Simple Tips for Understanding Italian Marriage Records

This is the third in a series of articles to help you understand Italian vital records without speaking Italian. If you missed the other two, please check out:

• Simple Tips for Understanding Italian Birth Records
• Simple Tips for Understanding Italian Death Records

As you try to go back another generation in your family tree, marriage records can be crucial. How can you find your great grandfather's birth record if you don't know his parents' names?

When your ancestors married in Italy, they had to provide a copy of their birth record. That means you can have a good deal of confidence in the age recorded on the marriage record. If their parents weren't alive to consent to the marriage, they had to provide death records. And guess what? If their late father's father was dead, they had to provide his death record, too.

Depending on the year, and what's available online, you may see:

• copies of these records (jackpot!)
• the birth and death dates written on the marriage record (a good runner-up)
• a list of the documents produced (disappointing).

If your ancestors' Italian marriage records are online, there are 3 types to see:

1. Matrimoni—The actual marriage record. It may include:
   • the civil marriage date
   • the church marriage date (yes, they can be different)
   • the 1st, and possibly 2nd marriage banns, when the couple posted their intention to marry.
2. Matrimoni Pubblicazioni—A record of the couple posting their intention to marry. It's like today's "speak now or forever hold your peace."
3. Matrimoni Processetti/Allegati—This is the goldmine. This can include the couple's birth records and any parents/grandfathers' death records.

When available, this set of Italian marriage documents is a positively priceless addition to your family tree.

Be sure to search for all 3 types of records on the Italian Antenati website or FamilySearch.org.

Let's look at examples of these documents and how to find the genealogy facts you need. I chose an 1831 marriage from my maternal grandfather's hometown, Baselice in Benevento.

The 1st banns are very brief, but you will learn the names of the bride and groom's parents. Here is the format:

• The date of the document, written in longhand. You must memorize the Italian numbers or keep your link to FamilySearch's Italian Genealogical Word List handy.
• Look for the words "promessa di matrimonio tra." This means promise of marriage between, so we can expect to see the couple's names. Remember that in Italian documents the male is always listed before the female.
• Look for the groom's name followed by his father's and mother's names. Then find the bride's name followed by her father's and mother's names.

Top, the simpler 1st marriage banns. Bottom, the more detailed 2nd marriage banns, filled with facts for your family tree.

The 2nd banns have the same information plus more details about ages and occupations. In this example we have:

• The date of the document and the name of the town.
• The groom's name and age ("di anni ventidue" = age 22), where he lives ("domiciliato a" = living in)
• His parents' names, his father's occupation, and where they live. In this case, the word "fu" before each name tells us the groom's parents are both dead. So we see their names and nothing else.
• The bride's name and age ("di anni quaranta" = age 40; there's a big age difference in this couple).
• Her parents' names (both are dead), and a blank occupation and home for her deceased father.
• Below the town official's signature it says this completes the process. Without opposition, the couple may marry.

I like to record the date of both marriage banns in my family tree software.

Next is the marriage record, which may contain 3 different dates. In the example shown here, there's a wide column and a narrow column. The narrow column is a statement from the local parish that tells us when a priest married the couple.

Don't let the format fool you. It begins with one date, but that's the date someone wrote this note. A little further down is another date. That's the marriage date. This one says:

"…la celebrazione del matrimonio é seguita nel giorno dieci del mese di Dicembre anno suddetto"

That translates to:

the celebration of the wedding took place on the 10th day of the month of December the aforementioned year

This is the marriage date I will record in my family tree. This document mentions the specific church name (San Leonardo Abate). I'll enter the full street address of this church—which I visited in 2018.

You don't need to understand everything on an Italian marriage record. Find these keywords and you'll see the info you want for your family tree.

In the wide column of the page we see another date, which may be a few days earlier than the church date. On this date, the town official:

• saw the couple in the town hall
• determined there were no impediments to their marriage
• pronounced them legally married.

It's an odd concept for us to relate to, having a civil ceremony and then a church ceremony. I've chosen to put my own spin on the dates. I record the earlier date in my family tree as the marriage license. I don't know how it was for 19th century Italians in a Church-centered society. Did they wait for the church marriage before they lived together?

The format of the wide column of this marriage record is as follows:

• The date the couple appeared in town hall to be married.
• Find the word "comparsi" (appeared). After that is the groom's name (Donato diLuca), age ("di anni ventidue" = age 22), place of birth ("nato in" = born in).
• Next is the groom's father (and potentially his occupation and where he lives) and his mother (and potentially where she lives).
• Then we see the same information for the bride. We may not see her occupation, but sometimes we do. This bride's parents are both dead, but there's an extra bit of very important information. It says "vedova di Leonardo Cocca." Bride Angelamaria Cece, who is 18 years older than the groom, is the widow of Leonardo Cocca ("vedovo/a" = widow). If you find the matrimoni processetti, you should see the late spouse's death record.
• The next handwritten date you see is the date of the 1st marriage banns.
• The long handwritten section is a list of the documents that the couple had to provide:
  • the groom's birth record
  • the groom's parents' death records and his paternal grandfather's death record
  • the bride's birth record
  • the bride's parents' death records and her paternal grandfather's death record
  • the bride's 1st husband's death record
  • their marriage banns with no impediments to their marriage
• The final section includes that names, ages, and occupations of 4 male witnesses. Many times you'll see only 2 witnesses. Take a look at the names to see if there is a stated relationship to the married couple. You may find that a witness is a "cugino" (cousin), "zio" (uncle), or "avo" (grandfather).

The marriage facts you need for your family tree are not hard to find. Even if the town runs out of marriage forms late in the year and has to hand write the whole thing, don't worry. You can find those keywords and see what follows. With practice, you can memorize number and month words, and the important keywords.

You'll focus in and find what you need:

• the handwritten date, fully spelling out the year, day, and month
• comparsi, alerting you to the name of the groom
• di anni—the next number is their age
• professione, which is obviously profession
• domiciliato, which looks like the word domiciled, or living in
• nato, telling you where they were born
• figlio/a di, meaning son/daughter of, which leads into the parents' names
• vedovo/a di, which, if you see it, tells you one of the two has been married before

There's no reason on earth for you to see a big block of foreign words and call for help. You know exactly which words to look for. You know what you'll find right after those words. Any words you can't make out are probably on FamilySearch's Italian Genealogical Word List.

With a bit of practice, you'll see the pattern to the documents. You'll recognize the keywords—even when the handwriting is the worst. Are your ancestral hometown's documents available online? Then nothing should stop you from using these images to build your Italian family tree.

Skip a Generation to Fill in the Blanks

You're closing in on an ancestor's birth record that you've wanted forever. You didn't find it in a search result. No. You found the birth date listed on other documents.

Then one day you discovered that his hometown's vital records are available online. And here you are, going page by page, looking for that important date.

But Murphy's Law beat you to it. The exact page you need is missing! Oh, the humanity!

Even if pages aren't missing, you may find that several years are missing. With most of my towns, the marriage records from 1861 through 1930 are not available. Birth records are hit-or-miss in the early 1900s and end in 1915. It breaks my heart every single time I run up against those missing records.

What can you do? How can you learn who your 2nd great granduncle married when the marriage records aren't available?

The answer is time travel…in a manner of speaking. Skipping ahead a generation can help you find the facts.

Let's say you have a 2nd great granduncle born in 1860. Since the marriage records end that same year, you won't find his marriage record. But you may find his children's birth records. You may find their marriage records, too. And if the evidence is clear, you may learn who your 2nd great granduncle married.

Note: Sometimes you get lucky and find who and when they married written in the column of their birth record. I love when that happens!

I spent my holiday vacation renaming thousands of document images. They're marriage records from my Grandpa's hometown in Italy. I finished the marriages through 1860, renaming each file to include the subject(s) of the document. Then I jumped ahead to tackle the remaining marriage records from 1931 through 1942.

It made me so happy to find Grandpa's younger sister's wedding. There was a treasure in there. She was born in 1922, and the birth records stop at 1915. My grandaunt's 1922 birth record can only be found in her 1941 marriage records. So now I have it!

Only by paging through all the records could I learn more about this family.

Let's look at how to examine these 1930s marriage records for new relationships. I randomly chose the 1931 marriage of Giovannantonio Marino and Concetta Iamarino. The marriage record tells me Concetta is 25 years old. The birth records for that year (1906) are not available.

I see that her parents are Pasquale Iamarino and Orsola Marino. That couple, born in 1862 and 1863, is in my tree. He is my 2nd cousin 4 times removed, and I know they married in 1889 because it's written on both their birth records. Until now, I never knew they had a daughter named Concetta because she was born in a year with no records.

Now I can add Concetta to my family tree as the daughter of my 2nd cousin 4 times removed. I can add the details of her 1931 marriage. And I can piece together her husband's family.

In Concetta's case, I already knew when her parents married. But there will be cases where a 1930s marriage will fill in the blanks on dead ends in my family tree. Let's not forget the 1880s birth records, either. They will hold children of men and women who are in my family tree, but whose marriage documents are out of range. It's their kids who will tell me who many of my 1840's-and-later babies married.

These renamed documents help me fill in the blanks for missing people.

These later documents sometimes provide copies of out-of-range death records, too. They can point me to a first marriage that may have resulted in children who are new to me.

It can be difficult to skip a generation this way. You have to make certain there's enough evidence. (See Are You Sure They're the Same Person?) Be sure you have enough facts to know you've found the right family. No matter where your people came from, there were probably several people in their town with the same exact name. Pay attention to who their father was.

The important thing to remember is that you don't know which records will fill in those blanks. It pays to go through them all. That's my goal: to piece together everyone from Grandpa's town. We're all related! And I'm determined to find out how.

How to Break Through to New Generations

I spent the last 2 weekends building a family tree for a woman who was stuck at the 1st great grandparent level.

I identified the names of EIGHTEEN of her 5th great grandparents. What a rush! It was all thanks to a ton of available vital records for her ancestral Italian hometowns.

Each time I found a new generation, I thought about what I could do to find their parents' names. It struck me that you could make a flowchart of the process—a series of Yes or No questions to tell you where to look next.

Let's see what that would look like. Say you know your immigrant great grandparents' names. You believe you know their birth dates, and you have an idea which town at least one of them came from. (This was the case for my client.)

What do you do next? Start by trying to prove your ancestor's birth date and hometown.

Nothing makes me happier than a set of marriage documents for my 2nd, 3rd, or 4th great grandparents.

Can you find their immigration record? If they arrived at the right time, their ship manifest may have their hometown and a parent's name.

Can you find their naturalization papers? These may include their exact date of birth, their hometown, and their father's name.

Can you find their marriage record in their new country? This may include both sets of parents' names.

Can you find their official birth record from their hometown? This may include:

• their father's name and age at the time
• their father's father's name
• the street where they lived
• their mother's name and age at the time
• their mother's father's name

They included a father's name to distinguish a person from someone else in town with the same name.

If you found this record, you get to level up! You've reached the 2nd great grandparent level, and you may have a name or 2 from the 3rd great grandparent level.

How can you discover all your 3rd great grandparents on this branch?

Can you find the marriage record of your 2nd great grandparents? This will name all your 3rd great grandparents. It may tell you their ages at the time. It may include the names of their fathers, or their dates of death.

Can you find the death record for a deceased 3rd great grandparent from the marriage record? That should tell you the names of their parents—your 4th great grandparents.

Can you find the marriage record of your 3rd great grandparents? This should name your 4th great grandparents, and may give you a name or 2 of your 5th great grandparents.

If the records are available, you can climb generation after generation of your family tree.

Don't Climb Too Fast

Beware of jumping from one ancestor's vital record to their parent's birth record. Let's say you find a birth record with a name that matches your 3rd great grandfather. How can you be sure he's your ancestor? Maybe someone else in town had the same name. That's all too common.

If that birth record doesn't say he later married the name you know for your 3rd great grandmother—you can't be sure you have the right person. You don't want to climb a stranger's family tree, do you?

The logical progression for climbing the tree when you have one ancestor's birth record is to:

• Find their parents' marriage record. These provide solid information about the earlier generation. You may have to scour several years before you find their marriage.
• Or find their death records. These will name their spouse (so you know it's the right person) and their parents.

Beware of errors, misspellings, and slightly wrong ages. Keep your mind open to name variations. "Teresa" on someone's death record may be "Maria Teresa" on her own vital records.

Don't overlook the awesome extras that may come with marriage records, at least in Italy. The associated documents may include:

• the bride and groom's birth records
• any of their parents' death records
• their paternal grandfather's death records

The reason for the death records is to prove that a parent is unavailable to consent to the marriage. And if your father was dead, they would want his father to provide consent. So you needed to prove everyone had died.

What a joy it is for us to find their death records. I love it when a marriage is in the sweet spot: Late enough to include the extra records, but early enough to have death records from the 1700s.

Proceed carefully:

• Rely heavily on marriage records for fuller information.
• Use death records only when they include the name you already know for the deceased's spouse.
• Turn to birth records if you already know both their parents' names, or you see their marriage written in the column.

Make no assumptions. Those lead to the types of errors we all hate to find on other people's online family trees.

One final note on marriage records: Pay attention to the town of birth. A bride and groom may come from different towns. In this case, the couple may marry in the bride's town, but live and raise a family in the groom's town. Why? Because the groom is more likely to inherit land and a home.

One birth record said the baby's father was born in this town, but its mother was born in another town. That told me to search the mother's town for this couple's marriage. And that's exactly where I found it.

With care, and the availability of records, you can build up a branch of your family tree several generations in one weekend. I did!

Don't Let Latin Church Records Scare You

I spent the weekend with the type of genealogy records I hate: Latin church records. Normally I'm knee-deep in Italian vital records. It's second nature to locate and pull out the facts I need:

• dates
• names
• relationships

But I would cringe when faced with a church record written in Latin. Reading an Italian document is as easy for me as reading an English document. That took practice. Complete immersion in Italian vital records made them easier and easier to understand.

Now I'm more comfortable with Latin records after a weekend of immersion.

The town I was researching had very brief church records. They didn't include anyone's age. That did simplify things, though. All I needed to translate was the date and names.

Here's a breakdown of the 3 things you need to know to get over any fear of Latin documents.

Talk about facing your fears. After a weekend of non-stop Latin church records, I have no problem translating these genealogy documents anymore!

1. Latin Dates

Nearly all the documents I was reading wrote the day of the month as numerals, not words. Some records did spell out the day of the month. When that happens, I consult the Latin Genealogical Word List on FamilySearch.org.

I got stuck on one document where the writing was faint, and they wrote the day of the month as an ordinal number (first, second, third, etc.).

There were a lot of birth records on the same page. The records before this one had the Latin words for 23rd, 25th, 26th, and the records after it said the 28th and 29th. That narrowed things down. I compared the numbers on the page. Then I consulted the Numbers section of the Latin word list. I decided this date said vicesimus octavus, the 28th.

The Latin months are very close to English and Italian months. They're easy to understand. But sometimes the documents use a shorthand I know from Italian records. They abbreviate September through December as:

• 7bre. Forget that it's the 9th month of the year. The beginning of September means seven. In Italian it's Settembre. Sette means 7, so 7bre for short.
• 8bre. In Italian the word is Ottobre, and otto means 8; 8bre.
• 9bre. Novembre; nove means 9.
• Xbre. They use a Roman number in most cases, but you may see 10bre. In Italian it's Dicembre, and dieci means 10.

They wrote the year as numerals in the documents I was reading. But you're probably viewing these documents in a collection for a particular year. You should already know which year you're viewing. If your document isn't in a collection, or it mentions another year, check the Latin genealogical word list.

2. Vital Record Words

You'll get used to the other key words you need to focus on:

• Die. Often the first word on a document, die means on the day. The document may begin Die 24 9bris 1814, meaning on the 24th day of November, 1814.
• Nomen. When you're looking at a baptism record, try to find the word nomen. Right after it is the first name given to the baby.
• Natus/Natu/Nata, ex, et. A bit above the baby's name, look for a variation of natus ex. This means born of, and right after the ex you'll see the baby's father's name followed by et, which means and. Then comes the baby's mother's name.

Here is an example of the key sentence in a baptism record, dissected for translation:

• nata (if it ends in an a, the baby is a girl) means born
• ex Joseph [last name] means of Joseph, as in the baby is born of Joseph, its father
• et Rosa [last name] means and Rosa, so the baby is born of Joseph and Rosa
• cui impom est nomen [impom is an abbreviation of impositus] Rosaria means they give to the baby the name Rosaria

The full sentence would look something like: Nata ex Joseph et Rosa cui impom est nomen Rosaria.

Now that you know the construction, it isn't so intimidating.

Marriage documents have keywords, too. Look for matrimonio tra near the beginning of the document. This means marriage between. Then find the groom's name and his parents, followed by the bride's name and her parents.

These compact little marriage records pack a lot of info into a small space. And the Latin genealogy words are nothing to be afraid of.

The marriage documents I viewed stacked 3 dates in a row. These were the dates when the couple posted their intention to marry, or their marriage banns. Then, in different handwriting, I saw another date and several names. This was the date on which the couple married in the church.

3. Latin Names

The last piece of the puzzle is the names. On these documents from an Italian church, the last names were in their original Italian. Most first names were in Latin. Once I got used to them, it wasn't a problem. Know that male names often end in -us or -ius, while female names end in -a. Here are some examples:

• Antonius = Antonio or Anthony or Anton; the female is Antonia
• Dominicus = Domenico or Domenick; the female is Dominica
• Franciscus = Francesco or Francis or Frank; the female is Francisca
• Joseph = Giuseppe or Josef; the female is Josepha
• Joannes = Giovanni or John or Johann; the female is Joanna
• Sebastianus = Sebastiano or Sebastian; the female is Sebastiana
• Vincentius = Vincenzo or Vincent; the female is Vincenta

For some Italian names, they change an f to ph. Epiphanio is Epifanio and Philippo (sometimes shortened to Pho) is Filippo.

You can get used to Latin by looking for the key words you need and dissecting the sentences. This is exactly how I recommend people get used to Italian documents. Find the key words that help you understand:

• Birth records: who is the baby and who are the parents
• Death records: who died and who were their parents and spouse
• Marriage records: who is getting married and who are their parents

This is an article I never thought I'd write because Latin documents made me cringe. But now I see how they work. Just pick out the dates names you need. Don't let them scare you.

Are You Sure They're the Same Person?

I got an email from Geni.com where, unfortunately, I uploaded my family tree years ago. I say "unfortunately" because I didn't know people would try to correct me and want to "take over" people in my tree.

The email said it found duplicates and wanted me to merge some people. I checked them out, and each one was clearly the same person in different family trees. I approved them all. I really don't care.

What I do care about is MY tree. My living, constantly developing family tree I build in Family Tree Maker and synchronize to Ancestry.com. In my tree, I make no assumptions. I base every fact on available documents.

It was a coincidence to get the Geni email about mergers the same day I was considering a merger within my own tree.

Should These People Be Merged?

Recently I've been examining the earliest available vital records from my grandfather's hometown. I can fit nearly every person named in the early 1800s birth, marriage, and death records into my tree. It's kinda easy when all the families intermarry over and over again.

I'm examining the earliest vital records so I can identify more people in this amazing book I bought. The book contains a detailed description of each of the 560 households in Grandpa's town in the year 1742. (That's the year the town did a complete census for tax purposes.) I've tied into about a quarter of these families so far.

Imagine a set of marriage documents that tells you the names of the bride and groom's great grandparents!

The town's marriage records get more valuable in the mid-1820s. That's when they include:

• the groom's birth or baptism record
• the bride's birth or baptism record
• the death record (if it applies) for the bride and groom's deceased parents
• the death record (if their father is dead) for the bride and groom's deceased grandfathers

The death records show why a parent or grandparent can't give consent for the marriage. They're dead.

Imagine finding the marriage of a couple born in 1800, and learning the names of their paternal great grandparents! It's a genealogist's gold mine.

In these records I found 2 brothers named Cocca who married 2 sisters named Cocca. I knew they fit into my family tree. So I started processing all the documents from their 1827 and 1830 marriages.

Because the brothers' and the sisters' fathers were dead, there were lots of records. I was able to connect both families to households found in the 1742 census.

That's when I had a decision to make. You see, the Cocca brothers' paternal grandmother was Colomba Lombardo. Her 1816 death record says her parents were Domenico Lombardo and Cristina Pilla. And that couple is in the 1742 census. Domenico was born in 1696; Cristina in 1704. Awesome!

Colomba fit into a family listed in the 1742 census. But hold on. There's already a Colomba there.

As I added Colomba to this family, I noticed Domenico and Cristina already had a child named Colomba. Was she the same person? Should I merge them?

Let's look at the facts:

• In the 1742 census, there is a 1-year-old girl named Colomba Lombardo. That tells me she was born in 1741.
• In the 1816 death records, there is a 68-year-old Colomba Lombardo from the same family. According to this death record, she was born in 1748.

Now, we all know death records can be inaccurate. And I know that at this time in history, my townspeople weren't 100% sure of their age. They didn't have to put their exact birth date on forms all the time like we do.

So maybe the Colomba who died in 1816 wasn't 68 years old. Maybe she was 75 years old and is the same baby from the 1742 census. If she were born in 1741, she'd be 8 years older than her husband. That's a little unusual in this town, but not out of the question.

Then again, there's always the possibility that baby Colomba found in the 1742 census died as a child. It would be customary for the couple to give their next baby girl the same name.

Because I know this custom, I cannot assume that the Colomba who died in 1816 is the Colomba who was born in 1741. For now, I will leave them both in my tree as sisters.

How can I ever prove they were sisters and not the same person? The answer may be waiting in more of the town's marriage records. So far, I've found only one child for Colomba and her husband. As I work through more marriages, I may find more. Those extra documents may give me more facts about Colomba's birth year.

The moral of this story is never make assumptions. Learn the traditions and customs of your ancestral hometowns. Seek out every possible document. Build on the evidence only, no matter how tempting it may be to "merge" people in your family tree.

For now, I'll add a note to each Colomba Lombardo in my family tree, explaining why they both exist. This way, anyone who finds them in my tree on Ancestry will understand that this was a choice, not an error.

Following the Documents from Marriage to Marriage

Last time, I told you how I'm building, using, and sharing a database of my ancestral hometowns.

On Wednesday, I used it to follow an unbelievable succession of marriages in the early 1800s. By the time I got to a man and wife who managed not to die right away, it was clear how an entire town can come to be related.

As a bit of background, times were tough in the 1800s in rural Italy and elsewhere. Most marriages were arranged, and if your spouse died, you needed another spouse. You needed a man to support you. You needed a woman to raise your children.

Widows and widowers usually remarried fast. It still takes me by surprise. What follows are multiple remarriages, causing connections among a lot of families.

Each marriage yielded more in-laws, babies, and deaths.

It began with the 1810 marriage of Daniele (that's Daniel) Marinaro and Nicoletta Mutino. He was 24 years old and she was 20. After 3½ years of marriage and the birth of 1 child, both Nicoletta and her baby, Giovanni, died in September 1813.

A year later, Daniel tried again. He married 17-year-old Costanza Palmiero. She died after 6 months of marriage. (Meanwhile, I'm gathering, cropping, annotating, and adding all these documents to my family tree as I go.)

Six months later, Daniel gave family life another shot. He married Lucia Rosa Maria Cocca in September 1815. They managed to have a baby, Angelamaria, in 1819. And she didn't die right away!

Things are looking up for Daniel. Until he died in early 1821 at the age of 34. He had 3 short marriages, 2 young brides who died, 1 son who died, and 1 daughter who lived.

But this marriage chain isn't over. Daniel's widow, Lucia Rosa, married Giovannangelo diRuccia, 3 years after Daniel's death. That's a long time between marriages when a young woman has a small child to care for. Daniel and Lucia Rosa's daughter, Angelamaria Marinaro, was 24 when her mother died in 1843. I searched for her in my renamed vital records from the town. I discovered that Angelamaria married Salvatore Petriella in 1835. I'm so happy for her! She lived!

An exhaustive search is a piece of cake with my database and Everything.

Before I follow Angelamaria and her husband, I'm not through with her parents' story. When her mother Lucia Rosa died, her stepfather, Giovannangelo diRuccia, waited 5 years. Then he married Mariantonia Scrocca in 1848. Mariantonia was the widow of Gennaro Giuseppe Viola. He had died 11 years after his marriage to Mariantonia.

I still have to find any more children of these marriages, but my goodness! It took 38 years for this marriage chain not to end in a premature death. Granted, Giovannangelo and Mariantonia married only 12 years before 1860. That's the last year of available death records for the town. They may have died soon after 1860.

As I continue exploring my database, I may learn when survivors Giovannangelo and Mariantonia died. The answer may lie in their children's marriage records. I hope they lived long lives together.

And this, my friends, is the reason for—and the beauty of—my obsessive ancestral town database. It sure can lead to some long sessions of family tree building.

Don't Miss Out on Your Ancestors' Culture

We've all met them. The guy who spent an hour on Geni.com and claimed to be a descendant of Eric the Red. The woman who clicked into one family tree and boom! She brought her family back to the time of the Roman Forum.

If you expect it to be that quick and easy to build your family tree, you may have been mislead by TV commercials. And if a foreign language and detective work make you give up, you're missing out!

Take the time to get familiar with your ancestors' genealogy documents. You'll find cultural gems hiding between the lines. There are tools to help you with that foreign language. You will get better with practice. And along the way, you'll be learning about your ancestors' culture.

As a kid, I learned about 1940s American culture from Bugs Bunny cartoons. I learned lots of weird British phrases from Monty Python's Flying Circus. I was there for the comedy, but I was learning much more.

Now genealogy research is teaching me about my ancestors' Italian culture centuries ago.

In 2008, when I began reading Italian vital records from the 1800s, it was all new to me. I had to learn the Italian words for the months and all the numbers. The documents spell out the years and days. They don't say June 15, 1868; they say mille ottocento sessantotto, quindici di giugno.

I had to learn a handful of Italian words to get started: born and died, husband and wife, marriage, deceased, and so on.

Once I mastered those foreign words, I began to notice how they recorded some events. Like the abandoned babies. Only the midwife knew who the mother was, and the mayor could give the baby a made-up name. Sometimes a mother left her baby on someone's doorstep. It's like something out of an old movie.

My 5th great grandfather found a naked baby on his doorstep. The mayor named her Maria Giuseppa.

Then I learned it was perfectly normal to remarry 2 months after your first spouse died. A widower, like my 2nd great grandfather Nicoladomenico, might marry a much younger woman and keep having children. Nicoladomenico's 2nd wife, my 2nd great grandmother, was his daughter's age. Perfectly normal.

I learned that each marriage required the presentation of certain documents:

• the bride and groom's birth records
• the 2 times they publicly posted their intention to marry, with no objections
• the death records for any of their deceased parents
• the death records for their grandfathers, if their fathers were dead

That last part—the death records of their grandfathers—is the only way to find a record of a death before 1809 when church records are not available. (1809 is when they began keeping civil records in this part of Italy.) This past week I've been taking advantage of that practice.

I needed to find the death record of my 5th great grandfather, Gioacchino Tricarico. There was no other way to learn his parents' names. I knew he died before 1809 because there was no death record for him in the civil records.

To find his death record, I needed to find a marriage record for his grandchild. But the grandchild needed to marry after their father (Gioacchino's son) had died. I searched their town's civil records to learn the names of all his grandchildren. Then I searched the marriage indexes year by year, until I found a granddaughter who married in 1855.

The Italian tradition was for the bride's (or groom's) parents to give permission for his child to marry. If their father was dead, the grandfather could give permission.

There needed to be a reason for the missing permissions. So they included the death records of the bride or groom's father and grandfather.

This may be the single best thing about Italian marriage records. In the 1855 marriage records, I found the 1808 death record of my 5th great grandfather. I learned the names of his parents, my 6th great grandparents: Tommaso Tricarico and Orsola Antonelli.

Knowing how my ancestral hometowns kept their records helps me make unusual discoveries.

I've also learned from studying these documents that:

• A bride and groom often lived in the same neighborhood. There's a good chance their families owned adjacent land, and their marriage was an alliance for the strength of both families. That stood out even more when I saw the matchy-matchy pairings of children with similar names. Francesco married Francesca. Giovanni married Giovanna. It happened too often to be a coincidence. I guess it was better than flipping a coin. And who even had a coin?
• When a bride and groom came from different towns, they had to publicly post their intention to marry in both towns. They often married in the bride's town and lived in the groom's town. The groom was more likely to have a house or land in his town.

There are always exceptions to the rules. My 2nd great grandparents bucked the rules. Antonio from Sant'Angelo a Cupolo moved to Colomba's town when they married. I've been studying documents from her town of Santa Paolina. It seems her family was better educated, had better professions, and owned vineyards. It must have made more sense for Antonio to move to Colomba's town.

But this family kept rewriting the rules. Two of Colomba's brothers moved to the next town, Tufo. Tufo is famous for its vineyards to this day. My 2nd great grandparents followed the brothers to Tufo after their 1st baby died. They lived there long enough to have 2 sons. When one son died, the family of 3 moved back to Antonio's hometown. After having a few more kids, Antonio became my 1st ancestor to come to America.

As I went back further, I found that Colomba's mother came from another town called Apice. Colomba's parents married in Apice, but lived in Santa Paolina. This bolsters my idea that Colomba's family was more well-off than others.

So what's your rush? Do you really want a family tree that someone else put together? Someone who may have done a careless job? Or do you want to appreciate your ancestry? Do you want to know how they made a living, and why they emigrated? Do you want to try to understand their sorrow when child after child died in infancy?

Don't rush through your family tree building. Learn, experience, and savor the day-to-day culture of your ancestors. It's the history of you.

Keep Track of Your Genealogy Theories and Tasks

I like to work from text-file task lists. I started doing this in my corporate job so I can easily re-prioritize my to-do list. If a task has a deadline, its line begins with the due date: AUG 11, AUG 25, etc. I keep those items in order so I never miss the deadlines.

This blog is about using business sensibilities and efficiencies in your genealogy research. So it makes perfect sense to use the task list idea in your family tree work.

There's no need for special software, although many of you may use Evernote or OneNote. You only need a text editor, like Notepad on a Windows computer or TextEdit on a Mac. I use Notepad++ because I can have a bunch of files open at once and include some HTML code when I need to.

Use your task list to keep track of:

• Where you left off with a search for an ancestor.
• Your theory about a particular ancestor and where you might find them.
• A problem you're trying to solve, like an unreadable last name or conflicting birth dates.
• Your progress on any of your annual genealogy goals.
• Links to online pages that may be helpful to you, and a note about why.
• Reference books you want to find or buy.

For each line item, it may help you to type last names in ALL CAPITAL LETTERS. Once you have several entries, you can organize them by type, or by branch of your family tree.

Keep a running, constantly updated list of what you're working on in your genealogy research.

Here's an example. I found an unusual 1809 death record for my 5th great grandfather, Vincenzo Liguori. I found it in the 1840 marriage documents of his grandson, my 3rd great grandfather. The problem is:

• The document doesn't actually say he died in their hometown of Circello
• It doesn't mention his parents or wife…only his son, my 4th great grandfather
• It isn't included in the 1809 death records.

I need to find another version of the document in another set of marriage records. I'm missing the names of Vincenzo's grandchildren born before 1809. (Civil record keeping began in 1809 in my part of Southern Italy.) I need to search marriage records for anyone with the name Liguori.

I added this line to my task list:

• Did Gregorio LIGUORI [Vincenzo's son] & Apollonia Grazia Caruso have a child before 1809? Search Circello marriages starting in 1825 for other Liguori children. (I'm up to 1841.)

The end of that line item tells me where I left off. That's critical to your task list.

Here's another example. My 5th great grandmother Francesca d'Andrea is a dead end. I don't know when she died or who her parents were. I think she came from Pesco Sannita because I see the name d'Andrea on lots of documents from that town. I started looking for people who might be her siblings.

I added this line to my task list:

• Francesca d'ANDREA's parents may be Giuseppe and Rosa Salamone or Antonio and Vincenza Orlando. That's based on other d'Andrea death records. Search for supporting marriage documents. (Not started.)

Finally, I've been working on a branch of my family tree with the last name Consolazio from Santa Paolina. My closest Consolazio relative is my 2nd great grandmother. I've been renaming the town's vital records files to include the names on the documents. Then I'm trying to fit all the people named Consolazio into my family tree.

I added this to the task list:

• I'm up to 1828 births reviewing CONSOLAZIO records.

Keep your task list open each time you sit down to work on your family tree. Consult it often. When you finish a task, add a note to the right person in your family tree, explaining how you learned this fact.

The notes in your task list are great reminders of what you've already done to solve a problem. Re-reading these notes may trigger that "aha!" moment and help you finally solve that puzzle.

Solving 2 Problems to Find My 6th Great Grandparents

Don't stop your research too soon if the documents aren't crystal clear.

My last article convinced me to make a pair of 5th great grandparents my #1 genealogy priority. I needed to find their Italian death records so I could learn the names of 4 more of my 6th great grandparents.

As I began my search, I realized I had already located what might be both their death records in 1816.

The problem was, neither death certificate mentions the deceased's spouse. I needed to prove I had the right death records. He, 80-year-old Saverio Zullo, had a very common last name in their little town. She, 63-year-old Angela Montenigro, had a very uncommon last name. The town's vital records show there may have been only one Montenigro family in town when she was born. (Their age difference may mean Saverio had kids with his 1st wife.)

Before I set out to prove these were the right documents, I had another problem. The clerk in town at the time had awful handwriting. I cannot read the last names of my newfound 6th great grandmothers!

I kept track of my steps as I solved these 2 problems.

It isn't time to rejoice yet. These documents aren't definitively my 5th great grandparents.

Problem #1: Prove the 1816 Death Records Are for My Ancestors

Here is everything I did to determine if I had the right death records:

I searched the town's marriage records before and after 1816, looking for my 5th great grandparents' children.

• In 1814, their son Saverio married, and his parents were still alive.
• In 1815, their daughter Berardina married, and her parents were still alive.
• In 1817, their son Carlo married, and his parents were dead!

Hurray! Only a genealogist is this happy to see that someone's parents have died.

The marriage records suggest Saverio and Angela died between 1815 and 1817. That supports the two 1816 death records as belonging to my 5th great grandparents.

There may be more proof, though. I searched more marriage records, hoping for a rewritten version of their death records. So far, I've gotten up to 1835 in this search. The supporting marriage documents for these years are mostly missing. But eventually I should find more complete marriage records for their grandchildren. Those records may include a rewritten version of Saverio Zullo's death record.

In the meantime, I was anxious about the other problem with the 1816 death records. What did those documents say?

I used several methods to figure out the bad handwriting in my 5th great grandparents' death records.

Problem #2: Figure Out My 6th Great Grandmothers' Last Names

Figuring out the last names of Saverio and Angela's mothers took a lot more work. Here's what I did:

• I took my best guess on each letter in the last names. I compared the writing to the other words in the document, and in other documents written by the same clerk. It was clear that neither name had any ascending letters (b, d, f, t, etc.) or descending letters (also f, g, p, etc.). That helped me rule out many possible names.
• I wrote down the possible letter combinations. I'm familiar with the common last names in this town from having examined so many vital records. These were not common names from the town.
• I checked a few resources for the name variations I'd written down.
  • For Italian descendants, the Cognomix website shows where to find a last name in Italy today.
  • You can also search for a name on the Italian White Pages website.
  • I checked my digital copy of a book exploring the origins and variations of Italian last names. (Search online for name origins in your ancestral country.)
    
  • You can search for a last name on FamilySearch.org or Ancestry.com to see where people with that name come from.
• I searched the town's records again for more documents with the 2 mysterious last names. I compared these to my original document. The clerks wrote the names a bit differently each time.
• I searched for, and found, a sibling for my 5th great grandmother Angela Montenigro. This document gives me another look at my 6th great grandmother Berardina's last name.
• The 1816 death records are missing an index. But the index for the year Angela's sister died gives me another look at Berardina's last name.

I took all these steps before making a decision. The evidence shows Saverio Zullo's mother, my 6th great grandmother, was Livia Carosa.

Angela Montenigro's mother, my other 6th great grandmother, was Berardina (sometimes Berarda):

• Lavorana,
• Laverono, or
• Lavorino

It's still not clear which version is correct. But I did narrow it down. I'll continue to search for every Montenigro in town, and anyone with a last name that looks like Lavorana, Laverono, or Lavorino. For now, I'll choose which variation to use and add my 4 new 6th great grandparents to my family tree.

Soon I'll move on to my #2 genealogy priority. That is to find my 8 missing 6th great grandparents from the town of Circello, Italy. I'm so thankful for the Italian Antenati website and all the vital records!

Don't give up when a sloppy, indefinite document is all you have. There are so many tools you can use.

How to Work Out Errors in Your Family Tree

The Ellis Island website was my gateway to genealogy. In my early days, I found ship manifests for my 2 grandfathers and other relatives. Then came my Ancestry.com membership, and my next gateway: census records.

What busted my family tree wide open was microfilm. I learned I could go to a Family History Center to view vital records from my Grandpa Leone's hometown. I began a 5-year process of viewing microfilm and typing every fact into a laptop. I have a text file with 29,864 lines of facts from his town's vital records, 1809–1860. I entered those facts into Family Tree Maker software to see how all the families fit together. (If you have an ancestor from Baselice, contact me!)

I'm related to 95% of the town. That research added 15,000 people to my family tree.

But I'm sure I made some errors. I couldn't look at each document again to correct any mistakes. Until 3 years ago. That's when a free website called Antenati published all those vital records and more. Now I have easy access to all the information I transcribed from microfilm in the dark.

Yesterday I ran Family Tree Analyzer to find some of those mistakes. It seems I have a family unit whose birth years don't line up. The 11 children (eleven!) have birth years from the 1760s to the 1780s. The problem is their mother, Antonia Cormano, was too young to have had the first 2 of her children.

And if her birth year is wrong, so are my estimated birth years for her parents and grandparents.

A routine error check lead me to several generations of one family with age issues.

The whole mess hinges on the unknown birth year of her first child, Antonio Colucci. Antonio died before 1809 when civil records began. So I can't find his death record easily. I estimated his birth year as 1746—25 years before his eldest child was born. I need to re-examine the marriage records of his descendants to sort things out.

Side note: Italian marriage documents are awesome. They include the bride and groom's birth records. And if any of their parents are dead, you get their death records. If their fathers and grandfathers are dead, you get the grandfathers' death records!

I wanted to learn the true birth year of Antonia's first-born child, Antonio. To find such an early record, I needed to find a male descendant of his who married after he died. Antonio's grandson Michele Antonio Colucci married in 1854. His marriage records did indeed have a death record for his grandfather Antonio. It shows his birth year as 1759, very different from my estimated birth year of 1746. That would help solve my problem with the birth years of Antonia and her ancestors.

But, of course, there's a complication. If Antonio was born in 1759, then he's too young to have had his 2 children born in 1771 and 1775!

The ripple effect of one bad date is enormous! (Are any "Indiana Jones" fans thinking of Harrison Ford's "Bad dates" line right now?)

Maybe Antonio's death record had his age wrong. These mistakes happen all the time. There were no other well-timed marriages that would include the death record I want. But let's say the birth year of 1759 is about right. Biologically, he could have had a child in 1775. So maybe his daughter Angela's birth year of 1771 is wrong. With a child born in 1797, Angela could have been born a bit later.

Her 1832 death record says she was 61 years old, born in 1771. Early birth records from the town rarely include the parents' ages. My only hope of seeing Angela's age apart from on her death record is her daughter's 1811 birth record. Sadly, that record confirms Angela's husband's age, but doesn't mention her age at all.

It's hard to imagine his age could be off by much when he's only 27 years old.

Well, that was frustrating. All I can do with what I have is fudge Antonio's birth year a bit and work backwards from there.

The following changes are going to need asterisks:

• I'll push Antonio's birth year back a bit and record it not as 1759, but as 1753. That'd make him an 18-year-old father. That's not common in this town, but it sometimes happened.
• I'll leave his father with his documented birth year of 1735. That'd make him an 18-year-old father, too. Like father, like son.
• Despite what her death record says, I'll change Antonia Cormano's birth year from 1742 to 1735. That'd make her an 18-year-old mother. It's like "Romeo and Juliet" if they'd lived.
• Then I'll follow my usual protocol. For Antonia's parents and grandparents, I'll subtract 25 from the year their child was born. If I change Antonia's birth year to 1735, then her parents were born "Abt 1710", and their parents were born "Abt 1685".

I'm not happy with fudging 2 documented dates, but the pieces didn't fit. I plan to work through this entire extended family, adding documents and sources to Family Tree Maker. If I'm lucky, some overlooked document will turn up with a better clue.

Genealogy, like life, can be messy. Slap on that bandage and keep searching.