Free Resource Provides Graphic Genealogy Research Basics

I'm happy to pay for my ancestry.com subscription. I have full access for less than a dollar a day.

But many genealogy fans prefer to go the all-for-free route.

Well, there's a newcomer to the genealogy resource field. MooseRoots is a completely free site that can help you find birth, death and marriage dates and places, and a lot more. (See also What To Do When You Have No Birth or Death Record.)

Results of a search for Grandma's birth record.

From their Genealogy Collections page, choose from a long list of categories, including:

• U.S. Census records
• State birth records
• State death records
• State marriage and divorce records (Australian records, too)
• Casualties from several wars

I began testing the site by looking for my grandmother's New York City birth record from 1899. I already have a copy of her birth record from the New York City Municipal Archives. The main fact I learned from her birth record was that her middle name was Carmina—and that's not what she told us it was.

The MooseRoots result was disappointing because it didn't include her parents' names. But it did include the certificate number. That would be enough for me to find the original on microfilm at the archives.

Next I searched the same collection for anyone with her last name to see if I would find her siblings. I found her two brothers, but the transcriptions of their first names were ridiculous. I found two misspelled Alfredos, and I wouldn't know which one was my great uncle if I hadn't already known his birthday.

But the lack of parents' names is based on the record collection, so I don't blame MooseRoots. I checked California birth records because I know they include the mother's maiden name. And those maiden names appeared in the results. But the California birth records did not include a certificate number.

Easily share various parts of the results page.

I was very impressed by MooseRoots' collection of Japanese-American Internment Camp records. Unfortunately, you can't search for a specific name or sort the results, so I didn't see the two last names of my in-laws. (See also Can Genealogy Research Be Painful?.)

I chose a random person named Tanaka (another family name in my husband's tree), and I was impressed with the results.

The website generates a narrative including lots of facts about Takanosu Tanaka: his year and place of birth, that he was widowed, the name of the "camp" where he was detained (Tule Lake), and much more.

As I scrolled down the page I found visualizations of Takanosu's facts. And this is the thing that makes MooseRoots unique: visualizations.

A company called Graphiq powers the site. Graphiq compiles facts into colorful graphs to make them easier to understand.

I believe MooseRoots has plans to become a much richer genealogy resource. When you click a person's name in your results list, you have the opportunity to add their photo once you create a free account. I hit a snag when I tried to register with my Facebook account. Instead, I chose the Google+ login option. That worked, but then the "Add or Edit Photos" button didn't do anything. So, they've got some kinks to iron out.

This video includes facts
unique to your ancestor.

Search results pages give you one-click access to an Ancestry search and a MyHeritage search if you're a subscriber. You can click a button to share any individual piece of the results.

The 1940 Census results included a nice surprise: a customized video that includes the census facts for the person you chose. There's also a scrollable list of other people on the same census sheet, with clickable names. (See also How To Squeeze Everything Out of the Census.)

When you're visiting the site, be sure to click the More menu at the top of the page to get an idea of which collections may be the most helpful to you.

Happy [moose] hunting.

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 Use a Paper Trail to Recreate Your Ancestor's Life

I *might* remember a long drive from New York to Ohio to visit my great grandparents when I was 5 years old. I *might* have a single image in my mind of great grandma's kitchen. But that's it.

Before I began researching my family tree, I knew next-to-nothing about my great grandfather Pasquale Iamarino—or Patsy Marino, as he was known. He lived in Ohio and worked for the railroad. Nothing more.

Genealogists enjoy piecing together our ancestors' paper trails and mapping out their locations. If we're lucky, we can wind up with enough facts to bring our ancestors back to life in a way.

Italian church records from the 1880s told me that Patsy and my other paternal great grandfather were 2nd cousins. A ship manifest told me that Patsy came to America at age 20, heading first to his uncle in New York City.

Four years later, in 1906, he was working for the Erie Railroad in Steuben County, New York. In the rail yard he must have met the Caruso brothers who came from a neighboring town in Italy.

By late 1906 he married the only sister in the Caruso family, in Hornellsville, New York. Hornellsville was a boom town at that time, achieving city status that year, thanks to the railroad.

When my grandmother Lucy was born in 1908, Patsy and his little family lived at 95 Front Street—a short walk from the railroad station. (I paced up and down in front of that house on a visit in 2015.)

I stood beside this rail yard in Hornell, New York, in 2015, imagining my great grandfather's life.

Between 1910 and 1914 Patsy moved to Albany and continued working as a railroad laborer.

Then, suddenly, in 1918 Patsy was in Youngstown, Ohio, and registered for the draft. Did he move to keep his job?

He was a boilermaker for the Erie Railroad, working in the railroad roundhouse, according to the 1920 and 1930 census.

City directories show him on Dearborn Street in Girard, Ohio in the early 1930s. This is the house I feel as if I remember.

By 1940, at the age of 58, Patsy retired. I'm closing in on 58 and wish I could retire! But my dad recently told me that Patsy had to retire because of lung issues. Did all those years cleaning out coal-burning engines give him something like black lung disease?

My great grandparents, before I was born.

According to the International Brotherhood of Boilermakers, "Railroad Boilermakers service and repair locomotives, and manufacture parts, including hundreds of items used every day in the railroad industry. They also perform welding on tracks and general maintenance work."

With today's worker safety rules, a boilermaker probably isn't at any risk of lung disease. But something incapacitated Patsy in his fifties. He lived to be 87 years old, enjoying free rail travel.

During his long retirement, Patsy enjoyed tending to his garden and his roses at the house on Dearborn Street. I wish I could remember him.

Searching for the Missing Link in Your Family Tree

My father's parents were third cousins. That was a bit of a surprise, but not a shock because they had the same last name.

All of their descendants have been great students and done well for themselves. No harm, no foul.

This past holiday weekend I began going through the vital records I'd downloaded from the Italian archives for my ancestral town of Sant'Angelo a Cupolo.

My goal: figure out if my great aunt Stella was related to her husband Attilio who had the same last name as her.

Attilio's 1924 passport photo.

This is an interesting family, and it became more curious as I sifted through the documents.

Carmine and Maria Rosa were married in Italy and had 3 babies. Carmine was "absent in America" when the first child was born, and he'd gone back and forth from the Bronx to Sant'Angelo a Cupolo many times. He was naturalized as early as 1899.

In 1904 Carmine and Maria Rosa and two of their children (the third must have died) came to America. While they lived in the Bronx, they had two sons, Enrico and Attilio, in 1906 and 1907.

I know from his passport papers that Attilio went to visit his family in Italy in 1924. On his application he stated that he had been in America ever since he was born in 1907.

But here's the shocking part.

Carmine and Maria Rosa went back to Italy as early as 1915, leaving young Enrico and Attilio behind. They had another child in Sant'Angelo a Cupolo in 1916.

There is no evidence that they ever returned to America, despite the fact that Carmine was a U.S. citizen.

If the parents left America in 1915, Enrico was nine and Attilio was eight. Enrico went to see his family when he was 17; Attilio went a year later when he was 17.

Meanwhile, I cannot find the boys in any census records until they are grown men.

Who was caring for the two boys?

I searched for families that had the same name as the boys' mother—dell'Aquila. I'd hoped to find them as part of an extended family household where they were receiving the full benefit of their U.S. citizenship.

But I can't find the boys anywhere.

Unless more vital records are put online, I can't find out who Carmine's parents are. I can't tell his exact link to my bloodline. But in such a small town, I don't think there was enough room for unrelated families with the same uncommon name.

I'll keep on piecing together the entire town of Sant'Angelo a Cupolo and hope I can find the missing link.

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.

Work in Batches to Strengthen Your Family Tree

Do you want to make your family tree accurate, reliable, and highly credible? There are many things you can do:

• Add descriptions to your images.
• Be consistent with addresses.
• Cite your sources accurately.
• Choose a style and stick with it.

I know it can seem overwhelming—especially if you started your tree long ago or you can only work on it now and then.

But if you divide and conquer your tasks, working in batches, you'll see real and valuable progress. If you gang-up your tasks, you'll save time and gain consistency.

Here's what I mean.

Add Descriptions to Images

Step through each image in whichever family tree software you use, focusing on one type of image at a time.

In Family Tree Maker, I can sort my images by type (because I clicked a checkbox to categorize each one). Now I can go one-by-one through each census form image, for example, and include important information. I've chosen to note which lines a family is on, and everything you'd need to find the original image:

• town, county, state
• enumeration district, city ward, assembly district
• page number and image number if it's part of a set
• a URL on ancestry.com or familysearch.org.

Great annotations make your facts reproducible and verifiable.

Be Consistent with Addresses

Your family tree software may help you validate a place name when you are typing. Take advantage of that feature if you have it.

Otherwise choose a style for entering place names, verify them on Google Maps, and stick with your style. I prefer to include the word County in my U.S. place names. I think it seems confusing (especially to non-Americans) to have something like "Monsey, Rockland, New York". That's why I consistently use this format: "Monsey, Rockland County, New York".

Entering the address shows me exactly where my great grandparents lived.

Cite Your Sources

This will be blasphemy to some of you, but I do not like excessively long citations for the sources of my facts. I use a short format each time:

• 1930 U.S. Federal Census
• 1915 New York State Census
• New York Passenger Lists, 1820-1957

There isn't any question which collection I'm citing. Plus I put the full description and unique link on the image's notes.

No matter what format, do include your sources. It's absolutely key to the strength and reliability of your data.

Be Consistent in Everything

Do you always use the same date format? I prefer dd-Mon-year (24 Sep 1959) because you should understand it no matter where you're from.

Do you always capitalize last names? I don't, because I think you lose something with compound names like McCartney or deBlasio. But stay consistent.

Do you always spell out every word in an address? I do because I feel it leaves no room for misinterpretation.

For example, my mother was born at 260 East 151st Street, Bronx, New York. If your native language were not English, E. 151st St. would be more challenging than East 151st Street.

Do you have a preferred style for descriptions of immigration facts? That may seem like an awfully granular thing to call out, but I like to add specific information to these descriptions. Here's my format:

For each ship manifest I record the date the ship left as an Emigration fact (for a person's first voyage) or a Departure fact (for subsequent voyages). In the description I follow this format:

"Left for [destination city] on the [ship name]."

Then I record the date the ship reaches port as an Immigration fact (for a person's first voyage) or an Arrival fact (for subsequent voyages). In that description field I follow this format:

"Arrived [with which relatives] to join [which relative] at [address], leaving his [relative] in [hometown]."

Now think about your family tree. Where do you feel your data needs the most care? Is it your sources? Images? Particular facts?

Pick one and dive in. Work your way through as many people as you can in one sitting to ensure absolute consistency. Make notes about the style decisions you've made so you can stick to them.

By picking one type of task and working hard to plow through it all, you will see overall improvement in your tree.

That accomplishment should inspire you to pick your next subject and get busy strengthening your family tree. Then you'll be ready to grow your family tree bigger and better.

5 Steps to Grow Your Italian Family Tree

I knew nothing about my grandfather's family when I started on my family tree. But I was determined to find his ancestors.

I spent years visiting a Family History Center to view microfilm from his town, ordered from FamilySearch.org. I wound up identifying ancestors born as far back as the late 1600s. That's so satisfying!

The process taught me how to piece together several generations of ancestors from foreign vital records.

This multi-generation chart is the tip of the iceberg.

After all that work, I recently found Antenati—an online collection of Italian birth, marriage and death records. The website has high-resolution images of the exact records I viewed on crummy old microfilm projectors.

Read how to use the Antenati site without understanding Italian.

Now I'm ready to move on to my other ancestors. Using the GetLinks program, I downloaded every available vital record from three other towns.

Here are 5 steps for climbing your Italian family tree.

1. Start with your youngest ancestor

If it's available, jump into the year you believe your youngest ancestor was born. For this example, let's say you're searching for your great grandfather.

Many times there is a handwritten index at the end of each year's records. If not, you may have to go page-by-page. The reward is worth it: you will learn his parents' names.

2. Search for siblings

After you find your great grandfather's birth, search the surrounding years for his siblings. These records can provide more information, such as the name of one or both of the baby's grandfathers.

In the Italian towns I've researched, a handful of names are used again and again. It's confusing, to say the least.

To clearly identify parents, a birth record may say, for example, "Giuseppe Sarracino fu Giovanni". This tells us that Giuseppe is the son of the late Giovanni. If it said "di Giovanni" we would know Giovanni is alive, but "fu" means he has died.

Getting that additional name will help you go to the next generational level.

3. Search for the parents' marriage records

You've found your great grandfather's parents names. You've found birth records for several of their children. Now you can search for their marriage records.

Italian marriage records are much more than a simple marriage certificate. They are several pages long, including birth records for the bride and groom, and death records of their parents who died. If the bride or groom's father is dead, and their grandfather is also dead, you should see the grandfather's death record.

Do you know what that means? You could wind up with the names of the married couple's great grandparents!

4. Scour the death records

The names and birth years you've gathered so far will help you search for these ancestors' death records.

A death record can provide you with the deceased's parents' names and their spouse's name.

If you see the word "vedovo" or "vedova", the deceased was a widow. You can search for their spouse's death record, too.

If you see "in seconde nozze" after the spouse's name, the deceased was married twice. "In terze nozze" means they were married three times.

5. Trust the earliest-recorded age

Birth records are gold, but you won't be able to find one for every ancestor.

Let's say you're focusing on your 3x great grandmother. You don't have her birth record, but her age is recorded on her 8 kids' birth and marriage records.

When you do the math, the recorded ages don't always add up. She gets older, she gets younger…which is right?

In the 1800s in Italy, people didn't keep track of their vital information the way we do today. By the time a woman was 55, she may not be sure when she was born.

That's why I put my faith in the earliest-recorded age. When a 22-year-old woman gives birth for the first time, she is more likely to know her age than 25 years later when that baby is getting married.

Follow these 5 steps and you, too, can pull generations' worth of ancestors from the Antenati website.

How I Gained 2 More Generations in 1 Day

Maria Rosa Caruso,
my great grandmother

Three months ago I wrote about how I used the "U.S. Social Security Applications and Claims Index" to learn the maiden name of my great grandmother's mother: Girardi.

Two months ago I wrote about how I'm downloading every vital record for my ancestral towns from an Italian genealogical archives web site.

Last night all that information came together to take me back two more generations on a branch of my family tree that hadn't grown in years.

Here's what happened.

I discovered many years ago that my great grandmother, Maria Rosa Caruso, was born in Pescolamazza, Italy. That was a problem at the outset because there is no such town! With a little research, I learned that Pescolamazza was renamed long ago to Pesco Sannita.

Pesco Sannita, in the province of Benevento, is a beautiful, well-manicured hill town that's very close to each of my other ancestral towns. (My heritage is highly concentrated!) I visited the town and its cemetery in 2005.

Over the last two days I downloaded every birth, marriage and death record for Pescolamazza from 1809 to 1942 (with a very big gap from 1861 to 1930). Once I had everything downloaded into sub-folders by year and type of document, I began searching for Maria Rosa Caruso's birth record and learned she had a twin brother Luca.

Maria Rosa's birth record.

This record confirmed her mother's full name of Maria Luigia Girardi. So I searched for Maria Luigia's 1840 birth record and found it. Et voila! I had her parents' names: Gioacchino Girardi and Maria Teresa deNigris.

I also found her husband's 1842 birth record—that's my great great grandfather Francesco Saverio Caruso—and learned his parents' names: Giuseppe Caruso and Luigia Pennucci.

The 1814 birth records are not available for Gioacchino Girardi and Maria Teresa deNigris, so I went searching for their marriage documents. Bingo!

The set of 1840 marriage documents told me that Gioacchino's middle name was Napoleone (was that 1814 patriotism or fear I wonder) and his parents were Nicola Girardi and Maria Pennucci. Maria Teresa's parents were Pasquale deNigris and Maria Emanuele Inglese.

Key facts from an Italian marriage record.

This generation of my 4x great grandparents was born between 1784 and 1793. I happily gained three new surnames (or cognomi in italiano): deNigris, Pennucci and Inglese.

I've expanded the families a bit more by finding two siblings for Maria Luigia Girardi and two for Francesco Saverio Caruso.

I will eventually squeeze every last drop of family out of these vital records as I did for my maternal grandfather's Italian hometown a few years ago.

6 Key Genealogy Facts on a Ship Manifest

I'm so lucky. All of my ancestors who emigrated sailed from Naples to New York between 1890 and 1920. The only document collection I need is "New York Passenger Lists". And every one of my people went through Ellis Island.

Ellis Island, December 2017

The ship manifest—the list of passengers on a particular ship for a particular journey—can tell you your ancestor's hometown. That alone is a significant boon to your genealogy research. It can lead you to their foreign vital records.

I'm more excited to find an ancestor who arrived in the U.S. in 1909 or later because there is likely to be a two-page manifest listing extra information.

The most treasured two-page ship manifests can provide your ancestor's:

Manifest Page 1

Not a nuclear family, but 4 out of 5
of these men are mine!

• Ship name (you can look for a photo of the ship)
• Departure date and port city
• Last name—a maiden name for many women
• Given name
• Age
• Gender
• Marital status
• Occupation
• Ability to read and write
• Nationality
• Race or people (e.g., Italian)
• Last residence (country and town)
• Name and location of nearest relative left behind
• Destination state and town

Manifest Page 2

And they were all going to the same place!

• Arrival date and port city
• Whether they have a ticket to their final destination
• Who paid for their passage
• How much money they are carrying
• If and when/where they were in the U.S. before
• Person they are joining here, often including the name and address of a relative
• Place of birth (country and town)
• A bunch of sure-fire extreme vetting questions, including (these are reworded):
  
  • Are-you-a-deadbeat type questions, such as were you in prison, an almshouse, or supported by charity?
  • Are you a polygamist?
  • Are you an anarchist?
  • Are you coming here because of a job offer?
  • Condition of mental and physical health
  • Are you deformed or crippled?
  • Height, complexion, hair and eye color
  • Identifying marks (including scars)

These are the blanks to be filled in for each person, but there is another set of facts for a genealogist to crave. Family members!

Sometimes you'll find an entire family traveling together. Or you may see a mother and her children, and the manifest will show the name and address of her husband who is already in the United States. Jackpot!

Your ancestor's ship manifest—assuming they did not sail so early that no questions were asked—should be the first thing you search for. You can't go back overseas and get that birth certificate if you don't know your ancestral hometown.

Not sure where to start? Check the census for your ancestor. It may include their immigration year.

Why You Need Your Ancestor's Draft Registration Cards

As the song teaches us, war is good for "absolutely nothing". Unless you're a genealogist.

Military records are filled with data points every genealogist wants. Perhaps the easiest military records to find are draft registration cards for World War I and II.

World War I

The U.S. declared war on the German Empire on April 6, 1917, entering World War I.

In 1917 and 1918, 98% of men in the United States who were born between 1872 and 1900 had to register for the draft. Each man went to a local place to have his information and signature (or mark) collected on a registration card.

It's interesting to note that although my grandfather was the right age to fight in World War I, there is no registration card for him. That's because he went back to Italy to fight for his native country.

The exact information collected depends on the state where your ancestor lived.

This tells me where his father lives in Japan.

For genealogists, the World War I registration card for your ancestor can provide:

• full name and current address
• age and date of birth
• race:
  
  • White
  • Negro
  • Oriental
  • (American) Indian
• citizenship status
• place of birth
• occupation, employer and address of employment
• list of dependents including parent, wife, and sibling or children under 12
• marital status
• name and address of nearest relative (could be in another country)
• military service
• exemption from draft
• your ancestor's signature
• physical characteristics:
  
  • height: tall, medium or short
  • build: slender, medium or stout
  • hair and eye color
• "Has person lost arm, leg, hand, foot, or both eyes, or is he otherwise disabled (specify)?"
• date the information was collected
• location of the draft board

World War II

We all know it was the attack on Pearl Harbor in December 1941 that forced the U.S. to officially enter World War II.

A staggering 16.1 million Americans fought in World War II, so a draft became necessary. This was the Selective Service Act.

The government registered more than 10 million men from November 1940—before the U.S. entered the war—until October 1946—after the war ended.

Better safe than sorry, I guess.

Front side of a World War II draft registration card

The government took the extra measure to register older men between the ages of 45 and 64. Think about what a 64-year-old man probably looked like in 1941. Ancient, no doubt. Ten years away from reaching the limit of life expectancy!

These "old man" draft registration cards were somehow completed in one day: 27 April 1942. The men had to have a birth date between two very specific dates: 28 April 1877 and 16 February 1897.

A World War II registration card for your ancestor can provide:

• full name and current address
• mailing address
• telephone number (if they had a telephone)
• age and date of birth
• place of birth including county (if within the U.S.) or country
• name and address of someone (usually a relative) who will always know where to find you
• employer's name and address
• place of employment or business
• your ancestor's signature
• physical characteristics:
  
  • race: White, Negro, Oriental, (American) Indian, or Fillipino
  • height
  • weight
  • hair and eye color
  • type of complexion: sallow, light, ruddy, dark, freckled, light brown, dark brown, black
• Other obvious physical characteristics that will aid in identification"
• date the information was collected
• location of the draft board

A World War II registration card gave me a breakthrough. My grandmother's Uncle Semplicio's card gave me his Italian home town. That told me where my great great grandparents came from.

Because of that card, I was able to find Semplicio's birth record, along with that of an unknown brother. The brother died as a child.

These draft registrations took place between census years. You may find that they provide additional addresses to help you map your ancestor.

Maybe they will provide an address that helps you find your ancestor within the previous or next census.

And maybe you'll learn about a physical disability you might otherwise have never known. For example, my grandmother's Uncle Semplicio had an artificial eye.

So that's why my mother was always afraid of him!