What To Do When You Have No Birth or Death Record

I've made it clear in my welcome message that I never trust someone else's family tree if they don't show their sources and I can't reproduce their facts. So even if I'm given facts by someone I trust, I will still do my due diligence and search for factual proof.

A good resource to use when you don't have access to someone's birth or death record is the Find A Grave website. If you're lucky, you may get to see an image of the headstone with full birth and death dates. A genealogist's giddy dream!

Here's an example of a situation where I wanted to verify the birth and death dates I'd been given for one relative, but you can also try this not when you're trying to prove someone else's work, but when you're trying to fill in missing dates.

I knew from census records that this man lived in Cleveland, Ohio and was alive in 1940. So I used the search form in Find A Grave to find an Edward Byrne who was born after 1855 and died after 1940 in Cleveland.

The search yielded five Edward Byrnes, but as my yellow highlighting shows, only two are buried in Cleveland. Focusing on those two, I see one was born in 1863 and died in 1941—that fits. The other, as it happens, is the son of the man I'm looking for.

When I click his name, I am not given an image of his headstone, but there are several facts recorded by someone I do not know. Once again, it's up to me to determine how many of these facts are trustworthy. But there is truly an abundance of facts, and I'm grateful for that.

I know from the census forms I've collected that he was a grocer. That fits. I know his street address in 1940. That fits. I have the names of many of his relatives, and I see them listed here. Short of seeing his birth and death certificates myself, this looks like credible data. And based on this information, I could attempt to purchase a copy of either his birth or death record from the state of Ohio.

Remember, the more resources you use to corroborate the facts about someone in your tree, the stronger your tree will be.

This Expanded Resource Provided an Elusive Maiden Name

Somewhere along my genealogical travels I found out that my great grandmother's mother—who never came to America—was named Maria Luigia. But I didn't know her last name. I did a little research to see if Luigia was her last name, but it was inconclusive.

Flash forward several years as Ancestry.com's resources continue to grow and grow. Now there is a resource called "U.S., Social Security Applications and Claims Index, 1935-2007" which the ancestry.com website describes as picking up where the Social Security Death Index leaves off. If you're lucky enough to find an ancestor in this collection, you may learn things like:

• Their father's name.
• Their mother's maiden name.
• A woman's married name.
• Their date and place of birth.

I happened to find the record for my great grandmother's brother, Giuseppe (Joseph) Caruso, and it featured one heck of a bad transcription for his place of birth (there are no images available). For his mother's name it said Maria L. Gilardo. Another sibling's record listed their mother's last name as something very not-Italian, like Girandiu. I also discovered the actual death certificate for Joseph Caruso, which Americanized his mother's last name to Gerard.

So, weighing all of these alternatives, I felt the most logical last name was Girardi (like Joe Girardi, the New York Yankees' manager). I did some research to find out if anyone named Girardi had come to America from their town of Pescolamazza, and they had.

This was enough to make me about 85% confident that I had the correct name.

Then I discovered the unbelievably valuable (to any descendant of someone from the Province of Benevento, Italy) Benevento State Archives. There I managed to find the actual 1840 birth record for my great great grandmother, Maria Luigia Girardi.

The moral of this story is to keep checking for new resources that can help you fortify your family tree.

1840 birth record of my 2nd great grandmother, Maria Luigia Girardi.

Why Did They Come to America?

When I first started researching my Italian ancestors after spending my honeymoon in Italy, I couldn't understand how they left such a beautiful place to come and work for the railroad or live in a cramped city apartment.

If you're wondering the same thing about your ancestors, no matter where they came from, you can gain a lot of insight by reading a bit of history about your ancestors' homeland at the time they came to America. They may have come here because it was their only option for steady work. They may have been fleeing an oppressive regime or hoping to avoid a war.

My entire family came from rural Southern Italy where poverty was extreme and advancement was all but impossible. In the late 1800s it became difficult to grow crops, and waves of cholera and other diseases were increasing the death rate. America offered steady work for healthy men.

On a PBS website called Destination America, you can view an interactive map that shows the amount of emigration throughout Europe by decade, from 1851 to 1910. According to this fascinating map, the decades are characterized as follows:

• 1851–1860: The Potato Famine in Ireland made emigration a matter of life or death.
• 1861–1870: Prussia and the German states could not provide good jobs to their people.
• 1871–1880: The German Empire, ruled by Otto von Bismarck, became inhospitable to Catholic Germans.
• 1881–1890: Skilled laborers throughout the United Kingdom escaped poverty and famine to work in America's industries.
• 1891–1900: Extreme poverty in Southern Italy, along with malnutrition and disease, led to a massive exodus.
• 1901–1910: Millions of Jews had to leave Russia to escape anti-Semitic violence, army conscription, and ethnic friction.

With so many millions of people pouring into the United States, some controls were needed. According to an immigration timeline on a Harvard University website, more than three million immigrants came to America between 1891 and 1900, and that includes many of my ancestors. A whopping 5.7 million Italians came to America between 1911 and 1920, including my two grandfathers.

The overwhelming numbers of immigrants led to a series of laws that were intended to stem the flow a bit. In 1917, according to the Harvard website, Congress enacted a literacy requirement for immigrants by overriding President Woodrow Wilson's veto. The law requires immigrants to be able to read 40 words in some language and bans immigration from Asia, except for Japan and the Philippines.

Between 1921 and 1930 more than four million immigrants arrived, but several laws during this decade enforced immigration restrictions:

• The Emergency Quota Act, 1921 restricted immigration from any country to 3% of the number of people from that country living in the US in 1910.
• The Immigration Act of 1924 limited annual European immigration to 2% of the number of people from that country living in the United States in 1890.
• The 1924 Oriental Exclusion Act prohibited most immigration from Asia. That same year the Border Patrol was created to help prevent illegal immigration.
• In 1929 they really clamped down on Asian immigration: The National Origins Formula institutes a quota that caps national immigration at 150,000 and completely bars Asian immigration, though immigration from the Western Hemisphere is still permitted.

I have cousins who left Italy in the 1950s but simply were not allowed to come to the United States, so they and many of their friends and relatives settled in, and still live in Niagara Falls, Canada. After the 1920s or so, it was never again as simple as getting on a boat, coming to America, and saying you wanted to stay.

How Do I Get There From Here?

Have you ever looked at a document in your family tree, let's say a census sheet, and realized you also need a family that lived on the same block? How do you get back to that census collection online (so you can see the surrounding pages) when all you have is the one document you saved?

You can look at the top of a census sheet and gather enough information to help you get to the general area where you want to look. For example, this 1930 census sheet is from Girard City, Trumbull County, Ohio, enumeration district 78-45, sheet 16B.

Top of a census sheet

With those facts I was able to use ancestry.com to easily drill down to the right link, containing 36 images. Because I knew it was sheet 16B, I was able to go right to image 32 and find the exact page I wanted. I can then go page by page to look for a related family that I believe lived nearby.

Searching for a particular census

But it isn't always that clean and easy. The top of the census sheet might be hard to read or the information incomplete.

Other documents are harder to rediscover, such as a ship manifest. This is the top of my grandfather's ship manifest from 1920.

A ship manifest with no ship name

It tells me that he arrived in New York on 29 November 1920, but what was the name of the ship? I can find a particular ship arriving on a particular day on ancestry.com, but if more than one ship arrived on that day, I may have a lot of images to look at.

To allow myself—and anyone who feels they may have a connection to my tree—to rediscover any of my saved documents, I add enough detail to the image in Family Tree Maker to make that search easy.

For a census sheet I indicate the line numbers to look at, the city, county and state, the enumeration district, sheet number, and image number, which can be a real time-saver.

Adding enough details to enable anyone to locate the original

When I decided to add this information, I spent a whole weekend updating every census sheet in my tree. Now I simply add the information the moment I add the new image. It's a practice that will pay off, and absolutely fortifies your family tree.

Case Study on "How Is That Possible?"

Here's a lesson that supports my earlier post, "How Is That Possible?" When my recent post about Italian marriage records led me to discover a mistake I had been making, I spent three solid days correcting my tons of such records in my enormous family tree.

The work was tedious, but after a while I realized that this change I was making—reclassifying certain dates as "marriage license" rather than "marriage"—provided the answer to a question that had come up a number of times.

I had quite a few men (these are small-town Italian men in the 1800s) who had gone through the process of posting their intention to marry a woman and then seemed to marry her, but went through the same process with another woman a month later.

What was going on? Divorce was not a thing, and the first wife had not died. In fact, I had proof that the first woman then went through the process with another man and married him.

Once I learned that they had not gotten married, but had merely obtained consent to marry, it became clear: The first couple intended to marry but something prevented the marriage. Each of them was then paired with someone else whom they did marry.

See When is a Marriage Not a Marriage?

I feel this corrected and more logical information makes my family tree even more solid. So I ran Family Tree Maker's built-in error report and uncovered a page full of birth date discrepancies. Some people had two birth dates from conflicting resources, while others had an original placeholder date that had been superseded by documented facts. So I was able to clean up all of the errors.

I even figured out and fixed the error I highlighted in How Is That Possible? where I had two Michele Leone's with the same birth date. The date belongs to my grandfather's first cousin; the other Michele Leone is a more distant relative born a different year.

Now I'm itching for other discrepancies to fix!

How to Read a Free-form Italian Death Record

I've shown you some birth, death and marriage records from the Napoleonic era in Italy. These were somewhat easy to read because they used a fill-in-the-blanks form. But your ancestral hometown may not have used the same form—or any form at all. What then?

Here is a record of the 1789 death of Francesco Colasanto, written as a single paragraph in 1851. It was part of the 1851 marriage packet of his grandson, Francesco Saverio Colasanto. I have underlined parts of the image and underlined the text that corresponds with those sections to show you how to read this type of document. Granted, the handwriting can be difficult. Practice and exposure to many documents written by the same priest or town official can get you used to reading it.

Handwritten death record prepared for the 1851 marriage of the decedent's grandson

Extract of the death of Francesco Colasanto. It begins with words to the effect of "In faith the priest of the Church of San Leonardo Abbate of Basélice," and goes on to mention where the original death record is found: Volume VIII, folio 41(?), document number 5. In that book of death records was found Francesco Colasanto, son of Giovanni and Donata Ruggiero, husband of Errica Pettorossi, died at 23 January 1789 and was buried in the same church. It states that this record is being written only for matrimonial purposes on 15 August 1851. It is signed by the priest, Giuseppe Maria DelVecchio, and by the mayor of the town. It bears a stamp from the church and from the town.

After viewing many handwritten documents just like this, I became familiar with their format and was able to quickly pull out the pertinent facts. Don't forget to let Google Translate be your friend.

OK. I promise to leave Italy for a while and return to U.S. documents.