Collect the Whole Set!

It's been my experience that anyone who becomes involved in genealogy becomes obsessed with genealogy. We each have our areas of focus. Some people spend years trying to go back another generation in one troublesome branch of their tree. Others concentrate on the males only, climbing the tree one generation at a time. Me? I want everything. Everything!

When I started my tree, all I knew about my mother's father's family were his siblings' names (Eve and Noah to his Adam!) and that his mother might have been named Mariangela (she wasn't). But I wanted to know more. First I wrote to the webmaster for his town's website and he was kind enough to send me my grandfather's parents' names, birth dates and marriage date, as well as the birth dates of his siblings. Then I began ordering microfilm through the Family History Center of the vital records from his hometown in Italy.

Armed with my great grandparents' names and birth dates, I was able to locate their birth records and learn their parents' names. During that search I found other names that may have been siblings to my great grandparents.

That's when I knew I had to document all the records (1809–1860) for the entire town to see exactly how they all fit together. In the end, this long process yielded about 12,000 people for my family tree.

Twelve thousand people.

The whole time I worked on that project, which was about five years, all I kept thinking about was how much I wanted to do the same for my other grandfather's town—the town my maiden name comes from. But work got in the way, and I no longer had the freedom to go view microfilm at my local Family History Center during their limited hours. I kept hoping that my other grandfather's town's records would be digitized and made available on familysearch.org, but it didn't happen.

Then I discovered an Italian website that has the vital records for all of my ancestral hometowns! So now it begins again. I am meticulously downloading every single birth, marriage and death document from the town of Colle Sannita, ranging from 1809–1942 with a few gaps. That's a lot of documents.

As I download them, I make note of two key last names: that of my grandfather (Iamarino) and his mother (Pilla). Once I have them all I will begin:

• transcribing the basic facts into a spreadsheet,
• entering confirmed relatives into my Family Tree Maker file,
• piecing together every relative in the town.

Today my tree has more than 19,000 people. (I told you I'm obsessed.) After this project, I should hit 30,000. That's a great start, don't you think?

What Language Barrier?

I've spent countless hours harvesting information from old Italian vital records. It was a little intimidating at first, but once I became comfortable with the most important genealogical words—and completely memorized my numbers—I stopped seeing these documents as being written in a foreign language. To me they are fairly straightforward documents filled with valuable facts.

1804 Italian death record. No big thang.

You can achieve this familiarity with foreign languages, too. You can learn the keywords you need to identify in a foreign document. And once you look at enough documents to get comfortable with the strange, archaic handwriting, you'll be fine.

Here are several free wiki entries from FamilySearch.org to help you get accustomed to genealogical words in the language of your ancestors:

• Czech
• Danish
• Finnish
• French
• German
• Hungarian
• Icelandic
• Italian
• Norwegian
• Polish
• Portuguese
• Russian (this is a downloadable PDF)
• Spanish
• …and don't forget the importance of Latin

Find more languages by clicking the map on this FamilySearch page: https://familysearch.org/wiki/en/Main_Page

There is much more country-specific information available in the wiki, so if you don't see the language you want above, or if you need to understand how vital records work in another part of the world, start at the world map. My list above is very European focused because I did not find language help for African, Middle Eastern or East Asian countries. But there is plenty of critical information available about how records are kept, marriage practices, and more. Take advantage of it!

And speaking of foreign-language documents:

• Tips & Tools to Help You Translate Foreign Genealogy Records
• How to Read Names on Badly Written Vital Records
• You Can Read Foreign-Language Genealogy Records

This Expanded Resource Provided an Elusive Maiden Name

Somewhere along my genealogical travels I found out that my great grandmother's mother—who never came to America—was named Maria Luigia. But I didn't know her last name. I did a little research to see if Luigia was her last name, but it was inconclusive.

Flash forward several years as Ancestry.com's resources continue to grow and grow. Now there is a resource called "U.S., Social Security Applications and Claims Index, 1935-2007" which the ancestry.com website describes as picking up where the Social Security Death Index leaves off. If you're lucky enough to find an ancestor in this collection, you may learn things like:

• Their father's name.
• Their mother's maiden name.
• A woman's married name.
• Their date and place of birth.

I happened to find the record for my great grandmother's brother, Giuseppe (Joseph) Caruso, and it featured one heck of a bad transcription for his place of birth (there are no images available). For his mother's name it said Maria L. Gilardo. Another sibling's record listed their mother's last name as something very not-Italian, like Girandiu. I also discovered the actual death certificate for Joseph Caruso, which Americanized his mother's last name to Gerard.

So, weighing all of these alternatives, I felt the most logical last name was Girardi (like Joe Girardi, the New York Yankees' manager). I did some research to find out if anyone named Girardi had come to America from their town of Pescolamazza, and they had.

This was enough to make me about 85% confident that I had the correct name.

Then I discovered the unbelievably valuable (to any descendant of someone from the Province of Benevento, Italy) Benevento State Archives. There I managed to find the actual 1840 birth record for my great great grandmother, Maria Luigia Girardi.

The moral of this story is to keep checking for new resources that can help you fortify your family tree.

1840 birth record of my 2nd great grandmother, Maria Luigia Girardi.

How Do I Get There From Here?

Have you ever looked at a document in your family tree, let's say a census sheet, and realized you also need a family that lived on the same block? How do you get back to that census collection online (so you can see the surrounding pages) when all you have is the one document you saved?

You can look at the top of a census sheet and gather enough information to help you get to the general area where you want to look. For example, this 1930 census sheet is from Girard City, Trumbull County, Ohio, enumeration district 78-45, sheet 16B.

Top of a census sheet

With those facts I was able to use ancestry.com to easily drill down to the right link, containing 36 images. Because I knew it was sheet 16B, I was able to go right to image 32 and find the exact page I wanted. I can then go page by page to look for a related family that I believe lived nearby.

Searching for a particular census

But it isn't always that clean and easy. The top of the census sheet might be hard to read or the information incomplete.

Other documents are harder to rediscover, such as a ship manifest. This is the top of my grandfather's ship manifest from 1920.

A ship manifest with no ship name

It tells me that he arrived in New York on 29 November 1920, but what was the name of the ship? I can find a particular ship arriving on a particular day on ancestry.com, but if more than one ship arrived on that day, I may have a lot of images to look at.

To allow myself—and anyone who feels they may have a connection to my tree—to rediscover any of my saved documents, I add enough detail to the image in Family Tree Maker to make that search easy.

For a census sheet I indicate the line numbers to look at, the city, county and state, the enumeration district, sheet number, and image number, which can be a real time-saver.

Adding enough details to enable anyone to locate the original

When I decided to add this information, I spent a whole weekend updating every census sheet in my tree. Now I simply add the information the moment I add the new image. It's a practice that will pay off, and absolutely fortifies your family tree.

Case Study on "How Is That Possible?"

Here's a lesson that supports my earlier post, "How Is That Possible?" When my recent post about Italian marriage records led me to discover a mistake I had been making, I spent three solid days correcting my tons of such records in my enormous family tree.

The work was tedious, but after a while I realized that this change I was making—reclassifying certain dates as "marriage license" rather than "marriage"—provided the answer to a question that had come up a number of times.

I had quite a few men (these are small-town Italian men in the 1800s) who had gone through the process of posting their intention to marry a woman and then seemed to marry her, but went through the same process with another woman a month later.

What was going on? Divorce was not a thing, and the first wife had not died. In fact, I had proof that the first woman then went through the process with another man and married him.

Once I learned that they had not gotten married, but had merely obtained consent to marry, it became clear: The first couple intended to marry but something prevented the marriage. Each of them was then paired with someone else whom they did marry.

See When is a Marriage Not a Marriage?

I feel this corrected and more logical information makes my family tree even more solid. So I ran Family Tree Maker's built-in error report and uncovered a page full of birth date discrepancies. Some people had two birth dates from conflicting resources, while others had an original placeholder date that had been superseded by documented facts. So I was able to clean up all of the errors.

I even figured out and fixed the error I highlighted in How Is That Possible? where I had two Michele Leone's with the same birth date. The date belongs to my grandfather's first cousin; the other Michele Leone is a more distant relative born a different year.

Now I'm itching for other discrepancies to fix!

Case Study on "Where Did Grandpa Come From?"

How to Find that Hometown

Let me share with you a case study that supports my earlier post, "Where Did Grandpa Come From?".  It details the steps I followed to find the true hometown(s) of my great grandmother's family—the Saviano family.

For many years I heard my grandmother and her siblings mention two towns: Pastene and Avellino. She and her siblings had heard those town names from their parents and repeated them throughout their lives.

It turns out they were slightly off. The family was from Avellino and Pastene the same way I'm from Rockland County, New York. That doesn't tell you what town I lived in, does it?

Pastene, ending in an E, is difficult to find. Plus, there's more than one Pastena, ending in an A, that could throw you off the trail. But I also knew the family was from the Benevento province, which borders the Avellino province. (A province in Italy is similar to a county in America.) In that area, there is a comune (municipality) named Sant'Angelo a Cupolo that contains a frazione (hamlet) called Pastene.

To put it more simply, Pastene is a tiny section of the town of Sant'Angelo a Cupolo. For proof that the Saviano family was from this place, I found their 1898 ship manifest when the whole family came to the U.S. They listed their hometown as "S. Angelo Cupolo".

Once I found the town on a map, this was perfectly legible to me.

I had never heard of that town before I found this document. At a later date, I found the New York City marriage certificate for my great grandmother's sister Filomena, and it listed Pastene, Italy as her birthplace.

But why did my relatives also say the family was from Avellino? Avellino is both a city and a province a few miles away from Pastene. My answer came from the World War II draft registration card for my great grandmother's brother Semplicio. It very clearly (albeit misspelled) lists his place of birth as Tufo in the province of Avellino, Italy.

Aha! Once I found that, I went to the Family History Center near where I lived at the time. Miraculously, someone had ordered a roll of microfilm from Tufo, so it was sitting there in the drawer!

On the microfilm I found the 1877 birth record for Semplicio Saviano. The big surprise was the 1875 birth record for an older brother no one in my family had ever known about. He died as a child. In fact, he had the same first name as another brother who was born later in Pastene: Raffaele.

So, although I haven't a clue why, this Saviano family moved from Tufo, Avellino, Italy, to Pastene, Benevento, Italy. A few miles was very far in those days, and my great great grandfather was not moving for a job.

And if you're thinking I may be looking at the wrong family in Tufo, I'm not. The mother in this family had the uncommon name of Colomba Consolazio, and that is seen very clearly on the Tufo birth records.

All of this is another example of the importance of locating as many documents as possible for your entire family.

Where Did I Find This?

A Lack of Sources Can Ruin Your Tree

To give credibility to your genealogy facts and make your family tree stronger, you need good annotation.

Describe the source of each bit of information well enough that anyone can retrace your steps and find the same information. That includes:

• Name
• Birth date
• Birth place
• Marriage date
• Death date
• Death place
• and more.

For example, if you haven't found a ship manifest documenting a person’s immigration to America, but the 1920 census states that they arrived in 1905, be sure to cite the 1920 census as the source of that tidbit.

It's clear that the 1920 census is not as reliable as an actual ship manifest when it comes to immigration, but at least we know where that data point came from.

Written proof is more trustworthy than a family story passed down to you.

Myth destroyed. Not our uncle after all!

This seems like a good place to tell my passed-down family story that turned out to be 100% false. My in-laws fully believed they were descended from the brother of the captain of the Titanic.

I met Grandmother Lillian who told the story of being Captain Smith’s brother’s daughter. She was ashamed of the fact that her uncle lost so many lives at sea. It clearly pained her.

The problem is Captain Edward Smith had no brothers. He had a half-sister, but there were no other Smith boys in his family. How could Grandmother Lillian be so wrong?

I decided to see if Grandmother Lillian’s father was Captain Smith’s first cousin rather than his brother. Unfortunately, this was another dead end. No Smith boys.

This story illustrates how much you need to show exactly where your facts came from. Captain Smith’s would-be niece is no longer alive, so we can’t ask her why she believed he was her uncle. Without proof, we’ve got nothing.

Think about this: Would you want to grab someone else’s family tree and attach it to your own when a goof like this calls their entire tree into question?

Do your due diligence. Cite your sources. Here's a great reference on citing sources from FamilySearch.org.