovered ancestor.

Recently I told you how I found a big error in my family tree. It was the result of hard-to-read documents and my not being familiar with a particular town's families. I wound up following Rubina Cenzullo when I should have been looking for Ruffina Zullo.

Some of my ancestors moved to nearby towns to marry.

When her death record showed me the truth—that Ruffina was born in another town—I knew exactly what I had to do.

The most important documents I needed to find in the new town (Apice, Italy) were:

• her birth record (around 1816)
• her marriage to my 3rd great grandfather (around 1843)

But now I have a new family named Zullo, and a whole new branch to discover. Ruffina's parents were Leonardo and Caterina. But I want to learn the names of my 4th and 5th great grandparents in this branch.

Here's what I'm doing to expand my new Zullo branch.

Find Siblings, Marriages, Deaths

Ruffina was born in 1816 when her father was about 27 years old. There could be siblings born before Ruffina, for sure. To find them, I used the GetLinks program to download all the Apice birth records. (Read about how GetLinks works with FamilySearch and the Antenati website. You'll find the download link there, too.)

I downloaded her town's 1809–1815 birth records and looked for Ruffina's siblings. I found:

• Saverio Antonio Nicola Zullo, born in 1811
• Saverio Zullo born in 1813

When two children of the same parents have the same name, it's a safe bet that the 1st child died before the 2nd was born. The 1st Saverio, in this case, should have died before the 2nd Saverio was born in 1813.

To prove that, I downloaded the town's 1811 death records. I found that the 1st Saverio died in October 1811.

But I found a surprise, too. A month earlier, in September 1811, another Ruffina Zullo died. She was the daughter of the same parents as the other children, and she was 2 years old. It's only because this Ruffina died that my Ruffina got her name.

The correct name led me to a new family unit.

This opens up another avenue for me to explore. I checked the 1809 Apice birth records. Ruffina was not born in Apice in 1809 (not in 1810 or 1811, either).

But I noticed something important. There are lots of people named Zullo in Apice to this day. But there was no one there with the same last name as Ruffina's mother: Trancuccio.

While thinking about this, I formed a theory.

Did Leonardo and Caterina, the parents of the Zullo siblings, marry in another town? Was it Caterina's hometown? That would explain why no other people in Apice have Caterina's last name. If this theory is right, 1809 Ruffina could have been born in Caterina's hometown.

This isn't far-fetched at all. Many times in 1800s Italy a couple would marry in the wife's town but live in the husband's town. My Ruffina's daughter Vittoria has a similar story, but with more complications.

Vittoria married Antonio (these are my 2nd great grandparents). Antonio was from Pastene; Vittoria from Santa Paolina. They married in Santa Paolina and had 1 child. Then they moved to the neighboring town of Tufo and had 2 more children. Then they moved to Antonio's town of Pastene to have the rest of their children. (And that's why my great grandparents met and married in Pastene.)

I used a website to see where Caterina's last name exists in Italy. I find it mostly in 2 nearby towns. Another tip: Enter the last name into a genealogy site search for immigration records. See where those people came from.

I downloaded the 1809 and 1810 birth records from these 2 likely towns. So far, I haven't found my 4th great aunt Ruffina Zullo. But I have found people with the last name Trancuccio.

I still like my theory, but I may have to check more towns.

I won't be visiting this ancestral hometown—at least not the old part 
of town. It was destroyed and abandoned after a 1962 earthquake.

There was another surprise waiting for me when I located my 3rd great grandmother Ruffina's siblings. On her brother Saverio's 1811 birth record, the father of the baby is "Leonardo Zullo di Saverio". That means "Leonardo Zullo, son of Saverio".

That's exactly what you hope to find! Saverio is baby Saverio's grandfather, and my 5th great grandfather. This Saverio Zullo was born in about 1764, possibly in the same town where Ruffina was born in 1816.

What can I do with 1764 Saverio's name to help build my tree some more?

Well, while looking for Ruffina's siblings, I saw several other Zullo babies born to different fathers. I also found some Zullo men and women who married in that town between 1809 and 1815. I can download all those records easily.

I can put together Zullo babies, brides and grooms. I'll match siblings by comparing their parents' names. With luck, I'll find a sibling for my 4th great grandfather, Leonardo Zullo. And maybe one of that sibling's records will tell me my 5th great grandmother's name. (I'll bet it's Ruffina!)

No matter who you're looking for, or which branch you're trying to grow, these basic tasks can help you succeed:

1. Found an ancestor's birth record? Search the surrounding years for the births of their siblings. Comb each record for more information, like ages, occupations and other relatives.
2. Based on the oldest sibling's birth, try to find marriage records for their parents.
3. Starting in the year of the youngest sibling's birth, try to find death records for their parents.
4. Pay attention to names. If your ancestor is from a big city, this isn't as helpful. But if you're looking at records from a really small town, you should see a lot of last names repeated. These are the long-standing families in that town. If your ancestor's last name is unique, maybe they're from another town.

Finding out Ruffina was born in Apice when I knew she married and had babies in Santa Paolina was a big surprise. Keep your mind and your eyes open. Let the facts you have suggest a theory about the facts you don't have. Then try to prove that theory. Don't give up the search!

And speaking of climbing to the next generation:

• Step-by-Step Discovery of My 5th Great Grandparents
• 5 Steps to Grow Your Italian Family Tree
• Today I Demolished My Family Tree's Only Brick Wall

How Are Your 2018 Genealogy Goals Coming Along?

It's nearly August already! How are you doing with your 2018 genealogy goals?

Last December I encouraged you to set some genealogy goals. The point was to help push yourself to work on or finish important genealogy tasks.

So how are you progressing? It isn't too late to hack away at those goals.

Here's my own list of 2018 goals. Let's look at how I'm doing and see if that can inspire you.

1. Create a Weekly Backup Plan

Genealogy
email
folders

Done! But it is ongoing. Each Sunday I consult my list of file types to back up. I've only missed a couple of weeks, but at this very moment, my files are 100% backed up.

My list contains some non-genealogy files:

• My Microsoft Outlook email file (which has tons of genealogy information)
• My bank and credit card statements and QuickBooks files
• My 3 latest Family Tree Maker complete backup files
• All the genealogy document images I've collected since my last backup

I back up my files to a neat little external, 1 terabyte Seagate drive and to OneDrive by Microsoft. I get a free terabyte of space there because I subscribe to Microsoft Office Online.

2. Find My Parents' Connection

When I uploaded my raw DNA to GEDmatch.com, I discovered that my parents are 4th or 5th cousins. Boy, did that leave them with their mouths hanging open.

My goal is to find their connection. Somewhere there is a pair of 5th or 6th great grandparents that they share. I haven't found the connection yet, but I am actively working on it.

I'm going through the vital records from their ancestors' neighboring hometowns and building out their families. I'll find that connection eventually. I just hope I'll find it while they're still alive to laugh about it.

3. Log the Antenati Documents Into a Master Spreadsheet

I feel like I talk about this every day. If you don't know or you have no Italian ancestors, Antenati is a website with TONS of Italian vital records. The word antenati means ancestors.

Using a free software program called GetLinks by Carlos Leite, I've downloaded to my computer every available vital record from each of my Italian ancestors' hometowns:

• Baselice, Circello, Colle Sannita, Pastene, Pescolamazza, and Sant'Angelo a Cupolo in the province of Benevento
• Santa Paolina in the province of Avellino

I have—easily—several hundred relatives in those records. Sometimes I search the documents for someone in particular. Sometimes I go year by year searching for every baby born to a particular couple.

But I really want to record the facts from all the records in a spreadsheet. I've completed several years' worth of records. It makes searching for someone so much easier.

A sliver of my ambitious master file of tons of vital records.

Someday, when it's all done, I can share the results and benefit everyone else who's a descendant of these towns.

So, I'm actively working on it, but I can't finish it in 2018.

4. Fill in the "Need to Find" Column on My Document Tracker

A near-disaster with my "document tracker" spreadsheet has forced me to make a ton of progress on this goal.

Last week I wrote about a screw-up in my master spreadsheet where I keep track of every document image or date I gather for someone in my tree. I took full advantage of a glitch in the file to make progress with my 4th genealogy goal.

Line-by-line, I'm examining my document tracker. I'm comparing each person's line in the spreadsheet to their documents and facts in Family Tree Maker. I'm filling in all the columns, and determining what's missing.

I'm adding the missing facts to the "Need to Find" column. Then I give the person's entire row a green background color to make it clear I've examined that person.

My spreadsheet of everything I've found, and everything I need, guides my research efficiently.

I'm not following alphabetical order because I'm also working on goal #5. I have completed my review of the letters A through C (that's last names) and S through Z. I've done all my Leone relatives and my Iammucci relatives. Those areas contain some of my closest relatives.

I'm making progress and absolutely will complete this in 2018.

5. Replace Family History Center Photos with Antenati Document Images

Around 2008, before the Antenati website and FamilySearch.org made the Italian vital records available online, I ordered microfilm of the vital records from my maternal grandfather's hometown.

I viewed every record from 1809 to 1860 on nasty old microfilm viewers at Family History Centers in Philadelphia and Poughkeepsie, New York.

The Philadelphia Family History Center had one computer that read microfilm. When it was available, I could grab JPEG files of the documents I wanted the most. In Poughkeepsie I had to take iPhone photos of the projected images. Those are awful. They're dark, fuzzy, and show the texture of the surface on which the image is projected.

This dramatic before-and-after comparison makes it clear why I need those high-res documents from Antenati.

My goal is to replace all the crummy iPhone photos with high-resolution images from the Antenati site.

I'm making headway on goals 4 and 5 at the same time by focusing on the families from the town I researched on microfilm. I can replace those bad images, fill in the blanks for those people on my document tracker, and make double the progress.

It's August-eve. We're seven twelfths of the way through 2018. That's about 58%. I believe my goals are at least 58% complete.

But I'm not taking my foot off the gas pedal. I need to keep on track and keep that finish line in sight.

Now it's your turn. And it's not too late in the year to begin! Which genealogy tasks are most important to you this year?

How are you doing?

Speaking of backups and safety:

• Prepare Your Family Tree for Your Computer's Demise
• Moving Your Family Tree to a New Computer
• How to Make Your Family Tree Fireproof!

How to Find the Most Important Genealogy Documents Quickly

A tiny portion of my newly downloaded
vital record collection.

Seems like every day I read that a new genealogy document collection is coming online. Some are available through subscription services, but plenty is out there for free.

If you stay tuned in to social media, you can learn about these new collections early. That's how I discovered a document collection I needed badly was coming online this past week.

Finally, a branch of my family tree that's been a dead end was opening up. And I was ready.

Even before the vital records from the town of Santa Paolina, Italy, were fully published, I was downloading them to my computer. I now have all the available records from 1809–1945 to comb through offline. I stored the documents in 386 folders—separating births, marriages and deaths by year. I have no idea how many thousands of documents there are.

Imagine this is you. Imagine these documents hold the missing information about your great great grandmother Colomba.

Where do you begin?

A little background:

• Colomba's 1920 New York City death record shows her last name was Consolazio and she was born around 1845, somewhere in Italy.
• Her son's World War II draft registration card said he was born in Tufo, Italy.
• Last year I looked at microfilmed records from Tufo. I found two sons for Colomba plus a few Consolazio babies who were her nieces and nephews. It was their records that told me the Consolazio siblings were from the next town—Santa Paolina.

I've been waiting impatiently for the Santa Paolina documents to show up online.

Here's how I'm surgically extracting the most important records first.

Find That First Birth Record

Hoping that her death record was correct about her age, I went straight to the 1845 births. I found Colomba! Though her name is a little different and her father's name isn't what I expected, I know it's her. On her birth record is a note of her marriage to my great great grandfather, Antonio Saviano.

This is unusually lucky, but her birth record say my great great grandparents married in Santa Paolina on 1 June 1871.

This 1845 Italian birth record includes the addition of her husband and marriage date.

Go After the Marriage Record

Your ancestor's marriage record can provide tons of detail, including:

• Bride and groom's birth dates
• Death dates of their deceased parents
• Death dates of their deceased grandfathers if their fathers are dead (this won't be true everywhere)
• Names and death dates of any previous spouses

Santa Paolina's marriage records are a different format than I'm used to. But they gave me important facts I'd been missing: My great great grandfather Antonio's parents' names, occupation, and town of birth. It also confirmed his year of birth.

Start Collecting the Babies

Knowing my ancestors married in June 1871, I started looking for babies beginning in 1872.

I also know from earlier research that this couple had baby boys born in the town of Tufo in 1875 and 1877. So I needed to check the birth indexes only for 1872, 1873 and 1874.

I found one baby girl, Maria Grazia, born on 26 April 1872. She and the two boys born in Tufo are my great grandmother's siblings. So I knew this little girl must have died. We simply have no Maria Grazia in the family. I was sad to find she died 4 days later.

Maria Grazia Saviano, the first-born child of my 2nd great grandparents, died at the age of 4 days.

These were Colomba's earliest babies. The rest of her children are well known to my family. They were born in another town called Pastene. And now I know that's where their father Antonio was born!

But we can't stop there. We need to find Colomba's grandparents, and maybe her great grandparents.

Hunt for the Parents

Colomba's birth record gave me names for her parents, but not their ages. Luckily Santa Paolina had a very small population. I subtracted 25 years from Colomba's birth year, bringing me to 1820. I began checking the birth indexes for 1820, 1819, 1818. I found my 3rd great grandmother, Rubina Maria Censullo! Now I have her parents' names—my 4th great grandparents.

Keep going. 1817, 1816. There he is! My 3rd great grandfather Semblicio Fiorentino Conzolazio. Now I have his parents' names—also my 4th great grandparents.

Getting close to the earliest records, I searched for Semblicio's parents' marriage. He was born in 1816, so I looked at 1815, 1814. Oh my gosh, I found it! His parents, Gaetano and another Colomba, were married on 29 December 1814.

The paragraph at the bottom includes the names of 4 of my 5th great grandparents.

Now I have each of their parents' names. That's 2 sets of my 5th great grandparents. I can't find Rubina Maria's parents' marriage because they were quite a bit older. I'd need church records to find them.

With one document collection, boom! 3rd, 4th and 5th great grandparents.

That's a Great Start

Using targeted searches, I got the juiciest information out of this record collection in no time. But there's a ton more to find. I want to find the births of Colomba's siblings, their marriages and their babies. I need death records for the 3rd, 4th and 5th great grandparents.

I hope you'll try this methodical approach. First looking for very specific records, then expanding to the related records. Be logical and you'll go far. You can do this!

And on that note:

• How I'm Methodically Finding My Missing Ancestors
• How I Tracked Down My 4th Great Grandmother's Parents
• Step-by-Step Discovery of My 5th Great Grandparents