How to Find Location Errors in Your Family Tree

I love how family tree software uses predictive typing to keep us consistent. Predictive typing is a software feature that suggests words or phrases as you type. It can save you keystrokes and avoid typos.

I take advantage of this feature when entering addresses in my family tree. Why type out the full church address (Chiesa di San Leonardo Abate, Via Roma, 6, Baselice, Benevento, Campania, Italy) when I can type is "chiesa di san l" and choose the matching result?

But I've been adding facts to my family tree since 2002. I'm sure I've made mistakes. The places in our family tree need us to review them.

Let's see how the free Family Tree Analyzer (FTA) can help us find mistakes and inconsistencies.

Make that genealogy map work for you! Use this tool to find inconsistent place names in your family tree.

Your first step when using FTA is to generate your tree's latest GEDCOM file. If you use desktop family tree software, you can export a GEDCOM file from your software. If you work on your family tree online, go to your tree and export a GEDCOM file from the website.

Now open your GEDCOM in FTA and give it a moment to load. Then click the Export menu and choose Locations to Excel. This will open a spreadsheet in the generic *.csv format on your computer. Since I have Excel software, I'm prompted to save it in the Excel format right away.

Because genealogists love maps:

• Collect Important Family Places to 'Tour' Anytime
• 3 Spring Cleaning Tasks for Your Family Tree
• Without Vital Records, What Can You Do?

Get Your Places in Order

If your spreadsheet software allows, sort the contents by Country, Region, Subregion, Address, and Place, in that order. Scroll through and scan your spreadsheet for anomalies. Look for anything that strikes you as being a possible mistake. Highlight the suspicious Places in yellow so you can find and act on them later.

Here's one surprising thing I found. Looking at the town of Santa Paolina, Italy, I noticed two different church addresses. I thought I knew which one of them was wrong. But when I went to Google Maps, I realized I'd been using the wrong church name and address for this town! The bad information comes from an Italian parishes website I use often. From now on I'll have to double check its facts on the map.

Did a bad address creep into your family tree? I had one that came from a "reliable" source!

I switched to Family Tree Maker and looked at the Places tab. When I located the now-wrong church information, I was ready to make the correction. Here it's easy to overwrite all uses of the wrong address at once. With a copy and paste, I changed them all to the correct church name and address. This eliminated the wrong church from my family tree file. That will prevent the wrong church from showing up in predictive typing, too.

If your family tree is online only, open your GEDCOM file in your favorite text editor. This is how you'll see where you used the bad address. Search the entire file for the street address in question.

If the place is part of a birth, baptism, death, or residence fact, scroll up until you see a line beginning with 1 NAME. This shows you the name of the person in your family tree who needs you to fix this address. But if the address is part of a shared fact, like a marriage, look just above it for a line beginning with 1 HUSB or 1 WIFE. Copy either of their ID numbers (e.g., @I30048@) and scroll to the top of your GEDCOM file. Now search for another instance of that ID. I found a line showing 0 @I30048@ INDI. The very next line gave me the name I needed, 1 NAME Rocco Enrico /Gambino/.

Focus on the Street Address

There's another way to sort the Locations spreadsheet that will be useful to you. Try a new A to Z sort on the Place column only. When I did this I noticed three entries for 210 Ridgewood Avenue. Each one was in Allegheny County, Pennsylvania. But they all showed different towns: Bellevue, Pittsburgh, and West View. What's going on there?

Use this free genealogy tool to find location errors in your family tree. Fix them and improve your consistency.

I looked for the street address in Family Tree Maker's Places tab, but you can search your GEDCOM file, too. All three instances belong to one man. His 1930 and 1940 censuses say the address is in the West View Borough of Pittsburgh. His World War II draft registration card says it's in Bellevue. His 1950 veterans compensation application says it's in Pittsburgh.

On Bing Maps* and Google Maps, I found that 210 Ridgewood Avenue is part of the West View borough of Pittsburgh. The front window of the nearest U.S. post office (seen on Google Maps) says, "West View Branch, Pittsburgh, PA". I'll use 210 Ridgewood Avenue, West View, Allegheny County, Pennsylvania, USA, as the location. This puts a very accurate pin in the map within Family Tree Maker. The pin is right at the front door.

* I love Google Maps for its Street View, but Bing Maps points out the county or province and gives you the full information.

But why does his draft registration card say Bellevue? They wrote his address as 210 Ridgewood Ave., Bellevue, Allegheny Co., Penna., twice. On Google Maps, I found another Pittsburgh borough of Bellevue. It's right near West View, but it doesn't have a Ridgewood Avenue.

The logical answer was on the back of the draft card. The local draft board itself was not located in tiny West View, but in tiny Bellevue. It may have been a clerical error, or else that's how they were recording everyone they registered.

Without Family Tree Analyzer, there's only one way I could have found this discrepancy. I'd have to be looking at this man's list of facts in my family tree. Since he's the father-in-law of my 3rd cousin, that might never have happened. I'm glad to be able to sort this out today so I can see this cute little house in Google Street View.

I'm eager to work with this spreadsheet and add consistency to all my addresses.

Have Your Genealogy Plan B Ready to Go

My missing source citations project has exciting side effects. Revisiting some people uncovers my past errors. And sometimes I can merge two people because I found solid evidence that they're the same person.

Imagine how upset I was when I couldn't work on this project for about a week. A programming error broke the website I need the most for gathering source citations!

I needed a Genealogy Plan B so I could stay productive. Sometimes I go to Plan B late in the day when I'm getting tired of source citations. My usual Plan B is renaming the entire set of vital records I downloaded for my 3rd great grandmother's hometown of Apice. I've made tremendous progress, but I've got a ways to go.

The only problem with that Plan B is it makes me feeling like I'm neglecting my family tree. I needed something else. A Genealogy Plan B+ or a Plan C.

Take advantage of your GEDCOM file to see exactly who needs more research.

I don't remember which train of thought led me to it, but here's what I did. And it was super productive and fulfilling.

Eighty-five people in my tree have a special note in their birth date description field. It says their father was in America when they were born. This note is on their Italian birth records because it was the father's duty to report the birth. If he was away, the midwife or a grandparent would report the birth. Since this isn't the norm, they included an explanation. The reasons I've seen include:

• the weather was too bad to bring a newborn into town
• the father was ill
• the father was dead (look for a date!)
• the father was working somewhere in the countryside
• the father was out of the country, often in America.

Whenever I see that the father was in America, I add a stock phrase to the birth date description field:

• Her father was in America when she was born, or
• His father was in America when he was born.

Last week, searching for these fathers this became my Genealogy Plan B. I opened my GEDCOM file in Notepad++. This software has a GEDCOM language filter that makes the huge file easier to understand. I searched for every instance of "was in America".

One by one, I found these people in my Family Tree Maker file and began researching their father. Almost all were men who I didn't know had gone to America. I found their immigration records first. Then I searched for more U.S. documents, like draft registration cards and censuses. Sometimes I learned that they brought over their family and stayed here.

Many of the U.S. documents led me to discover later generations for the first time. I found distant cousins I didn't know existed. In some cases they had lived close to me.

After a few days of following my Italian cousins to America, I was still eager to return to source citations. Each morning I checked the Antenati site. On July 18th the website worked again!

Getting back to Genealogy Plan A, I had 2 productive days of citing sources for more than 100 people per day.

Not everyone is as driven as I am to be productive every day. But if you have more than a casual interest in your family tree, consider working on projects. Choose projects that will improve your family tree with every step you take.

Here are some project suggestions you may want to use as your Genealogy Plan A, B, and C:

• Collect missing census records and cite them immediately.
• Search for immigration and naturalization records and cite them immediately.
• Gather draft registration cards for every eligible man and cite them immediately.
• Try to fill in missing dates and cite them immediately.
• Add those missing source citations!

If your family tree has more than a handful of people, you'll need help figuring out what's missing. My tree is so vast, I abandoned my Document Tracker, but it's a great tool for seeing what you have and what you need. I used it with great results when the 1940 U.S. census came online, and a bit for the 1950 census.

Use the free Family Tree Analyzer to find missing fact types and missing censuses in your family tree.

Family Tree Analyzer offers an efficient way to see who's missing their census data. Here's how:

• Use Family Tree Analyzer to open your GEDCOM file.
• Click the Census tab.
• Choose the Relationship Types you want to search. You could restrict the search to closer relatives or test the entire file.
• Choose a census year for the UK, US, or Canada.
• Click the button labeled Show Not Found on Census.

A new window shows you who should be in the census you selected, but is missing that census citation. You can download the results as a spreadsheet and work through them.

The report works very well except when you have no mention of a country for someone. I have some English people in my tree, so I wanted to see the report for who's missing the 1881 UK census. It included a bunch of Italians for whom I have no country entered. I need to give them Italy as a place of birth even if I don't know their town. That's another project that can add value to your family tree and mine.

As for missing or incomplete dates, you have two good options. Option 1: If you use any type of desktop family tree software, sort your index list by birth date. Now you can see who has no birth date (they'll be at the bottom of the list) and who has an incomplete or estimated birth date.

I always enter an estimated birth date if a document isn't available. My rule of thumb is this:

• If you know their spouse's year of birth, give them about the same year (e.g., Abt. 1886).
• If you know the year their eldest child was born, subtract 25 and make that their estimated year of birth. This will prevent you from confusing two people with the same name who were born many decades apart.

Option 2: If your family tree is online only, go to the website where you keep it and download your GEDCOM file. Then:

• Use Family Tree Analyzer to open your GEDCOM file.
• Click the Facts tab.
• Choose the Relationship Types you want to search. (Choose them all.)
• Next to the long list of fact types, click the button that has a right arrow on it. This opens up a second long list of fact types.
• Click to select Birth in the second list.
• Click the button above that list. It's labeled, Show all Facts for Individuals who are missing the selected excluded Fact Types.

I'm happy to see that no one in my 84,044-person family tree is missing a birth date. I try to check each day to make sure I didn't add someone and forget to enter their year of birth.

I hope you're feeling inspired to choose a project or two to fortify your family tree. Here are some other value-packed projects to try:

• Another Way to Find Errors in Your Family Tree
• How to Find Distant Cousins on Facebook
• Taking the Time to Take Care of Our Own
• Work in Sprints to Strengthen Your Family Tree

Divorce Laws and Your Family Tree

How many divorces are in your family tree? It isn't an easy question to answer if you haven't entered divorce dates.

My 83,974-person family tree has 40 divorce facts for 39 individuals. To find your numbers:

• Open your GEDCOM file in Family Tree Analyzer.
• Choose the Facts tab.
• Selected Divorce.
• Click "Show only the selected Facts for Individuals".

Was divorce even possible for the people in your family tree?

I know the real number is higher. I don't have a Divorce fact for many of my cousins' divorces.

The number is also low because the vast majority of people in my family tree were born in Italy before 1916. (The birth records available online end in 1915.) Have you ever heard of the 1961 Italian movie "Divorce Italian Style"? Divorce wasn't legal in Italy until the end of 1970. But there was another law on the books that Marcello Mastroianni's character tried to use in the film.

The very idea of this law is shocking. Up until 1981 it was allowable to kill a woman (and only a woman) for being unfaithful. To kill her! They called it an honor killing. In the film, Mastroianni's character tried to lure his wife into being unfaithful. But she refused to do so.

The lack of legal divorce in Italy before 1970 means two things for an Italian family tree:

• If a person remarried, you can assume their 1st spouse died, even if the death record is unavailable.
• There were children born out of wedlock each year. Divorce wasn't legal, but affairs were okay—especially for men.

Let's take a look at when divorce became legal in several countries. Some of the dates are later than you might think, and some are way earlier than I expected. Religious institutions imposed many of the restrictions on divorce laws. There's also a distinct trend toward giving men all or most of the power.

More interested in marriage facts than divorce facts?

• How to Understand Your Ancestors' Marriage and Remarriage Customs
• Report Finds Marriage Mishaps in Your Family Tree
• Did Your Ancestors Have Arranged Marriages?

Two definitions first:

• No-fault divorce means you don't have to provide proof of your spouse's fault.
• Unilateral divorce means one spouse can end the marriage without the other's consent.

Which of these dates affect your family tree?

• Argentina: Separation became legal in 1888; divorce 99 years later in 1987. An updated 2015 law removed the required separation period.
• Australia: The Family Law Act of 1975 went into effect in January 1976 legalizing divorce.
• Brazil: Divorce became legal in 1977. An updated 2010 law removed the required separation period.
• Chile: Divorce became legal in 2004.
• Denmark: Divorce became legal in 1969 with a required six-month separation period.
• England and Wales: Divorce became legal in 1857, but there were limitations. There had to be proof of infidelity, cruelty, rape, or incest. In 1923, a woman could sue for divorce, but she faced a higher burden to provide proof of fault. The process became much easier in 2020.
• Finland: Divorce became legal in 1988 with no required separation period.
• France: Divorce had a bumpy road in France. It was legal in 1792, repealed in 1816, reinstated in 1884, and overhauled in 1976.
• Germany: Divorce became legal in 1977 with a required separation period.
• Greece: No-fault divorce became legal in 1979. In 1983 Greece allowed unilateral divorce with a required separation period.
• Ireland: The Family Law Act of 1996 was the first significant law allowing divorce. Before that, the country's 1937 Constitution barred divorce.
• Italy: No-fault divorce became legal in 1970. Unilateral divorce with a required separation period became legal in 1975.
• Mexico: Divorce became legal in 1915, but it is still not common. In the 1950s and 1960s, many Americans traveled to Mexico for a "quickie divorce".
• Norway: Unilateral divorce became legal in 1993 with a required separation period.
• Portugal: Unilateral divorce with a required separation period became law in 1976. In 2008 the country abolished fault-based divorce making the process easier.
• Spain: Generalissimo Francisco Franco (still dead) overturned the divorce laws of the early 1930s. Divorce was illegal from 1938 to 1981. In 2005 the country instituted unilateral divorce with no required separation period.
• Sweden: Fault-based divorce became legal in the 1600s. The country passed mutual agreement divorce in 1915, and unilateral divorce in 1973.
• Switzerland: Unilateral divorce with a required separation period became legal in 2000.
• United States: In 1629 the Massachusetts Bay Colony created a judicial tribunal for divorce. Laws vary by state throughout the country.
• Uruguay: Divorce by mutual consent became legal in 1907; divorce by the sole will of the woman in 1913. That's unique!

If you have people in your family tree with more than one marriage, take another look at them. Depending on the place and year, you may be able to infer the death of the first spouse before the 2nd marriage.

3 Questions to Make You a More Efficient Genealogist

A lifetime ago I worked for a company that printed complex direct mail pieces. You know. Junk mail. My job was to help train new printing press operators. With the help of two experienced pressmen, I created training videos and manuals.

What does this have to do with genealogy? I had to learn the printing process myself before I could document it for the training materials. You can do this with the family tree-building process to work smarter and get more done in less time.

There are 3 questions that can help improve your family tree-building efficiency.

Ever since I retired, genealogy has been my full-time job. (That's why I retired.) How fabulous it is to have a job you can't wait to start every day! And I'm crazy-efficient and productive because of the steps I've taken. Here's what makes me so prolific:

1. Professional workspace. My desk, in one corner of my house, has a computer connected to three monitors arranged side by side. On a normal day, I'll have:
   • Family Tree Maker open on monitor one
   • a spreadsheet, desktop search program, and text file on monitor two
   • a web browser and any images on monitor three.
2. Consistent file naming. I do everything digitally, so I don't have shelves full of color-coded binders. I can't even imagine working that way. Years ago, I adopted a file-naming process that makes every file easy to find.
3. Top-notch tools. Some of my computer software is subscription-based, but you can find free alternatives. I use:
   • Adobe Photoshop for images
   • Microsoft Excel for tons of data handling
   • Notepad++ (free) for text files
   • Everything (free from voidtools.com) to locate any file on my computer
   • Family Tree Maker to store my genealogy work, and I synchronize it with my Ancestry tree every day.

With more professional tools, you can be a more professional genealogist.

Set yourself up for success with the right tools and an efficient workspace. Then it's time to examine your family tree-building processes. Imagine you have a day to spend working on your family tree. What will you set out to do? Ask yourself these three questions:

1. What are my goals for the day?

You might want to find all the census records your tree is missing. You might decide to add people and facts to your cousin-in-law's branch because they asked you to. Or you may create a Book of Life to share with family on the 4th of July.

I have a few ongoing projects I can dive into each morning. I know exactly which programs and files to have open when I'm ready to start. I created a computer macro to launch them all with one command: Ctrl + 1.

Whatever you plan to do, think about what needs to be at your fingertips and get it there.

2. What steps will I take in the process?

You can break down most goals into steps. Say you need to use the vacuum cleaner. You have to:

• get out the vacuum cleaner
• put the proper attachment on it
• plug it into a convenient outlet
• begin vacuuming.

When you're done, you need to put everything back the way it was.

Now think about the genealogy process you want to do. Let's use my long-term project to add the missing source citations to my family tree as an example. Once I use my macro to open:

• my tree in Family Tree Maker
• the spreadsheet of everyone with no source citations (generated by Family Tree Analyzer)
• Everything
• the Windows calculator (for calculating year of birth)
• my web browser to the site I need (in my case, the Antenati portal for Italian vital records)
• the Notepad++ file with my source citation templates

…I'm ready to begin creating source citations. The steps in this process are:

• Choose a person from the spreadsheet. I like to stick to people from one town for greater efficiency. Lately I've been working through everyone with a particular last name.
• Find the person in Family Tree Maker to see which citations they need. They'll need some combination of birth, marriage, and death records.
• Click on their father and see if they have siblings who also need source citations.
• All the vital records for my ancestral hometowns are on my computer for easy searching. What I need to do is find the document on the Antenati portal so I can create the citation. I use Everything to locate all the siblings at once. Say their last name is Basilone and their father is Giovanni. I type "Basilone di Giovanni in Everything and they all show up. The file names include the document number I need to locate online.
• On the Antenati portal, I open each collection I need in a separate browser tab. If I need birth records for 1858, 1862, 1865, and 1868, I open those sets of records in different tabs.
• In each tab, I locate the document number I need and grab the details for my citation. I need to edit my citation template to show the right year, document number, image number, and URL.
• When the citation is complete, I add it to my Family Tree Maker file.
• Each time I complete all the citations for a person, I delete their name from the spreadsheet. This way I know the exact number of people left to complete.

I do this until I'm worn out for the day. Then I go through my end-of-day file backup routine.

Whichever task you're planning to work on, think through the steps or take note of them as you do your work.

Knowing the steps and their order helps the whole process become second-nature. Look for efficiencies along the way.

I like to locate the right document in each open browser tab. Then I create the citations one after another. It feels as if the process goes faster this way. I also like to click to highlight all the siblings in the Everything results screen. Then I can deselect each person when their citation is complete. This way I never forget to complete a person. That helps in a family of 12 children!

3. Which part of the process slows me down?

Efficiency is the key to getting more done in less time. Where can you be more efficient in your process?

• Tackling all the siblings in a family at once makes me more efficient. I'm moving around less in my family tree.
• Opening the record collections in separate tabs makes me more efficient. I get the process started in several places instead of one at a time.
• Having a source citation template in an open text file makes me more efficient. I keep separate templates for births, death, marriages, and marriage banns. Plus one more for what's called matrimoni processetti. This minimizes the amount of typing I have to do.

Whatever genealogy site you use, open the best search results in different tabs. Your original search results list will remain there, waiting for you to return.

Picture me, if you will, sitting before my three monitors in the corner of my great room for hours a day. My goal with the source citations project is to complete 100 people a day, removing them from my list. If there are lots of siblings, I can complete 130 people a day.

Pay attention to the steps you take to reach your goal, and see where you can worker smarter. Being more productive will keep you from feeling frustrated in your quest, too.

Your 8 Favorite Genealogy Blog Articles

I launched this blog in January 2017. I've kept to a once-a-week schedule, making this my 667th article. This page features an automatic tally of the 8 most popular articles.

I'd like you to help me with an experiment. The following is a list of the 8 most popular articles, in order from most to least. Please click to read the ones that interest you the most—ones you haven't read already or read recently. Then we'll see if we change the rankings.

Does the popular vote reflect your choices? These are the 8 most popular genealogy articles.

Can't find one you haven't read already? Then use the search box or explore this blog to find something that interests you today. It seems to me the most popular articles feature at least one of the following:

• a project to do
• a free give-away, like a spreadsheet
• a new resource to try.

This experiment will help guide me as I create new material for you to enjoy.

1. How to Use the Online Italian Genealogy Archives

I spend so much time with Italian vital records that I dream about them. I started out knowing nothing and have become an expert. This article will help you get comfortable and proficient with Italian vital records. They are essential if you have any Italian ancestors in your family tree.

2. 3 Things to Do with Ahnentafel Numbers

Each of your direct ancestors has an assigned number whether you know it or not. You are number 1, your father is number 2, your mother is number 3. And those numbers continue in a specific pattern as far back as you can go.

This article features a free spreadsheet for you to fill in with the names of your ancestors. Find out how the numbering system works and how to use it to your advantage.

3. How to Create a 'Book of Life' for Your Relatives

If you've seen PBS's genealogy show, "Finding Your Roots with Henry Louis Gates, Jr.", you know the Book of Life. It's a graphic summary of the genealogy documents and pictures that tell your story.

See how easy and fun it is to create a Book of Life for yourself or someone else in your family. It's an instant treasure. Imagine creating one you can add to with each new discovery.

4. Run This Genealogy Report To Help Clean Up Your Dates

When your family tree reaches a certain size, it's hard to know which of the many people in it need more attention. This project uses the free Family Tree Analyzer program to spot everyone who's missing a key date.

How many people in your family tree need you to go back and search for their death date? How many people have an estimated date that you can resolve with a bit of research? This technique makes it easy.

5. Free Italian Military Records for WWI and WWII

This article has surged due to a high number of Google searches. I find these Italian military records to be fascinating and overflowing with details. I've made a point of collecting every one I can find for the men born in my handful of ancestral hometowns.

In 2018 I visited the archives in the city of Benevento to see my grandfather's military record in person. What a find! It answered my many questions about his time as a prisoner of war, and gave me so many more facts.

6. Why You Should Be Using the Free 'Family Tree Analyzer'

This introduction to Family Tree Analyzer explores several of its features. At the bottom of the article are links to 4 more articles that go into more detail about different ways to use FTA. This program never stops giving.

7. Free Resource Lets You Plot Family Tree Locations

You can create a custom map for anything you can think of that's related to your family tree. I used Google My Maps to show my grandfather's path through different states once he arrived in the USA. I've mapped all my own home addresses (there are at least 15). I've recreated one or two of my European vacations so I can relive the memories.

Find out how to use Google My Maps. Then check out the related map articles at the bottom of the article.

8. How to Visualize Your Ancestor-Finding Progress

This article revisits the "grandparent chart" I created for Ahnentafel numbers. You'll see how filling in the names of your ancestors gives you a quick visual of your family tree progress.

Notice how I added a row near the top of the spreadsheet to keep track of how many ancestors I'm missing from different generations. That can show you where to concentrate your efforts.

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Thank you for participating in this experiment. Feel free to leave a comment or send me an email with topics you'd like me to cover in future articles. (My address is in the footer of this blog until I get slammed with spam.)

Find Your Passion and Genealogy is Pure Joy

Everyone with an interest in their family tree was a beginner once. And it seemed overwhelming. Then we find our way. We make mistakes. We go back and fill in what we missed. After a while, our family trees have leaves on almost every branch.

Is this when some people get tired of genealogy? Do they imagine there's nothing left to do?

If that's how you're starting to feel, you haven't found your passion yet.

A single spark can ignite your passion for your family tree.

Finding That Passion

I became so passionate about genealogy that I resented having to work for a living. So my husband and I did the math, and I was able to retire a few years early.

Now I can devote my time to the two tasks that spark my passion.

1. Citing my sources. In 2017 vital records for my ancestral hometowns came online. I downloaded them all to my computer. I decided to piece together tons of families from these towns without citing my sources for now.

Big mistake! Who's going to believe my family tree without sources? So I've been creating all the missing source citations. I've made a lot of progress and should finish later this year.

At the start, more than 9,000 blood relatives in my family tree had no source citations. Today it's down to 814 blood relatives. I push to complete at least 100 people a day. I've gone as high as 180 people in a day.

When I finish the 814 remaining relatives, I'll have 52,000 non-blood relatives to tackle. But they're not as big of a priority. I'll keep working on this project, but it may not get all my attention every day.

This passion is making my family tree valuable to anyone with relatives from my towns. It will be my legacy.

2. Italian vital records. Once I retired, I took things up a notch. Instead of searching the document images for one relative at a time, I began renaming the images. Now they're all searchable on my computer. I name each birth and death record for the individual and their father. For example, take the 1814 birth record of Antonio Bianco, the son of Francesco Bianco. I renamed the image "8 Antonio Bianco di Francesco". (8 is the document number. The di means of in Italian and makes a great shorthand.) The image's folder location tells me the type of record, year, and town. It's in the "1814 births" folder for the town of Baselice.

For marriage records, I name the groom and bride and use the document number. For example, "15 Giovanni Iamarino & Libera Scrocca".

With the images renamed, I can search for a particular name or for all the children of Francesco Bianco. This is a tremendous help when you're piecing together a whole family.

When I finish renaming an entire town's records, I create a spreadsheet and publish it on my website. Anyone with ancestors from my towns can search these files for their people. They can see where to find their documents online. This is a valuable service, so I'm passionate about working on the next town. (See "How to Create and Share Your Ancestral Town Database".)

Now It's Your Turn

What about you? What can you do to keep up your interest and improve the quality of your tree?

Seek out the parts of the family-tree building process that excite you. When you find one, pour your time into it. I'll bet it keeps you eager to come back for more. Here's a checklist to get you started.

• What’s your favorite part of the process?
  • Reviewing your online hints. See "3 Ways to Tell If That Hint is No Good".
  • Checking out every decent search result. If I discover that one of my Italian nationals came to the United States, I do search for them in U.S. records. Then I do the same for their children.
  • Working on one document type at a time. When I decided to improve my downloaded document images, I went through one type at a time. I fixed them in Photoshop. I found it exciting to crop the big black backgrounds out of draft registration cards. Now my images look better and take up less space. (See "How to Improve Your Digital Genealogy Documents".)
  • Examining your DNA matches' trees. Sometimes it's a DNA match's tree that tells me who married whom, and who left Italy. These are valuable leads.
  • Poring over new record collections. What a joy it was when the New York City Municipal Archives put lots of vital records online. Now I can find vital records for relatives at my desk. (See "When Is a Genealogy Harvest Too Big?")
• What needs improvement?
  • Is your style consistent? Add quality to your family tree by using a consistent style for names, places, and dates. (See "Make Consistency King in Your Family Tree".)
  • How complete are your source citations? The free Family Tree Analyzer can show you exactly who is missing their citations. It's easy to generate a list. See "These Steps Make Your Family Tree Much More Valuable".
  • Do your images need help? Why put a color-faded photo in your family tree when you can correct the color? Why have a huge black border around that ship manifest? You can use photo-editing software to improve all your images.
  • Are you happy with your document filing method? If you can't find the document you need right away, you may need a more logical system. See "3 Simple Rules for Managing Your Digital Genealogy Documents" and "3 Rules for Naming Digital Genealogy Documents".
• What can you chip away at each time you open your tree?
  
  I'm lucky to be able to treat this hobby like it's the full-time job I always wanted. But you may not have much time to spend on genealogy. Which tasks can you pick up at a moment's notice and make good progress on? Some suggestions:
  
  
  • Make a list of your closest DNA matches. Work on identifying the closest match you don't already know. (See "Digging Into a DNA Match's Family Tree".)
  • Run any report from Family Tree Analyzer and whittle down the list. For instance, run a Data Errors report and check the results against your family tree. How many can you fix in one sitting? (See "How to Find Errors in Your Family Tree".)
  • Start a folder for one ancestor and gather more and more documents to use in their "Book of Life". Keep a text or Word file in that folder, too, with ongoing notes to use in their book. See "How to Create a 'Book of Life' for Your Relatives".
  • Keep a detailed note about where you left off for the day. Return to the same task next time without having to jog your memory.

Someone once said choose a job you love, and you'll never have to work a day in your life. Well, if you find your passion for genealogy, you'll be glad to work on your family tree every chance you get. You'll feel driven to make it the best it can be.

Go find your spark and light that fire!

4-Tool Combo Solves a DNA Problem

I've been playing around with the chromosome browser on MyHeritage. In my DNA match list on MyHeritage, I have a woman, her father, and his mother. (They're all my AncestryDNA matches, too.) I know their roots are in the Italian hometown of my dad's family.

Their relationship to each another should look interesting on the chromosome browser. I compared them to myself and my dad and my 6th chromosome is where the action is! My dad and the woman and her father and her grandmother all intersect on two parts of my 6th chromosome.

Then I looked at my dad's DNA test. I added the 3 family members (but not myself) on his chromosome browser. I found that the 4 of them intersect on my dad's 6th and 11th chromosomes. That's a solid connection.

So here's the big question. Why does the grandmother show up in my Family Tree Maker file as "wife of 4th cousin 1x removed"? There was a ton of intermarriage in our shared ancestral hometown. So the grandmother and I have 27 different relationships in FTM, but none of them are by blood.

I've let this go unresolved for too long. It's time to bring in genealogy tools in addition to the chromosome browser.

I knew they were related to each other. A chromosome browser tied them to Dad and me.

Tool #1: Family Tree Analyzer

A reader of this blog once told me that Family Tree Maker has a known flaw when it comes to relationships. There will be cases where it is wrong—particularly with more distant relationships. The reader suggested I defer to Family Tree Analyzer for the correct relationship.

So I opened my latest GEDCOM file in Family Tree Analyzer. I found the grandmother in the Individuals table. When I scrolled over to see the Relation to Root column, it said she's my 6th cousin once removed. Aha! So there is a true cousin connection.

Tool #2: Ancestry.com

I build my tree using Family Tree Maker and synchronize it with my tree on Ancestry.com. What a surprise to see that my Ancestry tree already knew she is my 6th cousin once removed. She's labeled as such on her profile page.

On that page I can click our relationship to see a list of generational steps from her to me.

Tool #3: Family Tree Maker

Back in Family Tree Maker, I followed those generational steps. I went from her to her father, grandfather, great grandmother, and up that paternal line until I saw it.

Way up the line, her 5th great grandparents had a yellow color code. (I use color-coding in FTM to identify my 4 grandparents' lines.) That tells me they are direct ancestors of my paternal grandfather. When I clicked their names, I saw that they are my 6th great grandparents. (Family Tree Analyzer agrees.)

Tool #4: Relationship Calculator

I wanted confirmation and to see my relationship to her son and granddaughter. (They each have more than one connection to me.) I opened my relationship calculator spreadsheet. First I went to the column for my 6th great grandparents. Then I went down that column to the row where my DNA match is this ancestor's 5th great grandchild. The column and row intersect at 6th cousin once removed.

The next 2 rows show my relationship to her son (7th cousin) and granddaughter (7th cousin once removed). Finally! I've known about these DNA matches for years without understanding our relationship.

Multiple tools pointed to one relationship. Then my color-coded family tree brought it all together.

I did look at the Shared cM Project tool on DNA Painter to try to figure out my relationship to the grandmother. But there were too many possibilities. I also looked at the diagram of possible relationships diagram on MyHeritage. Our true relationship is too distant to show up there. Even when I compared her to my father's DNA test, it leaned toward a 3rd cousin relationship. (Thanks, endogamy.) The true relationship of 6th cousins was too far away to show.

As I mentioned, I'd already placed these 3 DNA matches in my family tree. I can take their lines back to my 8th great grandfather, born in 1671. But it always bothered me that the real picture of our relationship was hiding. Family Tree Maker does know that my 8th great grandfather is my DNA match's 7th great grandfather. But I would never have seen the true relationship without the help of other genealogy tools.

The truth is out there, as they say.

5 Reasons to Add Sources to Your Family Tree

My family tree has grown past 83,000 people. Last year I began a full-time campaign to add all the missing source citations to my family tree. I've forgotten the original numbers, but I have 5,142 cousins and 52,358 other people in need of sources. I work my way through an average of 100 people a day.

Why would anyone work this hard on source citations? I'm glad you asked (LOL). Here are 5 good reasons to make source citations a high priority in your family tree research.

Show everyone the value of your family tree by bringing the receipts.

1. Sources Make Your Family Tree Believable

Imagine you find a family tree online that contains your grandmother's first cousin. The tree has lots of details and ancestors you don't have. Then you look closer and find that tree has no source citations at all. How can you believe any of it?

Now imagine everyone in that family tree has source citations. They have links you can follow to see the original documents for yourself. Wouldn't that be fantastic?

If you're doing quality work on your family tree, don't you want others to find it believable? Maybe their tree has errors and yours is right. Your source citations are what makes your work reliable.

2. Sources Help Put Others on the Right Track

It's common for people to accept hints or borrow names and dates from other trees—leading to big mistakes. Then others find their tree and perpetuate the same mistakes.

Let your well-sourced family tree be the beacon that shows them the way. The next person who see hints from incorrect trees, and your sourced tree, can recognize the truth. Only you brought the receipts!

3. Sources Give Distant Cousins an Incredible Gift

I love when people contact me because they found their ancestors in my family tree. Often they're unaware that the Italian vital records are online. They're wondering how on earth I found all these names and dates.

That's when I point them to my source citations so they can see the vital record images for themselves. And I give them the link to my Antenati instructions, if they're interested.

I've busted down brick walls for lots of people with roots in my ancestral hometowns.

4. Sources Help You Fix Errors in Your Family Tree

Hunting down records online to get the source citations gives you a chance to review your facts. I've found errors that might have stayed there forever if not for this second look. I've discovered:

• Typos that resulted in a wrong address.
• People I need to merge into one.
• Duplicate people, one with the wrong birth year and one with the right one.
• Missing baptism dates.
• Missing middle names because only their first name is in the birth record column. Their middle names are in the body of the record, and I overlooked them.

I'm always surprised to find these errors, but so happy to fix them.

5. Sources Create a Glorious Legacy

For all the reasons above, a well-sourced family tree is far more valuable than an unsourced tree. If many of your sources are "Ancestry Family Tree" or something else generic, that's not good enough. You can do better. You need to get to the original sources. (See Trade Up to Better Family History Sources.)

The mission of this blog is to help you create a one-of-a-kind legacy—your family tree. Consistency, source citations, and a lack of errors are key to making your family tree your legacy.

I fell down on the job with my Italian vital record source citations. I was all excited to connect everyone from my ancestral hometowns. And I did that on a grand scale. But it's no good to other people without those source citations. That's why I'm driven to whittle down my list of sourceless people every day.

How You Can Get Started

You can generate a list of people in your family tree missing source citations in a few steps.

Use Family Tree Analyzer to show who has no source citations in your family tree.

• Export a GEDCOM file from your family tree, wherever you keep it.
• Open that GEDCOM with Family Tree Analyzer. (Also see How to Find Errors in Your Family Tree.)
• Go to the Main List tab.
• Click the Export menu and choose Individuals to Excel. This will prompt you to save a CSV file to your computer. You can open a CSV file with any brand of spreadsheet software.
• For ease of use, I find it's best to delete every column except:
  • Forenames
  • Surname
  • BirthDate
  • RelationToRoot, and
  • SourcesCount (the last column)
• Use your spreadsheet software to sort the SourcesCount column from A to Z so the zeroes are at the top.

I want to focus on blood relatives first, and people with no sources at all. So I sorted my spreadsheet by these columns, in this order:

• SourcesCount
• RelationToRoot
• Surname
• Forenames

I deleted all the rows with one or more existing sources, leaving only the massive amount of zeroes. When they're all gone, I'll chase down other individual facts with no sources.

Most of my source citations are Italian vital records from the Antenati website. There's plenty I can do to increase my productivity:

• Work on one town at a time. I use a template for each type of citation (birth, marriage, death). Then I change the numbers and links as needed.
• Work on one full set of siblings at a time. I have all my towns' vital records on my computer, renamed for easy searching. (The file names include document numbers and the person's father's first name.) I can search for all the children of one man, see their record numbers, and find the documents on Antenati. The less I have to move around within my Family Tree Maker file, the faster I can go.

Even if this sounds like too much work to you, take a look at your SourceCount in Family Tree Analyzer. Celebrate your accomplishments or steel yourself for the important work ahead.

Commit to This One Genealogy Project

No time for a genealogy marathon? Commit to one family tree project and tackle it in sprints.

As I hope you noticed, I haven't publish a new genealogy article for the last two weeks. I had to travel to help my parents move, and after that was Christmas. But the visit gave seven of us COVID-19, so there was no Christmas.

Did I put the brakes on my family tree progress during that time? Well, helping my parents move was beyond exhausting, so I had no time for genealogy. But COVID has only slowed me down a bit. As sick as I am, I've spent at least a half-day every day adding people and source citations to my family tree. It helps keep my mind off my symptoms.

My overwhelming project in 2024 has been to create thousands of source citations I'd left out. I used Family Tree Analyzer to create a spreadsheet of everyone in my family tree who had no citations at all. My tree has 83,000 people, and I still have 62,000 people with no citations. That's embarrassing.

But I know why I skipped them in the past. I have easy access to the vital records for my Italian nationals. I knew I could go back at any time and create the source citations. But yikes! I went too far.

Because this project seems as if it'll take a few years, I need to liven things up sometimes. Instead of working my way down the list, I jump on opportunities.

When a man contacted me on Ancestry about his ancestors in my family tree, I decided to kill two birds with one stone. I added missing source citations to his people and crossed them off my citation to-do list.

I haven't found a cousin connection for the two of us, but his people are from my 2nd great grandmother's hometown. Long ago I downloaded all the available vital records for the town to my computer. (These mass-downloads are no longer easy to do. Websites block any attempts.) Then I renamed each of the more than 12,000 documents to make them easy to search on my computer.

I built out all my closest families from the town, and I completed their source citations. But I have a lot more families to build. With a bit of luck, I may find my connection to the man who contacted me.

Channel Your Energy into One Important Project

I know you aren't all as lucky as I am—able to spend several hours a day knee-deep in genealogy. But if you focus on one project that's important to you, you can make progress in smaller amounts of time.

If you had to choose one genealogy project that's important to you, what would it be? Here are some ideas to get you thinking:

• creating source citations
• finding more vital records
• gathering military documents
• downloading missing census records
• searching for newspaper articles
• finding a very important missing branch
• organizing your documents
• scanning your family photos
• creating a Book of Life

Imagine you've chosen that one project, and you're committed to spending a little bit of time on it every day you can. After a short time you can make measurable progress! In my half-days last week, I added more than 100 new people with source citations, and made new family connections.

What's your top-priority genealogy project for 2025? Now, is it time for another dose of medicine yet?