Pluck the Stragglers Out of Your Family Tree

I love when someone finds their family in my online tree and contacts me. Last week I heard from a new-found 4th cousin.

More often our connection is distant—cobbled together through the relatives of in-laws. I had this type of connection last week, too. A woman found her grandmother in my tree and wanted to know what else I could tell her.

I told her everything came from the 1920 census and a few New York City death certificates. But I had nothing else to offer.

In fact, as I wrote in my reply, she shouldn't be in my family tree at all. I explained that her grandmother's sister married a man named Celentano. That man's uncle married my grandmother's 1st cousin, Consiglia Sarracino.

I knew from the names Celentano and Sarracino that this was some of my earliest family tree research. When I started, I followed every possible thread for my American cousins.

I used censuses to stretch out the Celentano family as far as I could. And then I built out the families of the people who married into the family. That's how her grandmother wound up in my tree.

Enforcing the In-Law Rule

It wasn't until much later in my genealogy life that I created an in-law rule:

I will not add anything to an in-law's profile beyond their facts and their parents' facts UNLESS my cousin asks me to research that family.^*

^*This rule does not apply to my Italian research where entire towns are inter-related.

Establish a rule to keep your family tree on the path you want.

How many other far-flung in-law branches are still in my family tree? How can I find them in my enormous file?

I explored Family Tree Analyzer software for a while, but it wasn't a shortcut. Maybe there is no shortcut.

Stragglers in my tree would come from my parents' and grandparents' generations. Those are the people I would have found in my early census searches.

Most of my close cousins are from my maternal grandmother's family. In my earliest days, I would have spent time on the families of Grandma's aunts and uncles, the Saviano family.

This is a manageable group to work with. Grandma had only 3 Saviano aunts or uncles who lived long enough to marry and have children.

Uncle Semplicio

As a little girl, my mom was afraid of her great uncle Semplicio. He was an older man with one eye. He literally lived in a closet next to her apartment for a while.

Long ago I met someone online with a connection to Semplicio's wife Giovina. With his encouragement, I built an enormous tree for Zia Giovina. Once I decided to follow my in-law rule, I cut out every relative but Zia Giovina's parents.

Looking in Family Tree Maker, I see families for 3 of Semplicio and Giovina's children. I can view each family to see if I need to delete anyone. Nope. Everyone was following the in-law rule.

Aunt Filomena

My grandmother's aunt is an example of going out of my way to document an in-law. But I want it this way. One of her grandsons is very interested in our family history, and he helped me with it.

Plus, Filomena's husband came from a town very close to Filomena's Italian hometown. There may be a family tie somewhere in their past!

Uncle Raffaele

Uncle Raffaele died long before I was born, but his wife Lucia was sometimes at family gatherings. My brother and I knew her and Aunt Filomena as "Zee Loo Gee" (Zia Lucia) and "Zee Vulla Men" (Zia Filomena). We never saw Zee Vulla Men without Zee Loo Gee.

I have extended families for Raffaele and Lucia's children in my family tree. Clicking through to view them all, I found only one in-law family I should delete. I do want to preserve the research, but not in my main tree. I'll follow my own advice and export this group of people to a new tree before deleting them from mine. (See "How to Export and Delete Branches from Your Family Tree.")

Exporting the 46-person branch was easy, but it didn't seem to capture the media files. I'll do that myself. My document tracker file will help me see which media files belong to this batch of people.

Deleting the branch was tricky. There wasn't one ancestor whose descendants capture the whole group. Instead, I worked my way through the families, noting all their media files. Then I viewed a family tree chart for each group and deleted them from my family tree.

I made sure all the right media files were no longer in my main tree, and I exported a new GEDCOM from Family Tree Maker. A GEDCOM is a text file that follows a standard format that any family tree software can understand. I opened the GEDCOM with Family Tree Analyzer to see if I missed anyone. Would FTA find unrelated people from this branch still in my family tree?

If your family tree is big, Family Tree Analyzer can narrow it down to certain types of names for you.

Here's how to check:

• Launch Family Tree Analyzer and open your latest GEDCOM.
• Go to the Main Lists tab to see everyone in your tree on the Individuals tab.
• To exclude close family and true cousins from this search:
  • Scroll to the right to find the Relation to Root column.
  • Click the arrow button at the top of the column to open a small window.
  • Unclick Select All, then click to select only the blank field at the top of the list.
  • Click the Filter button to close the small window.
• Scroll all the way left to find the Surname column.
• Click the arrow button at the top of the column and choose Sort A to Z.
• Browse the shorter list for the last names you don't want to find.

Success! I didn't find anyone who wasn't supposed to be there. Now I can backup and save my Family Tree Maker file.

But I'm not really done, of course. I have some cousins through my paternal grandmother, and her mother had a bunch of brothers. I can run through this same process with that branch and a few others.

Should You Do This, Too?

The main reasons for going through this export/delete process are:

• to stop misleading people into thinking you're their blood relative
• to stop spending time on branches that aren't the focus of your family tree
• to conserve computer resources.

Plus, I don't like it when I see a name in my tree index and think, "Who on earth is that?"

Combine these Genealogy Projects for a Richer Family Tree

Work smarter by combining your genealogy projects wherever you can.

Have I overloaded you with family tree cleanup projects? I know I can't keep up. Let's take a look at some of these projects with 2 goals in mind:

• Choose which projects you really want to get done, and
• See how you can combine 2 or more tasks and work smarter.

1. Create a Direct Ancestor List with Ahnentafel Numbers

See "Overwhelming Clean-up Task? Start With Direct Ancestors." Add a custom fact field to hold each direct ancestor's Ahnentafel number. If you can, give each of your 4 branches an identifier. In Family Tree Maker you can color-code a person and all their ancestors. I've given a different color to each of my 4 grandparents and their direct ancestors.

Now I can instantly spot the more than 290 direct ancestors in my tree. This was a one-day project. The color-coding took a minute. Finding and adding each ancestor's Ahnentafel number took an hour or two.

Check your Grandparent Chart for the Ahnentafel number. Don't have one? That's another project you can do in a day.

Whenever you have an overwhelming project to do, take care of your direct ancestors first. That's a lot less to bite off and a great start.

2. Create Your Elder Scroll

Here's a natural project combination point. See "Make Your Own 'Elder Scrolls'." That custom Ahnentafel field from project #1 makes it easy (in some software) to create a custom report. List your direct ancestors (starting with you) in Ahnentafel order. Include each person's name and birth date. Print it out and tape the sheets together, end-to-end. That's your Elder Scroll.

If you've done project #1, you can do project #2 quickly. This is a fun project with a result you can hold in your hands.

3. Get Your "Shoebox" Items into Your Tree

See "How Many Genealogy Gems Are You Sitting On?" Sometimes I see a photo of a relative on Facebook or in a cousin's online family tree. I save the image and keep it in my "gen docs" folder and in the "photos" sub-folder. Apparently I've been doing this with all kinds of family tree documents for years.

When working on a project to add photos to my tree, I realized I had to find the man's whole family.

This weekend I gave my virtual shoebox some attention. I started with census sheet images for people who I thought should be my relatives. Years later, I've built my family tree out so much that voila! Those people are in my tree now! I'm winnowing down my gen docs folder, but it's big.

4. Process All Facts and Documents for a Person at Once

Here's another project combination point. See "Make Smarter Progress on Your Family Tree." I was working on photos in my virtual shoebox, trying to place them in my family tree. When I got to one family portrait, I realized I hadn't documented the family of the father in the portrait.

So while I was there adding his photo, I went after his birth record and added his parents. His father fit into another family unit that was in my tree already. His mother needed more work.

I found her 1850 birth record. Then I found her parents' marriage records. I added each new vital record to my tree with source citations for each fact.

5. Write Your Ancestors' Life Stories

See "Which of Your Ancestors Has the Best Life Story?" When you're working on nearly any of the other projects, you can combine it with this one. Let's say you realize you have a ton of documents and facts for one of your ancestors. There aren't many holes left to fill.

This would be a great time to pull together the timeline of that ancestor's life story. You family tree software can help you by displaying that timeline. How would you tell this person's story? What family anecdotes can you add to bring this ancestor to life?

It can help to break the task into chunks. Capture their timeline of events in a Word document. Later add a couple of photos. Then add in some family stories.

6. Fully Document Your Ancestor's Entire Community

I don't know which other countries make this so easy. But if you have Italian family, you may be able to download your ancestral hometown's records. I did. See "3 Steps to My Ultimate, Priceless Family Tree."

I'm approaching this collection in a few ways, making progress on each of them:

• Rename each file to include the name of the subject. Then the whole collection becomes searchable on my computer.
• Add each document's main facts to a spreadsheet. This helps with searches and will be shareable with other descendants of the towns.
• Go through that spreadsheet line-by-line to see who can fit into my tree. Then get them in there.

My renamed files make it so easy to locate a record and build out a family. In project #4 above, I realized I didn't have any documentation on the ancestors of the man in the family portrait. So I searched my computer for his name, found his birth record, and kept going up and up his family tree.

This project benefits everything else I do.

7. Choose a Ripe DNA Match and Pursue the Connection

By "ripe" I mean a DNA match with a decent family tree. See "Can't Connect to Your DNA Match? Keep Trying."

I like to revisit my unsolved, ripe DNA matches once in a while. There's a chance that my other projects wound up adding a connection to a DNA match.

I'm trying to keep all my projects moving.

Decide which projects matter to you. Start doing any one of them with the others always in mind. Don't be afraid to go off on a tangent if it means you'll make progress on another project.

Keep track of where you left off on any one project, take care of that tangent, and come back to where you left off. Keep making valuable progress on your family tree—your legacy.

And happy birthday to George Harrison! He isn't gone. Shut up.

Use Cousin Baiting to Expand Your Family Tree

A new cousin took the bait and contacted me with details about his branch.

Filling out the branches of your family tree
will help attract more cousins.

You know those long ancestral scrolls you see on the ancestry TV shows we all love? The straight-up family trees that always end with the king of England? That may look great on a wall. But you'll never connect to your DNA matches if you don't look beyond your direct-line ancestors.

What can you do to help unknown cousins find you?

Add Their Branches

"Cousin baiting" is a term used by genealogy bloggers. It's a way to attract distant relatives to yourself. When bloggers write about their ancestors, they drop plenty of names, dates, and places. They're putting out bait to attract new cousins. New cousins may have old photos, a family bible, or papers a genealogy fan would treasure.

But cousin baiting isn't only for bloggers. You can attract DNA matches and other cousins by filling your family tree with bait. Go way out onto the branches of your tree. Add as many facts as you can find. Your 3rd great grandparents' 4th child may be exactly the right person to attract an important cousin to you.

Recently I chose 3 of my DNA matches to work on. I used a bit of the information from their family trees, but not much. They each had very few facts to offer.

With your own research library, you can choose almost anyone and fit them into your tree.

I, on the other hand, have an insane amount of data to work with. If you've been reading this blog for a while, you know I've put together an enormous genealogy research library on my computer.

I know which Italian towns my ancestors lived in as far back as the late 1600s. (Knowing the exact town is critical!) I've downloaded and organized all the vital records currently available from those towns.

With my collection of documents, and my knowledge of the last names found in each of my towns, I can quickly find the facts my DNA match doesn't know.

Make the Connection Clear

I'm baiting my DNA matches by offering them:

• exact birth, marriage and death dates for their ancestors
• images of their ancestors' documents with a link to the original file online
• details of their ancestors' siblings, other marriages, and other children.

I'm building out my tree one DNA match at a time. And while I'm doing that, I'm no doubt adding bait for my other DNA matches to find.

How are you handling your DNA matches?

• Are you waiting for them to contact you?
• Are you looking only at the closest relatives?
• Are you giving up on a match with a small family tree?

Make your family tree thicker and richer by adding more and more relatives. While you're working on one DNA match, several others may see the connection and contact you.

I photographed this man's grave many years ago, not yet knowing who he was.

Reap the Benefits

Each new cousin I figure out adds a couple of dozen people to my tree. Each time I do this, I make more connections. For instance, the Teresa Ciotti belonging to one DNA match turned out to be the Maria Teresa Concetta Ciotti already in my tree. I added 4 more generations to that DNA match instantly.

Because of my very bushy family tree, I heard from the great great great grandson of my great great grandfather in Italy. He gave me lots of details about his branch of the family. I never knew they had lived in America.

I hope this inspires you to creep further out onto the limbs of your family tree. The answers you need may be in the hands of a cousin you've never met. Lay the bait and help them find you.

How to Decide Who to Cut from Your Family Tree

It's Time to Give a Whole New Meaning to 'Trimming the Tree'

In my newbie genealogy days it was a ton of fun to find people in the census. I'd trace a family through the years. I'd add names and facts and build out the family with glee.

Before long, I had 8 generations of my great uncle's wife's family. I don't know my great uncle's wife. I never met my great uncle! I had no plans to do any research for this family. And I had borrowed a lot of the people from other trees.

Why keep these hastily recorded people in my tree? I want my tree to be more professional than that.

I've written here before about lopping 600 or so people from my tree. Their only connection to me was my brother's wife. So I carefully separated them all out into their own tree for my sister-in-law.

Now it's time to prune more people who don't belong. This will improve the value of my family tree.

I deleted my great uncle's wife's ancestors one at a time. I checked first to see if they had a document image attached to them. If so, I detached the image, deleted it from Family Tree Maker's media collection and from my folders. Then I deleted the person, their spouse and children.

I did this carefully so I wouldn't leave any detached people floating in my family tree file.

That was a good family to delete. They had little or no documentation. I didn't know anything about them. They were not my people.

Here are some ways to decide who to cut from your family tree.

Where Did These People Come From?

Start by scanning your tree for a name you don't recognize. Can you find their connection to you? If the relationship is absurdly distant, maybe you should cut their branch.

Take a look at your source information for them. Did you find these facts yourself, or did they come from someone else's tree? Do you have good sources? No sources?

If the sourcing is unreliable or non-existent, maybe you should cut their branch . Give it some thought before cutting. Do you think you might ever be sorry about your decision?

The way I see it, if the names didn't have good documentation, they weren't worth much to my family tree anyway. If I did want to build out that branch, I'd rather start from scratch and do it based on evidence.

What Can These People Offer My Family Tree?

There are some very unofficial 
sources hiding in my tree.

With more than 19,000 people, my tree has tons of ridiculously distant relatives. Picking a person at random, I find she's the mother-in-law of the wife of the father-in-law of the husband of the sister-in-law of my 2nd great grandfather. In short, she's related to me through the 1st wife of my 2nd great grandfather.

She's not my relative, but I'm keeping her. I've met a few people online who are related to my great grandfathers 1st wife. Plus, my ancestors in their little Italian towns were basically all related by blood or marriage. That's kinda my thing. That's what my tree is all about: finding all the ties that bind these towns together.

Because that's my thing, I'm not deleting any of my 18th- and 19th-century Italians.

Look for Strange Sources

Looking at my long list of sources in my family tree software, I see a few unofficial sources. They're named for the family tree I looked at when adding people to my tree.

These days I avoid looking at other people's trees, but I used to follow leads.

One of these family tree sources is attached to 22 facts. This might be a branch I should cut.

I'll choose someone from the list of 22 facts and use Family Tree Maker's Relationship Tool to see their relationship to me. Of course. They're related to my 2nd great grandfather's 1st wife again! A couple of generations of the family are in my ancestral hometown, and then they came to New York state.

Family Tree Maker shows me every fact
associated with a particular source.

Instead of deleting this branch, I'm going to flag the descendant who was born in America. I want to replace as many "Somebody's Family Tree" sources as possible with official sources.

Round Up the Out-Laws

Have you put together a branch for your cousin's husband, only to have your cousin divorce her husband? Do you care about keeping that branch?

My new policy is to keep only the parents of in-laws. I have exceptions, of course. I've had fun building out my 1st cousin's wife's tree. (I'm a sucker for Italian ancestors!)

Here's what I'd suggest to you. Give some thought to what you want from your family tree. If you're doing this just for the fun of it, then set your own rules and have a blast!

If you're more like me, and you've found a true passion in your tree, focus on that. Are you working toward applying to the Sons or Daughters of the America Revolution? Are you trying to map out our ancestors' migration paths so you can follow in their footsteps? Are you trying to fill your living room wall with a cool display of your immediate ancestors?

Whatever you hope to achieve…

• cutting the fat
• improving the sources and
• deciding where to focus

will make your family tree stronger.

And speaking of trimming the fat:

• When to Cut a Branch Off Your Family Tree
• How to Handle the Unrelated People in Your Family Tree
• Who Are These People?

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.

Why You Should Track Down the Extra Cousin

Years ago I found the 1898 ship manifest that includes my great great grandfather Antonio Saviano bringing his family to America for the first time.

He had been here three times prior to 1898—once with his eldest son Semplicio—but now he was ready for the entire family to settle down for good in New York City.

Antonio is my first ancestor to come to America, as far as I know.

In the grand scheme of things, the fact that my earliest connection with the United States is as recent as 1890 makes me feel like a newcomer.

On this 1898 ship manifest beginning on line three you see Antonio and his wife Colomba Consolazio (thank you, Italy, for always using a woman's maiden name) with two of his children: Raffaele and Filomena.

Semplicio was living in New York awaiting the family, and his final sibling, my great grandmother Maria Rosa, arrived separately with her husband and pregnant with my grandmother.

My family and others from the same town arriving in 1898.

But notice Angela Saviano on line seven. She is not Antonio's daughter, and the manifest says she is going to join her cousin Semplicio Saviano.

Angela is a cousin I didn't know about. I decided to try to find out more about Angela, but the trail went cold very quickly.

Much later I was exchanging information with my mother's third cousin Rita who claimed to have Saviano roots.

It turns out that Angela Saviano was her grandmother, and she died shortly after coming to America.

The mystery cousin turned out to be a key link to a cousin we could not previously place in our family tree.

But it gets even better. On that same manifest on line two is a 65-year-old woman named Caterina Ucci who is from the same town as my Saviano family: Sant'Angelo a Cupolo, listed as S. Angelo on this manifest.

While Angela was single when she left home in 1898, she did marry and have a daughter by late 1899.

And here's the fun part: Angela married the son of Caterina Ucci.

That's why I always take a look at the surrounding names on a ship manifest—especially when they're from the same town as my ancestor.

With a little more research I found out why the trail on Angela Saviano had gone cold. She died in June 1901 of a heart valve problem. I saw her death certificate at the New York City Municipal Archives.

It seems so unfair for this 19-year-old girl to have made that two-week journey across the ocean in 1898, married by early 1899, had a baby in late 1899, and died in mid-1901.

What makes me happy is that her grandchildren were always referred to as our Saviano cousins despite having never known young Angela Saviano.

O Brother, Where Art Thou?

Fan Out Your Search for Better Results

There's Donata's missing brother John!

Do you trace your direct-line ancestors only? Or do you explore other branches and in-laws when working on your family tree?

I believe strongly in gathering as much information as possible and presenting a more complete timeline for each family in your tree.

Most of my ancestors simplified my genealogy research by coming to America in a relatively short time span, and living within a few city blocks of one another.

Recently I was tracing one ancestor's sister through the years in census forms. In one census I found her brother Giovanni living with her. Giovanni had been missing to me, and he wasn't showing up in a search for his name.

If I hadn't been tracking his sister, I might never have found Giovanni.

This is also a good way to find a widowed ancestor.

When following the records for one of your great aunts or great uncles, you may find your widowed great great grandmother living with them. That helps narrow down the stretch of years when your great great grandfather died.

I guess you could say I prefer my family tree wide like a maple, not tall and thin like a spruce. Spread out and see how your family tree flourishes.

You'll also enjoy:

• Why You Should Track Down the Extra Cousin