5 Reasons to Search Beyond Your Direct Ancestors

When you find your ancestor's birth record, don't overlook the other gems in those vital records.

Sometimes I dream I'm searching through old Italian vital records. I spend so much time knee-deep in vital records that it's only natural I would dream about them. The countless hours spent with these records have removed the foreign-language barrier completely.

You should explore all the vital records available from your ancestral hometowns, too. Here are 5 reasons why you should search for more than your direct ancestors in those records. Click each of the 5 titles to get the full story.

1. Don't Miss Out on Your Ancestors' Culture

I cringed when I learned my 2nd great grandmother Caterina was 23 years younger than her husband. Then I did a bit more digging. I found out Caterina was my 2nd great grandfather's second wife. And she was the same age as Nicola's eldest child from his 1st marriage!

Spending more time with this town's vital records, I realized a few things that hold true in all my towns:

• A widow or widower usually remarried in a hurry. Sometimes as soon as 2 months after their spouse died.
• A man's second wife was more likely to be much younger than him.
• When a bride and groom came from different towns, they usually married in her town and lived in his town.
• Each town registered a few abandoned babies each year. Someone might find a baby on a doorstep or on the side of the road. There was a special church window where you could leave a baby and no one would see you. These babies may have been born out of wedlock, but sometimes a woman chose to keep her baby.
• It was the mayor's job to name these foundlings. Their last name might:
  • show the baby's status (Esposito, Abbandonato, etc.)
  • refer to a local place name, like that of a river
  • reflect their physical characteristic (Russo for a red-cheeked baby)
  • or it may be a last name already found in the town.

I didn't fully understand these abandoned babies until I read a lot of their birth records. At first I thought my 60-year-old 5th great grandfather had another baby in 1809. Actually, he was about to step outside his home when he found the baby girl on his doorstep. That exact detail is noted on the birth record.

2. Discovering Life and Death Trends in Your Ancestral Hometown

I discovered a sad fact about my great grandmother Maria Rosa's hometown. Vital records showed a higher than usual infant mortality rate. How did I know it was higher than usual? Because I'd already reviewed the records from neighboring towns. A typical mid-1800s family in this town had 10 babies, but only 2 lived to adulthood.

That bit of information made it obvious why Maria Rosa and her siblings came to America. They all made a better life for themselves in New York, Ohio, and Pennsylvania.

3. What Do the Records Say About Your Ancestor's Town?

My 2nd great grandmother Colomba's hometown records told a very different story. While reviewing vital records, I realized that most marriage records included one out-of-towner. Colomba's husband (my 2nd great grandfather) came from a neighboring town to marry her. Colomba's own mother came from yet another town.

This led me to a second discovery. In my other ancestral hometowns, most men were farmers or laborers. But in Colomba's hometown, most men were merchants, notaries, and doctors. While this town is notable for its vineyards, it seemed to attract a more educated population.

So why did my 2nd great grandparents leave? It's possible Colomba's brothers inherited the family's land and property. Or her husband had his own ambitions.

4. Why All Siblings Are Critical to Your Family Tree

If you know when and where your 2nd great grandparents were born, you need to find all their siblings. Those siblings and their descendants will help you connect to many of your DNA matches.

I've found that one sibling's vital record can hold more clues than the others. No matter where your ancestor came from, vital records will vary depending on the year.

In some of my ancestral hometowns, birth records from 1866 to 1874 hold extra hints. For each of the baby's parents, you can find their full name, age, and their father's first name. That extra detail can help take your family tree back another generation.

5. Searching for Family in a New Town Takes Practice

I'm so familiar with the last names in my ancestral hometowns that I can see past the worst handwriting. But when I discovered my 3rd great grandmother in a new-to-me town, it was like starting from scratch.

This town's early records (starting in 1809) feature incredibly bad handwriting. I had to do a few things to feel confident about how to spell these new names. I started a spreadsheet to keep track of the last names I was seeing, then, for each name in the list I:

• Checked the Cognomix website for last name distribution in Italy. I made note of whether the name is still found in the town. If not, I noted the closest town that still has that name.
• Used a green highlight to show which names have high confidence in their spelling.
• Noted any alternative spellings. For example, sometimes a family uses the name Capua, but other times it's written as Capoa.

When I review this town's vital records, I check my spreadsheet to figure out what I'm looking at. Does that say Casassa? Oh, no, it's Casazza, and that's already in my list. Only by reviewing all the documents can I get comfortable with these new last names in my family tree.

Each of your ancestor's life stories depends in part on their family members. If you want to know your family history, be sure to broaden your search to the whole family and then some.

3 Key Signs a Family Tree is Wrong

When you find your relatives in a stranger's family tree, it means one of two things:

1. You've discovered a new branch of your own family tree, or
   
2. They made a mistake and put your relatives where they don't belong.

When that stranger is also your DNA match, you hope they're right. It's up to you to see if their family tree is reliable or riddled with errors.

Here are the 3 key signs that separate fact from fiction.

Don't pull that family tree into your own. You don't know where it's been!

1. Their family is from the wrong place

Giuseppe Nicola Mascia was born on 9 Oct 1794 in Colle Sannita, Italy. I know this because his baptism record is included in his 1826 marriage papers from Colle Sannita. I have vital records that tell me his and both his wives' names, birth dates, and parents' names. I have birth records for his 8 children, born between 1815 and 1835.

One of my DNA matches has Giuseppe Nicola Mascia, born on 9 Oct 1794, in their family tree. But things quickly go wrong.

• They say Giuseppe was born on that date in Deliceto, a town 80 miles away from Colle Sannita.
• They have the wrong parents and siblings for Giuseppe. I have documents for the correct people.
• They have Giuseppe's first wife and kids but the wrong second wife and kids. Theirs overlap with the dates of the real second wife and kids.

What can we make of all this? Since the people in their tree are from a town 80 miles away, they're a different family. I'll bet they saw a hint for "Giuseppe Nicola Mascia" from my tree and pulled him and his first wife and kids right in. They were wrong to do so. They didn't check the facts.

You must know your locations and time period! In the early 1800s, people from my grandfather's town of Colle Sannita stayed put.

For a better understanding of the importance of place, see Location and Mobility in "4 Keys to Italian Genealogy."

2. Their dates don't add up

In the same person's family tree, they added another couple from my tree even though the dates don't work. My couple, Nicola Giuseppe Mascia and Angelica delVecchio, married in 1818 and had 7 kids in the town of Baselice.

This person brought Nicola and Angelica into their tree along with 4 of their 7 kids. They documented the fact that this couple married on 30 May 1818 in Baselice. Then they added FIVE other children who were born in Deliceto (50 miles away) between 1804 and 1814. In 1804, Nicola was 15 and living in Colle Sannita, and Angelica was 12 and living in Baselice.

The dates do not work. They contradict logic and the documented facts. I found the 1812 birth record for one of the misplaced kids in Deliceto. His parents were Mattia Mascio and Maria Farollo of Deliceto. Someone didn't do their own research.

Does your family tree have dates that can't be right? You can fix them. Find out how in "How to Find Errors in Your Family Tree."

3. Birth locations are vague

I find so many family trees where it's clear they don't know where their people came from. To spot them, look for great grandparents with only a country as their place of birth. They'll also be missing a full birth date.

That's fine—either they haven't done their research yet or they've hit dead-ends. But that country without a town is a red flag when I see they've put people from my towns into their family tree.

If they don't know where their people came from, how can they assume my people are their people? When I spot this type of borrowing from my tree, I check their direct ancestors. If I can't find a strong possibility of a connection to my towns, I disregard the entire tree.

Are you still missing your ancestor's hometown? Here are "4 Key Places to Discover Your Ancestor's Hometown."

Everyone is in a different place on their family tree journey. Since you're reading this blog, I know you wouldn't pull another family tree into yours without proof. But if you're browsing through DNA matches' trees hoping for a breakthrough, keep an eye out for these 3 key signs a family tree is wrong.

Tour Your Ancestral Hometowns with YouTube

I haven't visited my ancestral hometowns since 2018, and I'm really starting to miss them. I'd love to walk the streets again, linger longer, and talk to more of the villagers.

Then a great idea fell into my lap. I wanted to find some information about a town I haven't visited yet. My 3rd great grandmother Rufina's hometown is Apice, and it's now a ghost town. An earthquake in the 1980s made the whole town too dangerous to live in. They call the deserted part of town Apice Vecchio (vecchio means old). Today everyone lives nearby in the very modern-looking Apice Nuovo (nuovo means new).

Among my search results were articles and videos about the ghost town. I saw a suggested video posted by another of my ancestral hometowns: Pesco Sannita.

What's this? My great grandmother's town has a YouTube channel? I watched an English-subtitled video about agriculture in my great grandmother's hometown. I'll be sure to look for the vineyards and olive tree groves on my next visit.

I watched another video about the Fiume Tammaro. I found this river (fiume) mentioned on 6 Pesco Sannita death records from the 1840s and 1850s. Young boys kept drowning there. Seeing the video, it seems too shallow and slow-moving to have taken the boys' lives. Even more surprising is that some women still wash their laundry in the river.

The town's YouTube videos include:

• beautiful fly-overs filmed by drones
• cultural events
• demonstrations by a local chef
• a look inside their restaurants, and more.

What else can I find from my ancestral hometowns? Searching for my grandfather's town of Baselice, I found:

• more drone fly-overs
• promotional videos for the town
• a description of a public works beautification project.

I'm a big fan of the drone fly-over videos (many created by Raffaele Pilla). I spotted my grandfather's house in one of them!

You can fly over, walk through, and learn the culture of your ancestral hometowns right on YouTube.

For my other grandfather's town, Colle Sannita, I found messages from the mayor and town council meetings. For my great grandparents hometown of Sant'Angelo a Cupolo, I found a fly-over video and a first-person view of a foot race through town. Even the real estate videos are great because they give me a view inside the homes. That's something I can't see while walking through my towns.

I also watched video tours of the city of Benevento. It's the center of all my ancestral hometowns, and I have 2 cousins who own restaurants there. I've been to Benevento 3 times and still haven't seen all the sights.

Search for videos from your ancestral hometowns by typing the name of the town in the YouTube search box. Be sure to use the correct in-country spelling of the town name. Pay attention to who is posting the videos you like. They may have more videos for you in their collections.

Be sure to hover over the video and click CC (closed captioning) to see subtitles. If they aren't in English, click the gear next to CC, click Subtitles, Auto-Generate, and choose your language. The translations may not have the best quality, so keep an open mind. If you can't click the CC, the video may have no spoken words.

While I was at it, I searched YouTube for my current hometown in New York. I found some interesting videos about the town's railroad history. Then I found videos about the little town of Hornellsville, NY, where my grandmother was born. If you haven't used YouTube to give your genealogy research some context, you should give it a try.

And speaking of your ancestral hometowns:

• Walking in Your Ancestors' Footsteps
• Prepare to Walk Along Your Ancestors' Streets
• Discover Your Ancestral Hometown's History

Why Your Half 4th Cousin Once Removed Matters

I've just finished the second of my most ambitious genealogy research projects. I created inventories of available vital records from my ancestral hometowns. Then I reviewed each document, placing about 95% of the people into my family tree.

First I did my Grandpa Iamarino's town of Colle Sannita. Now I've wrapped up my Grandpa Leone's neighboring town of Baselice. I've shared 5 inventory spreadsheets on my www.forthecousins.com website. And I'll have another town ready soon (Circello).

The reason 95% of the people from the documents can fit in my family tree is that the towns are remote. They were even more isolated before automobiles. Everyone in town was likely to marry a neighbor. The 5% of people I can't fit into my tree are:

• out-of-towners or
• members of noble families who married other aristocrats.

Why Spend All That Time?

The benefits of this time-consuming project include:

• Gaining familiarity with all the last names in town.
• Overcoming bad handwriting because of that familiarity.
• Finding connections to DNA matches because their people are in your tree.
• Knowing exactly who everyone in town was and their relationship to you.

The first step in such a project is making your inventory. View the town's documents online (find Italian vital records on Antenati or FamilySearch). Then make a brief entry in a spreadsheet for each image. My preferred format is: document number name of subject "di" father's name. ("Di" is Italian for of, and that's how these documents denote the father's name: di Giovanni, di Antonio, etc.)

An example is: 82 Adamo Leone di Giovanni & 83 Antonia Maria Colucci di Leonardo. That's a single document image showing 2 birth records. Document #82 is my grandfather's 1891 birth record. He is the subject of the document and his father is Giovanni. Also in the image is document #83 for Antonia Maria Colucci, daughter of Leonardo.

No matter how distant the relationship, there's value to every connection in your ancestral hometown.

The towns of Colle Sannita and Baselice each had under 3,000 inhabitants in he 1800s. The vital records have added at least 30,000 people to my family tree. I have a complete inventory for the town of Pesco Sannita ready and waiting for my review. I'll go through the same process with Pesco as I did for Colle and Baselice:

• View each vital record to see if the subject, their parents, or their spouse are already in my family tree.
• When I can find where this person fits, add the facts from the document, including dates, places, and the names of family members.
• If I can't find a place for this person in my tree, I highlight that line in the spreadsheet in yellow. It's very possible that their connection will show up after I review more documents. I'll make a second pass through the spreadsheet later to see if they can fit.

I've listed the benefits of this project and explained my process. But you may still be wondering why it's worth such a huge commitment of time. Three reasons spring to mind:

1. Connection. Familiarity with the people from my hometowns gives me a strong connection to these places. They aren't merely the quaint and beautiful towns I've visited a few times. They are me! I love knowing how deep my roots go in each town.
2. Knowledge. Often I see people on Facebook asking how they can learn more about their ancestors' day-to-day lives. If you come from a remote town and you're not descended from nobility, you're not going to find their journal tucked away in some archive. They were likely illiterate and living a life of hard work. You may find some general writings about life in that area at a certain time. A history of your ancestral town may provide those types of clues. Otherwise, all you can learn about your ancestor is that they came from this family, married this person, had this job, had these children, and died. Those family names and dates are what you can discover in the town's vital records.
3. DNA Matches. Because I've studied my ancestral hometowns' documents, I can quickly recognize my entry point into a DNA match's family tree. If you're only looking at a match's tree for your last name, you're missing out on that entry point.

The title of this article mentions a half 4th cousin once removed. I chose someone from my family tree randomly. This cousin is a descendant of my 4th great grandfather Gennaro Pilla and his second wife. Gennaro had 2 children with my 4th great grandmother, and 5 children with his 2nd wife. That's 5 threads I'd have missed if I paid attention only to my direct line. And this particular half 4C1R led me to his son, my half 5th cousin John, who introduced me to a ton of relatives in Canada. I met lots of people with my maiden name on that trip to Canada. That's a rarity.

I love being able to encompass entire towns with my family tree. If you're staying on the straight-and-narrow, gathering information about your direct ancestors only, you're missing out on so many connections!

Discovering Life and Death Trends in Your Ancestral Hometown

As I looked at my past article about how to use the Italian Ancestry website, one reader comment stood out. She wanted to know why on earth anyone should download all the vital records from their town. Her thought was, "Why spend all that effort when I only need my grandfather's birth record?"

This past week I've been using my downloaded records from one town to add more than 1,300 people to my family tree. In the past, I had only gathered my great grandmother's closest family. Now it's time to connect everyone—as I've done with my two grandfathers' towns.

For at least several hundred years, my ancestors lived in a few rural Southern Italian towns. Being there for so long, there was a lot of intermarrying. As a result, entire towns have a connection through blood or marriage.

The mission of my family tree (current population: 58,553) is to find all the connections.

While working on the town of Pesco Sannita (formerly Pescolamazza), I spotted a terrible trend. This is something I would never have known without reviewing *all* the vital records.

Not only is this infant mortality rate horrifying, but the 1st man's 1st wife had 2 stillborn babies before she died at age 29.

Pesco Sannita had a horrifying infant mortality rate in the first half of the 1800s. It was so shocking that a typical woman was giving birth to 10 babies, and only one or two lived long enough to marry.

The alarming death rate made me realize what a miracle it was for my ancestors to have lived to adulthood.

Here are some examples of what I discovered going through the vital records:

• My 3rd great grandparents, Giuseppe Caruso and Maria Luigia Pennucci, had 7 children between 1829 and 1848. Only 3 lived to marry.
• My 4th great uncle Francesco Saverio Pennucci and his wife Antonia had 8 children between 1824 and 1844. Only 4 made it past infancy.
• Distant relatives Filippo Girardi and Caterina Gentile had 9 children between 1827 and 1844. Only 2 grew up.
• My 5th great aunt Maria Luigia Girardi and her husband had 6 children between 1816 and 1827. Only 1 made it into her 20s before dying.

Because I've studied the neighboring towns, I know this infant mortality rate is unique. My goodness—what was going on in this town at the time? The town's website says Pescolamazza fought for independence from its feudal lord in 1817. The legal proceedings dragged into into the 1850s.

There is one definitive book on the subject that isn't online. It's called "Storia di [History of] Pesco Sannita" by Mario d'Agostino. Suddenly I remembered that a distant cousin gave me a book about the town years ago. When I found it on my bookshelf, I saw it is the very book I couldn't find online! And it mentions a lot of names that I can tie to vital records. I started translating the book years ago, but I didn't get far. Uh oh. Another genealogy project for me.

A much appreciated genealogy gift from a cousin I met online is helping me understand the sad, deadly history of my great grandmother's town.

I used the Google Translate app on my phone for a quick-and-dirty translation of a few pages. It seems as if the town became isolated once they severed ties to their feudal lord. They were unable to take their goods to market. They had a real problem to overcome.

They needed to build a new bridge, at great cost to many, including the townspeople. By today's standards, it took an eternity to build that bridge and restore financial security to the townspeople. This happened in about 1861.

The mortality rate was much better in the second half of the 1800s. In an 1892 newspaper advertisement, the town is looking to hire a doctor. The ad ran several times in the Corriere Sanitario—the Healthcare Courier—way up north in Milano. I suspect the high infant mortality rate was due to poverty, malnutrition, and a lack of medical care.

Visiting Southern Italy today, it's hard to imagine the extreme poverty and lack of opportunity our ancestors faced. All we see is the sublime landscape and ancient architecture.

It took a deep dive into the town's vital records to realize the daily threat to my ancestors' lives. The next time you wonder why I'm piecing together my ancestral towns, remember that's what it took to notice a deadly pattern.

And speaking of piecing towns together:

• How to 'Attack' Your Ancestor's Small Town Vital Records
• How to Use Your Personal Genealogy Database
• Laying the Foundation for a Solid Family Tree

Exploring Your Last Name Concentration

I recently made the comment that "I'm like the frozen concentrate of Benevento, Italy." In "Where Will Your Roots Map Take You?," I showed you how to create a map of all your ancestral locations.

Today's project focuses on your ancestral last name concentration. Granted, your name concentration depends on how much research you've done. But you may find some real surprises.

Let's look at 3 ways to discover which family names make up the biggest percentage of you. If you’d rather do it old school, you can pull the names from your family tree manually. But there's no reason you can't do option 2.

Once your ancestral last names are counted, Excel makes it easy to show your family tree composition in a colorful chart.

1. Family Tree Maker's Surname Report

After years of using Family Tree Maker (FTM), I've somehow never used the built-in Surname Report. To create yours:

• Choose yourself in your family tree and click the Publish tab.
• Under Person Reports, choose the Surname Report.
• In the Report Options column, click Selected individuals.
• You'll see your name highlighted, and you can choose the Ancestors option. But then you run into the problem of ancestors with more than one spouse. What if your ancestor isn't set as the preferred spouse? You may get step-grandparents in the list. I clicked the Filter In button because my ancestors all have a custom Ahnentafel fact. I clicked All facts, and Search where Ahnentafel Is not blank. With 401 people selected, I clicked Apply.
• Now click the boxes in the report option tab for (1) Sort surname by count, and (2) Limit counts to included individuals.

You'll see an alphabetical list of all the last names of your direct ancestors. It shows how many times each name appears in your list of direct ancestors. And I love how it shows the earliest and most recent birth year of each name in this group.

You can save this report by clicking the Share button at the top-right of FTM and choosing Export to PDF. I recommend you also choose Export to CSV so you can make some charts and graphs from the data.

2. Family Tree Analyzer's Surname Chart

You can open any GEDCOM file with Family Tree Analyzer (FTA) and sort by relationship type to find your direct ancestors. But why not give it a GEDCOM that contains only the right people?

My Family Tree Maker File has a custom field that holds the Ahnentafel number of all my direct ancestors. It also has an Ahnentafel filter so I can display only this group. You can export a GEDCOM file of only the people found in any filter you've created. I created a direct-ancestor-only GEDCOM and opened it with FTA.

With your file open in FTA:

• Click the Surnames tab and check only the Direct Ancestors box.
• Click the Show Surnames button.
• Click the top of the Individuals column to sort each surname from Z to A. (This is a numbers column, so it's really sorting from most to least.)

At the top of the report, you'll see the highest concentration of last names in your family tree. I recommend you save this information as a spreadsheet so you can do more with the data. Click the Export menu and choose Individuals to Excel. This will give you tons of facts. You may want to delete most of the columns.

Dive deeper into each of your ancestors' last names using the Family Tree Analyzer Surnames report.

3. Excel's Charting Features

The spreadsheet I saved from the FTM Surname Report works best for creating charts. It includes the all-important count for each name. The FTA Surnames Report lists each name entry separately. You'd have to do some manipulation or manual counting of each name to get enough data to make a chart.

I chose the Count column in my spreadsheet and sorted the data from Largest Count to Smallest Count. At the bottom of the list I have a lot of names that appear only once or twice among my direct ancestors. I decided to include only the names that appear 5 or more times. I selected the surname and count of each entry with 5 or more in the Count column. For me, that's a total of 29 different last names.

Click Recommended Charts on the Insert tab, and then choose All Charts. This gives you a preview of how each chart will look with your data. I chose an Area chart, and then I fiddled around with the options until I liked the results. I created a pie chart, too.

Examining Your Results

My maiden name is Iamarino, but I'm still a little surprised to see that name come out with a commanding lead. All the other names scoring double digits are surprising to me. Coming in at #2 is Pilla, which happens to be the name of my Grandpa Iamarino's mother. It's also a common name in many of my ancestral towns. But I had no idea how many of them were my direct ancestors. It's also exciting to see that my earliest known Iamarino ancestor was born in 1640. That's a remarkable find for someone with roots in Italy.

As you examine your list of last names, which ones do you think you'd like to take a step further? Why not make a poster of everything you can learn about your top surnames?

I’m lucky to have a book that explains the history of last names in Italy. It's a huge book because Italy has the highest number of last names in Europe at about 350,000. (See "The Interesting History of Italian Last Names.") There may be such a book for your ancestral places. Explore Google Books or an online library catalog for your options. If you're Italian, the book I have is available online for free. Go to https://archive.org/details/OrigineEStoriaDeiCognomiItaliani.

From this cognome or last name book, written by Ettore Rossoni, I learn that the name Iamarino:

• is very rare
• comes primarily from Colle Sannita (my grandfather's hometown)
• means the son of Giovanni (or Gianni) Marino
• is recorded in Colle Sannita as early as 1588

Does your ancestral hometown have a website? What can you learn about the history of the place that's interesting to you?

Years ago I made the surprising discovery that the patron saint of Colle Sannita is Saint George. For some reason, I chose St. George and his April 23rd feast day as a key feature in the novel I wrote as my college thesis. The title of my novel was "St. George." I mean, what are the odds?

I'm also intrigued that the Saracens occupied the town in 728 AD. My maternal grandmother's name was Sarracino. The cognome book tells me this name was once given to Arab or Islamic communities in Italy. Grandma's roots come from a town not far from Colle Sannita. They may be very ancient roots!

Pick out a few details about your ancestral town's origins. Find a nice image of the town or use the map. Put something together in Word or other software that you might turn into a book cover or a framed wall hanging.

The last names in my family tree give me so much joy. I'm always thrilled to discover a new one. Many of them pin me firmly to one place on the map, like Iamarino.

Step back from your usual research and dive into the most important names in your family tree. You may feel more pride in your heritage once you take a closer look.

And speaking of last names:

• Using Color to Understand Your Family's Last Names
• How to Keep Track of All Your Surnames
• When Did Your Ancestors First Use a Last Name?
• Where Did Your Last Name Come From?

Genealogy Obsession Pays an Unexpected Dividend

I'm obsessed with my massive genealogy project. Connecting everyone from my ancestral hometowns is all I want to do! I've improved my process along the way, and today my tree has 50,000 people. (See my more efficient technique below.)

When I write about this project, some people say, "I wish I could do that, but the vital records aren't available." Others say they're now doing the same thing, and all the connections are astonishing.

How many people from one town are somehow related? It's not just an obsession. It's a legacy.

Building an 18th–20th Century Foundation

When I add a person to my tree from the 1880s–1900s, I know they're someone's grandparents. That made me realize my project makes it easier to figure out my connection to distant DNA matches.

If you have a DNA match with a very small family tree, you may not see much more than their grandparents' names. I used to make an effort with these matches but not get very far.

Now I'm in a much better position to figure out my connection to a DNA match's grandparents. This weekend I scrolled through my match list, looking for those I hadn't figured out.

Simple notes make it easy to navigate your DNA match list.

One after another, I found their recent ancestors in my tree, and I saw our connection. I add notes to my matches that appear on the main DNA match list on Ancestry. I can scroll down the list and see who needs more research. This weekend I added new notes, like this:

• his 1G Maddalena Iamarino is my 3C3R, common ancestors are my double 5Gs Giovanni Iamarino and Libera Pilla
• 5C thru shared 4Gs Giuseppantonio Basile and Maria Maddalena Tedesco
• 3C descendant of Antonio Pilla and Angelina Iarossi, common ancestors are my 2Gs Gennaro Pilla and Maria Giuseppa Liguori
• her 1G Gennaro Finella is my 3C3R, common ancestors are my 5Gs Giuseppe d'Emilia and Orsola Mascia

Some matches helped me see which of my distant cousins came to America and who they married.

My all-consuming genealogy project is bearing useful fruit!

Letting the Documents Lead the Way

Here's an overview of my process and how I made it work even better.

I started with my Grandpa Iamarino's hometown of Colle Sannita. Vital records for the town are available online on the Antenati website (see "How to Use the Online Italian Genealogy Archives"). They have:

• Birth, marriage, and death records from 1809–1860 except for 1859 deaths and marriages
• Birth records from 1861–1904 except for 1875
• Birth records from 1910–1915 except for 1911
• Death and marriage records from 1931–1942 except for 1939 deaths

That's a total of 225 types of records and more than 38,000 document images.

My first step after downloading all the files was to:

• view each document and
• rename the jpg file with the name(s) of the subject(s).

An image named 007853875_00496.jpg now contains the names of a baby and its father:

007853875_00496 Carmine Pasquale d'Agostino di Giuseppe.jpg

The father's name ("di" means of in Italian) lets me search for all the children of any man, like Giuseppe d'Agostino. I can use a free program called Everything to search my computer for "d'Agostino di Giuseppe. (See "My Secret Weapon for Finding Relatives".)

This file-renaming process is the basis for building an entire town's family tree.

The file renaming process alone was quite a task! I renamed more than 38,000 image files for this town (and tons more for my other towns). Then I was ready for the BIG project.

I created a spreadsheet with the name of each file. I go line-by-line, viewing each document again, and trying to fit the person or people into my family tree. If they fit, I mark it in my spreadsheet. And if they don't fit, I mark that, too.

I went through several years' worth of documents this way. One problem came up again and again. Some townspeople went by their middle name, making them hard to find each time they had another baby. So I made a change to the process.

If I'm adding an 1865 baby to a couple, I'll mark it on the spreadsheet. But before moving to the next line, I'll search for every other baby belonging to this couple. And if their kids' birth records have a marriage notation, I'll search for their spouses. And I'll add any of their kids. Then I'll return to the next line in my spreadsheet.

This way, couples using unexpected first names won't stump me each time they have another baby. It saves so much time when I complete their families all in one go.

Another problem I overcame was searching for a set of parents only to discover their baby is already in my tree. That was a wasted search. Here's how I fixed that problem. Before I begin another year's documents, I sort my Family Tree Maker index by birth, marriage, or death year. Then I compare the spreadsheet to the index and mark off the people I already have.

Because I complete entire families at one time, each new year I review is already 75% complete.

At this moment I'm up to the 1868 births. I have 64 folders left to go out of the 225 available. When I add 20th-century people to my family tree, it gets easier to connect with more DNA matches.

When I do get to the bottom of the spreadsheet, I'll make one more pass. I'll re-review the people I couldn't fit into my family tree. They tend to fall into 5 categories, and I want to mark them as such:

• "Out-of-towners" who happened to have a baby or die in Grandpa's town.
• "Old people" who died too early for me to know who their children were, or to have their parents in my tree.
• "Too-common names"—This is usually the only child of a couple I can't ID because so many townspeople had the same names.
• "Foundlings" who died without marrying.
• "Possibilities"—These are people I may be able to fit into my tree after I've gone through all the documents.
  

About 95% of the people found in those 38,000+ document images have a connection to me. Towns in this area kept largely to themselves because travel between them was hard. And all my roots are in this area. I'll bet I can reach the same 95% connection rate with documents from my other ancestral hometowns.

Well, my retirement is fully booked. I'm in my happy place every single day. Where are you?

Look Past the Misspellings to Find Your Ancestors

My second grade teacher taught us to read by making us "sound it out." I remember my class sounding out a sentence in one voice. "We went to the park" sounded like: wuh ee, we; wuh en t, went; tuh oo, to; thuh uh, the; puh arr k, park." It sounded weird, but it worked.

That lesson from too many decades ago helped me break down a family tree brick wall last week.

There's an Italian-American woman who wants to visit her ancestral hometowns. She wants to identify her ancestors so she might connect with people in the towns. One branch of her tree was giving me problems. I couldn't be sure where this particular husband and wife came from, and my searches were coming up empty.

Then she shared a family history that her ancestor wrote about this brick wall branch. The document had exact birth dates for the couple. It listed 2 or 3 hometowns for both the husband and wife. That was curious. Then again, it could mean that they were born in one town and their parents were born somewhere else.

I focused on the husband first. I checked a website that lists the names of every town in Italy. Of the 3 hometowns in the family history document, only one existed. I did not find him there.

The other 2 towns did not exist, and the spelling didn't look like proper Italian. I figured this was how the town sounded to the family history author when her ancestor said it. This was a phonetic spelling of the town.

Say It, Don't Spell It

With that in mind, I kept saying the 2 misspelled town names aloud, over and over again. I scanned the list of Italian towns as I repeated the sounds again and again. I didn't find them.

You may not know how to spell the name of your ancestor's town. What to do? Sound it out.

One of the best methods for finding a hometown is to find your ancestor on a ship manifest. I knew I wouldn't find the hometown on his ship manifest because he came to America too early. My ancestors were kind enough not to arrive before 1898, giving me a good look at the names of their hometowns.

The family history document had one more good clue about this couple. They got married in Manhattan in about 1888. I went straight to the search page for the New York City Municipal Archives. I knew I should find the marriage document there. I hoped it would have the bride and groom's parents' names. I did not expect it to list a hometown.

My searches failed. I couldn't find this couple, even when I included all the city's boroughs and expanded the years. Then I searched for a variation of the bride's last name. Experience tells me that an Italian last name ending in i usually ended in o at an earlier time. So I searched for her name ending in an o. This produced a long list of possibilities. I looked at the search results, hoping to find one with both her name and his.

That's when I found them. I never thought a clerk would misspell his very common last name. I swear, the NYC clerks in the late 1800s were illiterate. Who spells Italy Ytali? Someone who hears an Italian pronounce Italy and can't spell, that's who.

See How It Sounds

Now I had my couple's parents' names, even though the clerk mangled each one. (Saverio is a first name. Saviero is not.) Since the groom's mother's name was not common, I did an Ancestry search for her. The one search result made me gasp. (I guess I'm a gasper.) It was someone else's family tree that included my groom's entire family—but not him.

Everything about this unsourced tree made perfect sense to me. The parents matched the NYC marriage record. The family history mentioned the groom's sister and brothers, and here they were. I never accept someone's family tree as fact, but I was able to verify what they were showing.

The one thing that made me certain this was the right family was their hometown. Remember those misspelled town names? The ones I kept saying aloud to hear their sound? This tree had one of the town names. When I said it aloud, I knew for a fact it was the misspelled town from the document.

Keep sounding out that foreign town name as you search for something that matches the sound.

Now it was time to prove this person's tree right or wrong. I searched the properly spelled town for my groom's birth record. I found him in the year before the date from the family history. (Always assume early ancestors may not know their own birthday.) There he was with the same parents I'd found misspelled on his NYC marriage record.

Knowing the right town, I used vital records to take the groom's family back 4 generations!

Most people would see that other family tree and think, "That's not the town great grandpa used to talk about." But I saw the town name and said it aloud as an Italian would. I heard it as a match for the botched spelling in the family history document.

When you pronounce an R in Italian, it sounds like a D. My grandfather used to call my grandmother Mary something that sounded like Moddy. That wasn't a D sound. It was a rolled R. That's why the family history had the town name so wrong.

What Else Makes That Sound?

My second grade teacher's "sound it out" method is still working for me. Have you heard your ancestor's hometown spoken with a foreign accent but never saw it written? You may not know how to spell it at all.

I used this method in my own family tree once before. (See Case Study on "What If There's No There There?") My great grandmother used to talk about where she came from. Her granddaughter passed that along to me as a phonetic spelling: Pisqualamazza. That's not a town. So I searched passenger lists for anyone around her age with her last name. I looked at each search result to see the hometown. When I saw Pescolamazza, I knew that was it. And that's where I found her birth record. Now I can name her 3rd great grandparents.

If you can't locate your ancestral hometown, keep your mind and ears open. Sound it out as you try to mimic the right accent. If you heard your grandfather say it when you were a kid, try to remember exactly how it sounded. Then see what sounds the same.

Without Vital Records, What Can You Do?

Last week I told someone we can't expand her family tree. She knows a lot about the relatives born in the 1890s, but their mother will remain a mystery for one reason. The vital records for her town are not available.

To discover your Italian ancestors, you must know exactly where they were born. Only then can you check which birth, marriage, and death records are online. In this woman's case, we know the town, but almost no records have survived.

Missing Records Create Bricks Walls

I have a similar situation with my Grandma Mary's ancestors. I discovered exactly where they came from. It's a section of the town of Sant'Angelo a Cupolo called Pastene. Pastene is very small, and there are a lot of vital records available. The problem is, there are no records before 1861.

A few years ago I hired a pair of researchers based in Naples, Italy, to take a ride to Pastene. I last visited the town in 2018, but I found the church doors locked. I'm not sure how far I would have gotten even if I had made it inside. I asked the Italian researchers to give it a try.

They found a surprising lack of records. They said the town didn't keep pre-1861 records. Even the church records were scarce. The researchers did find a few scraps that helped my family tree. I was able to take Grandma's paternal line back 4 generations beyond her father. The paternal line of the Sarracino family goes back to the 1740s in my tree. I wish all her branches went that far!

This unexpected find proves exactly where my ancestors lived. I can walk right up and see their houses on my next visit.

About 2 years later—and 2 years after my latest visit to Italy—I found a very interesting map online. This 1825 map of Pastene contains numbered tracts of land and houses. It highlights only 3 specific areas by name:

• the center of town containing the church and the piazza, labelled Pastene
• a cluster of houses labelled Saraceni
• a much smaller group of houses labelled Molli

I don't know why the map only calls out the names Saraceni and Molli. But I felt sure they referred to my Sarracino and Muollo ancestors.

What Other Documents Exist?

Now I have proof that I was right. While revisiting one of my genealogy bookmarks, I found the website with the Pastene map I'd found. I decided to explore the rest of the site to see what might be useful to me. To my surprise, I found a census of Sant'Angelo a Cupolo, including Pastene. I recognized all the last names on the pages.

My Italian historian friend explained this was part of a census of the entire Papal State. On the last page of the 60-page census of Sant'Angelo a Cupolo is the date 23 July 1825. The map has a long inscription with the exact same date. Clearly the map and the census go together.

As I paged through the census, I found quite a few families named Saracino. Each listing is nothing more than a person's name, their father's name, and a house or property number. I'm convinced one entry (Domenico Saracino, son of Giovanni) is my 4th great grandfather. The census tells me he lived in house 209 and/or 222. On the map, 209 and 222 are in the Saraceni cluster of houses.

My ancestors' town is small enough for me to believe I found their home in 1825!

Pastene is a one-road town. The Saraceni section of the map is at a noticeable bend in the road. That bend helped me find it on Google Maps and go in for a closer look.

Now I know exactly where to walk on my next visit there.

I'm at a dead end with Grandma's family due to a lack of records. At least now I may know why. Pastene ignored Napoleon's decree to document their people because it was church property. They started keeping records in 1861 because that year they belonged to the state.

The town's website says, the Church passed ownership of the town to the Kingdom of Italy in September 1860. My Pastene became part of the newly established Province of Benevento in 1861. And then the record keeping began.

Knowing exactly where my ancestors lived, down to the house numbers, is wonderful. I can't trace them back any further, but I can walk among their homes. That's my consolation prize.

I'll continue to explore the 1825 census for more clues. What unexpected historical documents might you find for your town?

How DNA Can Help Find Your Ancestral Hometown

Some people think seeing your DNA pie chart is a waste of time and money. When I saw my first DNA results in 2012, I'll admit, I was very disappointed. But in 10 years, the number of DNA testers and the technology used for analysis have grown.

AncestryDNA updated their DNA Communities recently. I checked the results for my parents, my husband, and me. My first thought was, "Yeah, you got that right." The communities matched exactly what I know based on the paper trail.

It's amazing to see how specific our results are as compared to 10 years ago.

Mom and I have the South Benevento & North Avellino Provinces community. That's exactly how I always describe where our ancestors came from. When I zoom into our communities on AncestryDNA, the locations of my direct ancestors begin to pop up. They form a corridor that stretches from northern Avellino up through southern Benevento. That's the cradle of my genetic matter right there.

The updated AncestryDNA communities are too accurate to ignore.

This is all very nice to see. Only later did the true value of these communities hit me. What if you don't know exactly where your people came from? What if family lore tells you nothing more than a country of origin? I know that's true for so many descendants of immigrants. What if that country's borders have changed over time? How can you get anywhere in your family tree research on such slim information?

One answer is your DNA Communities. AncestryDNA compares your DNA results to those of millions of other test-takers. They form clusters of people based on your matches and your matches' matches. If your DNA matches have identified their ancestral hometowns, or if they match the population there today, it becomes clear. Your people must have come from the same area.

My husband's updated community is also very accurate. His test results have always said nothing more than 100% Japanese. That's awesome in itself, to be 100% of anything.

But his new community has the names of 5 cities, and the first 2 happen to be exactly where his family came from. His dad's side is from Hiroshima, and his mom's side is from Yamaguchi. I can verify this with his ancestors' immigration records. It's amazing that all his history, from 300 years ago to his grandparents, rests in a small slice of Japan.

And my family history is very similar. Civil records put my ancestors in that thin corridor of southern Italy since the late 1600s. Church records show my maiden name existed in my Grandpa's hometown since at least the 1400s.

Let Your Communities Narrow Your Search

Let's say your ancestor emigrated too early for their hometown to appear on a ship manifest. And you can't find any other record for them that states a specific town of birth. Check your DNA Communities! One of them may narrow down your search to a handful of towns.

In many countries, you must know your ancestor's town of birth or you may never find their records. If you can narrow down your search to a short list of towns, you may find your ancestor faster.

If I didn't already know my ancestral hometowns, these results would have pointed the way.

I checked my DNA results on MyHeritage, and they have what they call Genetic Groups. I have far less confidence in these groups. They're not very specific, and they include Ohio because my dad and his cousins were born there. His family had only recently moved there. My Ohio roots are very shallow.

My 2 other Genetic Groups are better than Ohio, but nowhere near as specific as AncestryDNA. They are Italy (Bari) and Italy (Campania). I know my roots are 100% in Campania, but that's an entire region of the country. That wouldn't help me find my ancestors. MyHeritage has a "Low" confidence level that I'm even from Campania!

My 23 and Me results are way off in so many ways. What they tell me would be of no use whatsoever in helping me find my ancestors. But I didn't buy their test kit. I don't know if the results would be more specific if I had.

Have you tested with AncestryDNA? Do you still have some mysteries about your places of origin? Check out your updated communities! You can even see which of your DNA matches belong in the same communities. If you haven't found your town of origin, maybe one of your closest matches has.

Using Obituaries to Find Missing Cousins

I can never find obituaries for my ancestors. No marriage notices, no social events, nothing! Even so, when Newspapers.com had a membership sale, I signed up so I could do research for others.

But first I remembered an event in my life I wanted to look up. Of course the right local newspaper isn't available on Newspapers.com. I was off to a terrific start! Switching gears, I started looking for U.S. obituaries of anyone who came from my Grandpa's town in Italy. I did that by searching for his exact town name.

When names won't work, try an obituary search for your ancestral hometowns.

You know how genealogists joke about their love of cemeteries? Well, this ghoulish game is perfect for us. The idea is to see if you can take a total stranger's obituary and find their place in your family tree.

After a couple of misses I found Mary. She was born in Colle Sannita in 1880 and died in Pennsylvania in 1970. Her obituary includes both her parents' names. It also says her husband Tony (also from Colle Sannita) had died only 3 weeks earlier. Of course I looked up his obituary, too.

Now comes the challenge. Could I fit this couple—both completely unknown to me—into my family tree?

I started with Mary whose maiden name they misspelled in the obituary. I knew it was wrong because I know the names from Grandpa's town like the back of my hand. I searched my collection of the town's vital records and found her birth record. I soon realized she was already in my tree with a complex in-law type of relationship to me. I even had her husband Tony's name in my tree based on 2 things:

• their son's 1914 birth record from the town, and
• a marriage notation in the column of her birth record.

Mary's Italian birth record had Tony's full name written in the column. I'd expected to find his birth record with her name on it. But there was no record for any Tony with Mary's name on it. So he's been a dead end for some time.

To figure out which birth record was his, I searched for the parents mentioned in his 1970 obituary. I had to be careful that I had exactly the right parents in this town where names repeat a LOT. So I searched for all the children born to a couple with the right names, Damiano and Maddalena. Finally I found a child born at a time when the birth records were far more detailed. This one record included the names of Damiano and Maddalena's fathers. That was the clue I needed to be sure I'd truly found the right couple.

I had no idea what became of the 1880s–1890s babies in my family tree.

In the end, Tony became my 5th cousin 3 times removed. He was a dead end until I happened upon his wife's obituary. Now he's a distant cousin who shares my 7th great grandparents. Recently, I've been using the earliest records from Grandpa's town to fit more families together. But when I get to the later documents, many people will become dead ends for me. I can't know who left for another country or who they married.

A targeted search for your ancestor's town may tie together lots of loose ends in your family tree. For me, this is a great tool for discovering who left Italy, who they married, and what kind of life they lived.

Don't have access to a website like Newspapers.com? Prepare yourself to play this game the next time they offer a free weekend. Maybe this Memorial Day!