Answers Lead to More Questions About My First Immigrant Ancestor

Growing up, the family members I knew and saw on holidays were almost entirely the descendants of one man: Antonio Luigi Saviano.

Most of us didn't know his name. He was the father of our grandparent or great grandparent.

But four years ago my mother pulled out a photo of Antonio lying in his coffin. He died in the Bronx, New York, several years before she was born.

Was my first immigrant ancestor a shrewd businessman?

I'd been researching my family tree for about 10 years at that point. The branch of the family where I'd made the least progress was Antonio's branch—the very branch I'd known my whole life.

This year I went on a quest to find out where Antonio and his wife Colomba Consolazio came from. Here's what I knew already:

• According to his World War II draft registration card, their son Semplicio was born in Tufo, Avellino, Italy.
• I had looked at microfilm of vital records from Tufo. I found Semplicio's birth and the earlier birth of a son—Raffaele Vitantonio Saviano. I knew this baby did not survive because it was a younger Raffaele who came to America in later years.
• Antonio and Colomba moved less than 10 miles from Tufo, Avellino, to Pastene. Pastene is a small section of Sant'Angelo a Cupolo in the neighboring province of Benevento. They had 3 children there: my great grandmother Maria Rosa, Raffaele, and Filomena.
• It was in Pastene that Maria Rosa met and married my great grandfather, Giovanni Sarracino. They had their first child there, but he did not survive.
• Antonio began travelling to America in 1890, three years after the birth of his youngest child. He was my first ancestor in any branch to do so.
• He was 47 years old at the time. That's a bit on the old side for the first of his three cross-Atlantic trips.
• He brought his son Semplicio to America and left him there. Then in May of 1898, Antonio returned to the Bronx with his wife and his children Raffaele and Filomena.
• The family left for America one month after the marriage of my great grandparents. That means my great grandmother did not have her family there to support her when she gave birth to her son Carmine in December 1898. And she didn't have their support when Carmine died a short time after.

Let's stop there for a moment. Something strikes me about my great grandparents and their ill-fated baby boy, Carmine.

Maybe my great grandparents never planned to come to America. Baby Carmine was born just shy of eight months after their wedding. There was nothing stopping them from coming to America with the rest of the family.

Maybe it was only the shock of Carmine's death, and his possibly premature birth, that drove the couple to leave their home.

Maybe if Carmine had lived, I would be an Italian national.

That aside, let's look at what I learned about my great grandparents Antonio Saviano and Colomba Consolazio this year.

Working backwards from the Tufo births of their children Semplicio and the first Raffaele, I discovered that Colomba had two brothers living near her in Tufo. I found the marriage record for one brother.

His place of birth, and the town where his parents still lived, was not Tufo. It was the neighboring town of Santa Paolina.

My next step was to view microfilm of the vital records from Santa Paolina. Sure enough, I discovered that Antonio and Colomba were married there. They had a baby girl before Raffaele and Semplicio named Maria Grazia. She died after four days.

Colomba was born in Santa Paolina, but her real name was Vittoria Colomba. I learned her parents' names and her grandparents' names.

And on their marriage documents I learned the origin of my great great grandfather, Antonio Saviano. He was not born in Santa Paolina where he married and began his family.

He was not born in Tufo where he moved and had more children.

He was born in Pastene! The very town to which he returned, had more children, and from which he left for America.

Antonio Saviano, my first ancestor to come to America, travelled in lots of circles. He went from Pastene to Santa Paolina to Tufo to Pastene, completing a very small circle. He went to America and back to Pastene three times. Finally, he brought his family to America and settled down…age of 55!

Antonio lived to be 82 years old. He outlived his wife Colomba by five years, but he died surrounded by this four surviving chlidren.

I learned that he was:

• a shoemaker (calzolaio) in his youth
• a dealer or merchant (commerciante) shortly before his first documented trip to America
• a day laborer two years after settling in America, and
• had his "own income" by the time of the 1910 census.

Was Antonio an independent businessman? Are his accomplishments the reason his son Semplicio and my great grandfather Giovanni Sarracino became the owners of apartment buildings and agents for a local brewery?

Was Antonio a wheeler and dealer? What was the source of his "own income"? It may be nothing, but his cause of death was a toxic infection of the kidneys and the heart's inner lining. Were these infections related to the Bronx's underground beer cellars of the time, owned by the breweries with which his son and son-in-law did business?

I've often wondered if my family owned those particular apartment buildings because of their access to the beer cellars. This would make them good partners for the breweries.

The discovery of Antonio Saviano's origin and travels shed a lot of light on him. But now I find I have a ton more questions.

I think it's time for some Bronx brewery history lessons!

And speaking of what documents can tell us:

• Why You Should Track Down the Extra Cousin
• My 5th Great Grandfather: A Random Act of Kindness?
• Married Thanks To Royal Decree

Family Mystery Solved! Two Lost Boys Found

Months ago I wrote about a family story that's not at all uncommon among immigrant families. (See Searching for the Missing Link in Your Family Tree.)

My great aunt Stella and her husband Attilio had the same last name—Sarracino. Stella told me they had permission to marry because they were absolutely not related.

That wasn't quite true. They weren't closely related, so it was OK for them to marry. But they were indeed cousins.

Attilio Sarracino's 1907 U.S. birth was recorded in Italy in 1909.

I discovered this when I traced Attilio's parents to the same little hamlet in Italy where my great aunt's parents were born. It's the frazione of Pastene in the comune of Sant'Angelo a Cupolo.

I'd already collected the Pastene birth records for Stella Sarracino's parents—my great grandparents. (See How to Use the Online Italian Genealogy Archives.) Then I found the Pastene birth records for Attilio's parents, Carmine and Maria Rosa dell'Aquila.

Carmine and Maria Rosa's story is interesting:

• Carmine came to New York City in 1891 at the age of 25.
• He returned to Pastene and married Maria Rosa in 1898.
• They had a son Equilino in 1899. He was born while Carmine was spending another year in New York City.
• He returned to Pastene and had a son Carlo in 1902, and a daughter Stellina in 1903.
• In 1904, baby Carlo had died, but the rest of the family came to New York City in April.
• In 1905 their son Enrico was born in the Bronx.
• In 1907 their son Attilio was born in the Bronx.
• Between Attilio's June 1907 birth and October 1909, Carmine and Maria Rosa returned to Pastene.

Let me stop right there. In my extended family, it's rare to see a family come to America for a while, and then return to Italy.

When my genealogy research showed me that Carmine and Maria Rosa continued having children in Italy after Enrico and Attilio were born in the Bronx, I thought they had abandoned their boys. I thought they must have left them with relatives.

But why?

They continued:

• In October 1909, daughter Iolanda was born in Pastene.
• In 1911 Carmine made another trip to New York City.
• In June 1911 his daughter Antonia was born in Pastene while Carmine was in New York City.
• In 1916 Carmine was back in Pastene and his son Guido was born.

Attilio's passport photo.

I know that Enrico, born in the Bronx, died in the Bronx at age 80. His brother Attilio, born in the Bronx, died there, tragically, at age 33.

Were they ever reunited with their parents? Or did they only see their father on his occasional trips to America?

The answer was hiding in my downloaded collection of Pastene vital records.

I've been recording the facts from thousands of birth, marriage, and death records in a spreadsheet for easy searching and eventual sharing. (See How to Create Your Ancestral Hometown Database.)

While going through the 1909 birth records for Pastene, I found two records detailing the U.S. births of Enrico in 1905 and Attilio in 1907. These late entries for their births may have been required by the comune of Sant'Angelo to have a record of their inhabitants.

These late birth records are so detailed, they include the address of the house where the boys were born—458 East 150th Street. The records include the names and Bronx addresses of the witnesses to the births.

I know from Attilio's passport records that he returned to New York City in 1924. (See Your Family Tree Needs Your Ancestor's Passport Application.) I also know Enrico was in the Bronx in 1924. He testified that he recognized his brother's passport photo. He hadn't seen his brother since they were together in Italy two years earlier.

Finally this family mystery makes sense. Young Enrico and Attilio were not left behind. They did return to Italy with their parents and siblings. They each lived in Pastene until, like most young men at the time, they were old enough to make their own way in America.

I'm still piecing together facts from my downloaded vital records to discover the exact relationship between my great aunt Stella Sarracino and her dashing young husband, Attilio.

How to Increase the Value of Your Family Tree Images

As a long-time computer professional, I'm embarrassed that I didn't learn this till today.

You can add custom details and descriptions to any JPG file on your computer. Your customizations will stay with the file when you copy, move or share it.

The biggest benefit to customizing your image files' details may be this:

You can search for your customized description in a huge folder of images and quickly find the file you need.

You can rename your images as needed.

I have thousands of downloaded vital records from the Italian Antenati website. As I go through them, I like to rename some of the files to include the name of the subject. If it's a close ancestor, I might include "my 4GA" (my fourth Great Aunt) in the file name. But now I can get more specific—especially with those direct ancestors.

This works on Windows or Macintosh. In Windows 10, right-click the image and choose Properties. Then click the Details tab. Many of the fields are editable. I never thought to check that before!

The Description and Origin sections are editable.

For Windows 7 instructions, see this short tutorial. For Mac users, see these instructions.

Before diving into this project, I'm going to decide on a set of standards. What might I want to search for? Which details are most important? My first thoughts are:

• Person's name, year, and type of record (for example, Libera Pilla 1882 birth record)
• The person's relationship to me (for example, my great grandmother, or my paternal grandfather's mother)
• Which town the record comes from and the type of record (for example, Colle Sannita; birth record)
• The URL of the original image and the name of the source

I'd recommend giving lots of thought to your own set of standards. Then start with the images that are most important to you. I'll start with wedding photos and my closest relatives' vital records.

Searching is easy with customized descriptions.

Ironically, this tip is the solution to the problem I was having when I stumbled upon it. I wanted to find my great grandmother's birth record to send to my cousin. I couldn't remember her year of birth, and I didn't want to wait for Family Tree Maker to open. So I tried looking in several folders without success. I finally opened my tree on Ancestry.com and found the correct year. Then I happened to click on the image's properties and discover I could edit them!

Now a quick search for my great grandmother's name and "birth record" brings up the right image.

How will image details make your family tree research a bit easier?

Bonus: Select multiple images and edit their details at once.

You may also enjoy:

• O Brother Where Art Thou?
• How To Read a Free-form Italian Death Record
• What To Do When You Have No Birth or Death Record

Are You Overlooking Your Family Tree Discoveries?

What if the you from several years ago could talk genealogy with the you of today? Do you think the two of you could help each other out?

You're probably thinking that you've got so much more experience in family history now. You could teach so much to the past you. You could set her on the right course. You could tell her everywhere she's making genealogical mistakes.

But guess what? Past you has a lot to offer today's you, too. Past you holds some keys to your family tree that today's you has completely forgotten.

Today, past me and present me had a surprising collaboration. Here's what happened.

Digitizing death and marriage records is one thing. But notes are just as important.

When I went to Italy in 2005, I brought a notebook. It contained useful Italian phrases and facts I'd gathered about my closest ancestors.

My family tree was very small at that time, and I didn't have many documented facts. My plan was to use the few facts I had to explain who I was to the cousins I was about to meet.

In the same notebook, I jotted down details from three cemeteries I visited in my ancestral hometowns. My husband took photos of graves, and I wrote the facts in my notebook. When I was able to visit with cousins, I wrote down a few details they were able to share.

How I wish I'd taken better notes! But I was afraid of looking rude by paying more attention to my notebook than to my cousins.

Take Time to Collaborate With Yourself

This morning I read that old travel notebook and compared it to my family tree and the cemetery photos.

Past me, who'd scribbled all those notes, wound up providing present me with clues I didn't know I had! For example, my cousin Gennaro said his sister Maria had moved to New York City with her husband and four sons. I'd written down phone numbers for two of the sons, but I never called them.

Using the names of Maria and her sons, I found documentation for them on Ancestry.com. Maria and at least two of her sons became U.S. citizens. I knew I had the right people because they all had the same address between 1967 and 1971.

I learned that Maria and two of her sons died not long ago. And I had never contacted them because past me forgot to tell present me that their phone numbers were in that notebook. I missed my chance.

My Italian cheatsheet alongside cemetery notes.

This is a strong argument for digitizing everything you gather in your family tree research. Scan your official documents. Enter their facts into your family tree.

This is true for notebooks, loose notes, and recorded conversations, too. Preserve the information and make it searchable by typing it into your word processing software.

I don't want to throw out my 2005 travel notebook, even though my dog chewed it as a puppy. But it would be a terrible mistake to leave it in paper form only.

What Should You Re-read Today?

Next, past me is going to share old immigration notes with present me. When I took those notes, I didn't know if the people were related to me or not. I only knew that they had the right last names, so I wrote their facts down in a notebook.

We'll see if present me can make a breakthrough with that old, forgotten information.

To paraphase a TV ad campaign, "What's in your closet"?

You may also enjoy:

• How to Make Your Family Tree Fireproof!
• It's Time to Revisit & Improve Your Earliest Family Tree Research
• Step-by-Step Discovery of My 5th Great Grandparents

Divide and Conquer Your Family Tree Research Tasks

Is your family tree research stuck? Are you so overwhelmed by certain tasks that you're avoiding them? Is a brick wall stopping all other progress?

You can overcome these genealogy blues with a simple plan.

Divide and Conquer

These brief spurts of activity will be as healthy for your family tree as a brief sprint is for your heart.

• Work on those tedious tasks in simpler chunks.
• Avoid your brick wall and forge ahead with another branch of your family tree.
• Narrow your focus and score some big gains.

This method will keep you productive and happy with your genealogy hobby. And you'll be learning along the way.

"Fix all my source citations" is an overwhelming roadblock. "Fix my 1930 census source citations" is something you can tackle!

Make Cleanup Projects Less Intimidating

Are you avoiding adding source citations to your family tree? Is the size of the project scaring you away? Break the big task into smaller pieces. Set aside chunks of time to devote to the task, and keep track of your progress.

Don't let the overall task overwhelm you. Think of it as "today I'll start adding citations to all of my 1940 census tasks". Get as far as you can in the time you've decided to spend.

Hopefully you'll either be eager to move on to the 1930 census, or eager to come back tomorrow and finish up 1940.

Piece by piece you will tackle the task.

One Bad Branch Shouldn't Spoil the Tree

Are you getting nowhere with one pesky branch of your tree? Leave it alone for a while.

Focus on another branch and document the daylights out of it! Find every piece of supporting evidence you possibly can. You'll have an excellent example of how well you can do this. Your branch will be impeccable.

Plus, working on perfecting an easier branch will teach you about certain resources and documents. It may inspire you to take a different approach to your brick wall branch.

Now go get 'em!

Need some more inspiration?

• Let a Few Quick Wins Reinvigorate Your Genealogy Research
• Organize Your Genealogy Research By Choosing Your Style
• How the Scientific Method Can Help You With Your Family Tree
• How to Build a Professional-Quality Family Tree

Why I Recorded More Than 30,000 Documents

In 2007 I started ordering Italian vital records on microfilm from FamilySearch.org. The films were from the hometown of one of my grandfathers.

My first goal was to find birth records for my great grandparents to find out their parents' names. But so many people in the town had similar names it was comical. I wasn't sure I was looking at the right family.

There was only one solution. Record every single fact and plug them into my family tree software.

I did this for five years. Once or twice a week I spent a handful of hours with a computer open on my lap beneath the microfilm viewer. I developed my own shorthand: b, d, wed, bap, and Italian words like di and fu. I became incredibly fast at typing names like Mariantonia, Angelamaria, Francesco Saverio, Giuseppe, Giovanni.

More than 90% of the town is related to me!

Oh, did I mention I'm Italian?

This work was invaluable. I shared it online with anyone who may have ancestors from my grandfather's town of Basélice. I documented about 16,000 people, and about 15,000 of them are relatives by blood or marriage. Yeah.

Today Italian descendants are gleefully finding their ancestor's documents on FamilySearch.org or the Antenati website. Maybe you've been lucky and found your grandfather's birth record. Maybe you found your great grandparents' marriage record. But are you overlooking entire generations?

This year I used a simple app to download every document available from my ancestral hometowns. Now the organized images are on my computer (and a backup drive) awaiting my analysis.

I'm focusing on my mother's mother's branch first. Despite having grown up with cousins from this branch, I have the least information about them. I cannot get beyond my third great grandparents.

My first visit to Pastene, Sant'Angelo a Cupolo, Italy.

So here's the dilemma. The hometown of the families in this branch is Sant'Angelo a Cupolo, and specifically the smaller frazione within that town called Pastene. Only a limited amount of documents is available to me from the town. And one set of my great great grandparents was born in another town whose documents are not online.

The solution is going to be extensive, possibly exhaustive documentation of each birth, marriage and death record.

I've begun by finding every child born to my great great grandparents. I'm also documenting the children of my great great grandfather's brother.

The holy grail is that one magical document. The one that includes a baby's grandfather's name. The one that has a baby's maternal uncle as a witness. The one that names the father of a baby's grandmother who is reporting the birth.

I've got to look at each marriage record, too. There may be a marriage between a man and woman whose names I don't recognize. But maybe one is the grandchild of my ancestor. And maybe my ancestor's death record will be included.

Hopefully you enjoy the hunt as much as I do. Perusal of all available documents is the bare minimum.

Complete documentation…priceless.

You may also enjoy:

• Picturing America Through Your Ancestors Eyes
• Free Resource Provides Graphic Genealogy Research Basics
• Where Have You Been All My Life?

Where to Find Free Historical City Directories and Newspapers

Have you ever subscribed to an online newspaper archive website? I've tried them twice, but I never found anything about my relatives.

Those sites may be worth the subscription fee if your ancestors were important businessmen or socialites. Or if they were involved in a crime or a train wreck. But I never found my folks.

This directory shows me when Antonio's
son James starting working.

I've had better luck with a free newspaper website (see Fulton History below). There I found some real estate transactions by my great grandfather and his brother-in-law. The information was sparse, but it helped me piece together some of his business dealings.

City directories, on the other hand, have been a great help in locating an ancestor in between census years. (See How To Squeeze Everything Out of the Census.) This can help you when you discover your ancestor is not living at the same address in 1930 as he was in 1920. The city directories between 1920 and 1930 can show you where he moved.

This directory tells me exactly when Antonio died!

Here are a few free websites (also see Free Genealogy Resources) where you can search for your ancestors. If you find them, you can add more data points to their timeline, giving you a more complete view of their lives.

Some of these free sites may have an unfriendly interface or have no search function. You get what you pay for.

Tip: When opening a city directory, look at the table of contents so you have a rough idea of which pages to view.

Free Newspaper Websites

• Fulton History. What began as "Old Fulton NY Post Cards" now contains over 39,328,000 historical newspaper pages from the United States and Canada. The site includes a good search feature and highlights your search terms on the resulting pages. This is where I found my great grandfather's business transactions.
• Internet Archive. Type newspaper in the search box, then narrow down your results in the left column. There is so much available on this website that I may devote an entire article to it soon.
• Library of Congress: Chronicling America. This website contains digitized newspapers from 1789 through 1924 in 13 languages. That's 2,234 newspapers. The search functionality is very helpful.

Free City Directory Websites

• Don's List of Directories, Almanacs, Businesses, Registers, Street Guides. Several states are available.
• Internet Archive. Type city directory in the search box, then narrow down your results in the left column.
• Do you need city directories for a specific state? Do an online search for that state's directories. Some state libraries make their state's directories available online.

This real estate directory tells me my great grandfather
owned one building and lived in another.

Subscribers to Ancestry.com have access to their city directories collection. I've used these to locate certain ancestors in between census years. A directory helped me figure out where my grandfather went to live and work upon entering the United States. Directories can show you when a grown son left his parents' household and moved nearby, possibly helping to estimate his marriage date.

A city directory may provide a missing piece to the puzzle for you.

The Italian Genealogy Goldmine: "Wedding Packets"

I've shown you how to dissect Italian birth records, Italian death records (twice, in fact), and Italian marriage records before.

But I promised to explain the treasure trove I call Italian "wedding packets". (Maybe these exist for other countries, too!)

If you're researching your Italian ancestors, and you're lucky enough to find your ancestral hometown's records in the Italian genealogy archives (Antenati), then you have access to the wedding packets.

On the Antenati site, you'll find different kinds of "matrimoni" documents for each year.

• First comes "Matrimoni, pubblicazioni" which includes the two times a couple had to publicly post their intention to marry. The first record may not tell you anything more than the names of the groom and bride and both sets of parents.
  

  

  First notification of intention to marry.

  The second record provides ages, occupations, places of birth and/or residence. If the bride or groom is widowed, you may also get the name of the deceased spouse.
  

  

  Second notification of intention to marry.

• Second is "Matrimoni" which adds the date on which they were approved for marriage (think of it as a marriage license date), and the date they were married in church. Sometimes you'll also find the names of the priest and witnesses.
• Third comes "Matrimoni, processetti"—my favorite! This wedding packet can contain many pages. It starts with a birth record for the bride and groom. If either is a widow, you get the deceased spouse's death record. Then there is a death record for any of their parents who have died. This, of course, can tell you the names of the bride or groom's grandparents. If the father of the bride or groom has died, and their grandfather is not alive to give his permission for the marriage, then you'll also see the grandfather's death record.
  

  

  Groom's first wife's death record.

Groom's father's death record—giving me the names of my 4th great grandparents.

The best-case scenario is an older couple, both widowed, and both with no living parents or grandparents. I've had wedding packets provide me with one or both spouse's great grandparents' names!

We're lucky because in the old days, no one stayed single. If their spouse died, they absolutely remarried—sometimes again and again. Life was too hard not to have a partner.

How to Run Your Genealogy Research Like Clockwork

Years ago I thought if I broke up my housework into smaller tasks, I'd be more likely to get it all done. Wash the laundry on Monday, clean the bathrooms on Tuesday, change the sheets on Wednesday—like that.

I found out a strict schedule doesn't work if you don't want to do the tasks!

But what if this schedule consisted of things you basically love to do—like all things genealogical?

Imagine you have two hours you can carve out of most days—say one hour early in the morning and one hour right after dinner.

If you apply yourself to specific tasks, think of the steady growth your strong and accurate family tree will see!

My challenge to you (and to myself) is to develop a Family Tree Calendar and use it to push yourself toward a better and better body of research.

Here are some suggested tasks to work in one-hour sprints:

• Make an inventory of what you've collected. I keep a spreadsheet with columns for things like birth, death and marriage records, census forms, draft cards, etc. And I have one person on each line. This one document shows me what I have and what I need.
• Organize your documents into folders. Hopefully you've got some sort of a system going, but think about how you can improve it in a way that makes it crystal clear what is where.
• Annotate the documents you store in your family tree software. Your software probably lets you add notes to a file you've attached to an ancestor. Think about the family historian who will come after you. Annotate the documents in a way that would let anyone else find them the same way you did.
• Find the missing documents for one nuclear family. Use your inventory of documents you've collected, focus on one family, and try to locate the missing documents. Tie up those loose ends.
• Use a tool to analyze the flaws in your tree. Family Tree Analyzer is one such tool that will show you errors you didn't realize were there. How many can you resolve in one hour?
• Fill in the missing GEDCOM facts. When you do locate a census sheet for a family, do you add the residence, date, and occupation facts for each member of the household?

Even if there are some tasks you truly don't enjoy (like beefing up your source citations), going at it for one uninterrupted hour can't hurt you.

Make a plan and use it to keep yourself on course. I've been known to wander off on many a tangent, documenting a very distant family simply because the information was there for the taking.

That's fine—but save the tangents for the weekend or other free time.

Try this: Spend one month treating your research like a paid job, and see how far you can go!

Let me know how you do. And tell me which tasks you added to your list!

And if you're a big fan of organization, read my Work in Batches to Strengthen Your Family Tree.

How to Avoid Going Down the Wrong Path

It's a good thing the Family Tree Maker^®/Ancestry.com^® TreeSync^® feature isn't working right now because that saved me from committing a genealogical sin.

I nearly posted bad information about someone. Publicly.

This wake-up call reminds me that it is so easy to be led astray when researching a family you know nothing about. It all started when a woman contacted me on ancestry.com about her great grandfather Rudolph, who is in my tree.

He is in my tree with very few facts because he was the father of a woman who married a cousin of mine. Since the cousin himself is so distant to me, I did not go into great detail about his wife's ancestors—just the names of her parents.

But after hearing from Rudolph's descendant and collaborating with her to find his marriage record, I spent a little time searching for more facts about him.

Many cultures embrace the practice of naming children after their grandparents, which is a potential pitfall for genealogists. I fell right into that trap yesterday, following the wrong Rudolph, son of the wrong August.

I found what seemed like Rudolph's family, but missing Rudolph, only to be told that while the husband and wife's names matched, the birthplace, immigration year, and occupation did not match what his descendant knew to be true and had thoroughly documented.

Multiple, agreeing sources let you know you've got things right.

There's a reason why everyone tells you start your family tree with yourself and work your way up. Once you get beyond the relatives you knew personally—such as your grandparents and their siblings—nothing is certain until you have an abundance of corroborating facts.

For example, if you're investigating a distant branch, such as the in-laws of your great great uncle, you probably won't have any first-hand knowledge of that family. To help ensure you're putting the right facts in your tree you'll need a few things:

• Your great great uncle's marriage record can give you his wife's name (let's call her June for this example), birth year, and her parents' names.
  
• Now you can look for June in census records, making sure to match the names you know and June's birth year.
  
• Once you find them you can search for the same family, possibly at the same address, in different census years, making sure the facts line up. There should not be too much discrepancy among the censuses when it comes to recorded immigration years, age, place of birth, and occupation. Since you know when June was married, you would not expect to find her with her family instead of her husband after that time.
  
• Before going too far with June's family, search for any military records for the man you've identified as her father. Check to see if the censuses closest to the military record match for residence, wife's name or number of children.

As I browse through my tree of 19,295 people, I can find a number of dubious facts that I know need further investigation. But you know what it's like. So many relatives, so little time.

Be careful with your genealogy facts out there.

Family Tree Maker is a registered trademark of The Software MacKiev Company. Ancestry.com and TreeSync are registered trademarks of Ancestry.com Operations, Inc.

When Is a Marriage Not a Marriage?

In January I wrote about how to handle the facts in your family tree that don't add up in How Is That Possible? I like to use Family Tree Maker's bookmark feature to call attention to the people in my tree who have a problem with their facts.

Bookmarks remind me to check the facts.

Today I took a look at Francesco Cece who was born in 1805 in my grandfather's town of Basélice, Benevento, Campania, Italy. His facts included three marriages, which was not uncommon in the 1800s.

If your spouse died back then, you were going to remarry. If you had children, they needed a new mother or father, and if you were old, you needed a younger spouse to take care of you.

Just look at my great great grandfather's case.

Francesco's three marriages were pretty close together, so I looked to see when wives number one and two died.

But wife number two was alive when he married wife number three, so something was wrong.

I decided to visit the online Benevento Archives to take a closer look at the marriage of Francesco Cece and Mariarosa Marucci.

I have not seen this a lot in my research, but Francesco and Mariarosa went through the process of publicly posting their intention to marry on 13 March 1831 and 31 March 1831.

They were granted permission to marry on 6 April 1831, but as you can see on their marriage license, the right column where their church wedding would be recorded was crossed out.

A handwritten note in that section of the page says that despite having a contract with one another, the couple were not united in marriage.

When I revisited this marriage record did I realize they never married?

Mariarosa entered into another marriage contract nine months later and married Saverio Colucci on 1 March 1832.

Francesco entered into a marriage contract five years later at age 31 with an 18-year-old girl from another town, Donata Maria Fantetta. Each of them had lost their parents, so this could have been a marriage of necessity for young Donata Maria.

Sadly, this contract also did not end up in marriage for Francesco Cece.

I checked the marriage records all the way through the year 1860 and never again saw Francesco's name.

His first and only wife, Margarita Capuano, died at the age of 25, just six years after they married. They had no children.

I've removed my bookmark from Francesco, but I don't think I'll soon forget him.

Married Thanks to a Royal Decree

While recording facts from my grandfather's Italian hometown's vital records, I noticed more than one extremely young person getting married. Often a young girl who was orphaned would be married with her grandfather's permission as a matter of survival. Her new husband could take care of her.

While revisiting some of these documents I found some young people who needed a royal decree before they could marry in 1818.

One was Michele Franco, a 16-year-old farmer who was about to marry a 19-year-old seamstress. They lived in different towns, so perhaps this was not an arranged marriage, but a marriage for love.

It's hard to imagine why else a 16-year-old boy from another town would be a suitable choice for this 19-year-old seamstress. Because of his age, Michele received a royal decree on 18 August 1818 granting him permission to marry.

Another, somewhat astonishing case is 12-year-old Mariantonia Marucci. She was not an orphan and had her parents' consent to marry 29-year-old Michelarcangelo Pettorossi, a bricklayer.

The couple had 10 children together starting when Mariantonia was the ripe old age of 15. Mariantonia received a royal decree on 24 February 1818 granting her permission to marry despite her lack of age.

I have no details about Mariantonia's parents, but maybe they were so impoverished that this was the only way they could provide a decent life for Mariantonia.

Mariantonia Marucci, age 12…authorized to marry despite her age, by royal decree.

Then there was 14-year-old Angelamaria Silvestro, who became an orphan at the age of 10.

Her grandfather was quite old when he gave her his consent to marry 29-year-old Serafino Verdura, a farmer. Angelamaria did not appear to need a royal decree which makes me wonder when and why such a court order was required.

You can understand the 12-year-old girl needing special permission, but why did the 16-year-old boy need it when the 14-year-old orphan girl did not?

Some research about the age of consent to marry in the 19th century seemed to indicate that it was perfectly fine for a 12-year-old girl to marry. It is possible that this particular area, or perhaps all of what was then the Kingdom of Two Sicilies, had their own age of consent rules.

In the early 1800s in the small Italian towns I've research, the average age at first marriage was about 25, so parents were not marrying off their children unless they really had to.

It's interesting to compare these two very young girls to modern-day Italians who must be 18 to marry—or 16 with court consent.

When You Can't Agree to Disagree

When working on your family tree, there will be times when you have conflicting information about someone. I had two documented birth dates for my grandfather.

When you know they can't both be true, which one do you believe?

I follow a couple of rules here. Rule #1: The earliest recorded date is probably correct. When I'm dealing with very old documents from the old country (in my case, Italy), I know that my rural ancestors had lives nothing like our own, and it was entirely possible to lose track of your own age. Imagine that!

So if I'm comparing birth records from the 1800s for several siblings, and the parents' ages never match up, I put more faith in whichever number was recorded the earliest.

You're more likely to know your birth year when you're 20, and your widow is less likely to remember it when you die at a ripe old age.

Here's an example: An 1840 birth record shows the mother is 30 in 1840, so you write down that she was born in 1810. An 1842 birth record says the same woman is 35 years old, meaning she was born in 1807. Then the same woman's 1880 death record states that she was 65, which would mean she was born in 1815. That's when the earliest record is most likely to be correct.

Getting back to my grandfather, the family always believed his birth date to be May 30, 1891, and that's what we put on his tombstone. But after he passed away I found his World War II draft registration card, and he must have said his birth date was May 28, 1894. I don't see how someone could misunderstand if he spoke aloud—even in his heavy accent—May the thirtieth, 1891.

Once I found this draft registration card, I was left with the task of hopefully finding his birth record someday. Thankfully, someday came along recently, and I have my proof. Rule #2: Some documents are more official than others.

My grandfather's indisputable Italian birth record.

Don't believe every bit of information you find. You need to weigh the value of one document versus another. My grandfather's birth record clearly overrules his World War II registration card. It actually follows both rules because it was recorded much earlier, and it is an official, certified document.

Why Did They Die?

In your family tree, you probably have people who died for reasons unknown to you. They weren't old, and you have no reason to think they were sickly. If you can't get a copy of their death certificate to learn the cause of death, you may want to turn to history.

A good place to start if your ancestor died in the U.S. is the List of disasters in the United States by death toll on Wikipedia. The page lists many notable disasters and may be sorted by year, type and location. It also provides links to articles explaining each disaster in detail.

As I browsed the list I found the location of Connellsville, Pennsylvania and an article about the 1903 Connellsville train wreck.

Can historic events tell you what became of your ancestor?

I know that many people from one of my ancestral Italian hometowns worked for the railroad in Connellsville, and it is quite possible that my great grandfather Francesco Iamarino worked there at that time. At the bottom of the Wikipedia article I followed a source link, and there was a list of the dead.

While carrying out my obsessively exhaustive documentation of every vital record from my grandfather Leone's hometown of Baselice between 1809 and 1860, I noticed that some years the death toll was much higher than others. For example, in this town of roughly 2,000 people, about 100 would die each year. But some years that number spiked above 200. This makes me wonder about epidemics and earthquakes.

On the BBC website I found an article titled History of deadly earthquakes. It lists earthquakes worldwide from 1906 through 2016. Using Wikipedia again I found a List of earthquakes in Italy. Long ago an Italian historian sent me a list of 41 people who died in my grandfather Iamarino's town of Colle Sannita. The list was dated 26 July 1805. On the Wikipedia page I see that there was an earthquake in Molise on 26 July 1805. On the 1805 Molise earthquake page is a list of towns, and it says that 44 people died in Colle Sannita.

Try to use local resources to learn about disasters. A transcription of a local Connellsville, Pennsylvania newspaper provided the names of the victims of the 1903 train wreck. And it was local records that produced the names of the Colle Sannita residents killed in the 1805 earthquake. For my own family, it took a trip to the New York City Municipal Archives to see the death certificate and cause of death for many of my relatives.

Given enough time, more and more things will be digitized. Given enough genealogical networking, more and more things will be shared to the benefit of us all. Be sure to investigate what natural or man-made disasters happened where your ancestors lived.