Here's Your Family Tree Progress Report

The world is a chaotic mess, so let's focus on something positive. How's your family tree coming along? How's your progress report looking?

Well, how can we measure our progress in piecing together the names that make us who we are?

I've been measuring my progress by keeping my grandparent chart up to date. I've had a lot of success finding more 6th great grandparents lately. I've focused hard on searching for their names. Each time I find one, I open my grandparent chart. I figure out their Ahnentafel number and add the new name in the proper place.

It's a manual process, for sure. Sometimes I'll count the blank spaces and note how many names are missing for a generation.

Today I found a fast and accurate way to see which ancestors I have and how many I'm missing. Never underestimate the power of Family Tree Analyzer. It's a free program I've written about several times, and it has a ton of useful features.

Family Tree Analyzer gives you an instant progress report.

First you need to export a new GEDCOM file from your family tree software or website. (A GEDCOM is a text file with all the facts in your family tree.) Open your GEDCOM with Family Tree Analyzer. (I just found out you can drag and drop your file onto the program window!) Then go to Reports on the top menu bar and choose How Many Directs Report. The report opens a table showing how many people you've found in each generation.

I have a total of 343 directs named in my family tree. I've got myself and my 2 sons, 2 parents, 4 grandparents, and on and on. My report goes all the way up to 2 pairs of 9th great grandparents. At first I thought something was wrong with the count of 4th great grandparents. I know I'm missing 9 of the possible 64, but this report showed 11 missing. Then I remembered my paternal grandparents were 3rd cousins. I've got repeat ancestors!

As you view your report, keep these totals in mind. Here's how many ancestors everyone has:

• 4 grandparents
• 8 great grandparents
• 16 2nd great grandparents (I've found them all)
• 32 3rd great grandparents (I've found 31)
• 64 4th great grandparents (I've found 53)
• 128 5th great grandparents (I've found 84)
• 256 6th great grandparents (I've found 100)
• 512 7th great grandparents (I've found 31)
• 1024 8th great grandparents (I've found 7)
• 2048 9th great grandparents (I've found 4)
• 4096 10th great grandparents

The number of ancestors doubles each generation, and it really adds up! Click any line in the report to see a new chart with details about each person in that category. For example, I clicked the 6th great grandmother line. That showed me the names of the 50 6th great grandmothers I've identified. FIFTY!

In my case, it's easy to see which ancestral hometown is dominant in my ancestry.

I can see these women were born between about 1690 and the mid 1700s. That's way before the available vital records from Italy. I found their names in the marriage or death records of their children or grandchildren.

Sometimes there's no proof of an early ancestor's town of birth. I mark them as Italy. I'm sure of that. But once I get down to my 5th great grandparents, I can find proof. I know some were born in:

• Apice
• Baselice
• Circello
• Colle Sannita
• Pescolamazza
• Sant'Angelo a Cupolo, and
• Santa Paolina.

Click the BirthLocation column in your Family Tree Analyzer report to sort the list. You'll see how many ancestors came from the same town. In an earlier article I counted my ancestors by town and found that a third of my ancestry comes from one town. This report makes that so easy to see.

Each time I find another direct ancestor, they go right into my grandparent chart with their Ahnentafel number.

Your progress report can help focus your attention on a particular branch. I have a roadblock on half of my blue branch (my maternal grandmother). Apart from that, I want to press on finding those 5th and 6th great grandparents.

But first, I'll finish clearing out my genealogy closet. When you focus on one project, you can make tremendous progress.

Organize Your Genealogy Closet: A Challenge

I have a folder on my computer called "gen docs." When I find something that may belong in my family tree, but I'm short on time, I toss it in gen docs. The folder got so full, I added a sub-folders to categorize it all.

I always mean to go back and deal with these document images and photos. But it never happens.

That's why I'm issuing this genealogy clean-up challenge to me and to you. This week, make it a priority to deal with your own miscellaneous stash of genealogy items. They may be on your computer, in a physical file drawer, or in that Ancestry.com dustbin called the Shoebox.

Think of it like cleaning out your closet. You might sort your clothes items into:

• Trash
• Donate/Sell
• Keep

It's simpler for genealogy items. They're going to be either:

• Delete immediately or
• Place in family tree immediately

Last week I discovered I'd duplicated part of my gen docs folder by mistake. I found a smaller version of the folder in another part of my computer. Some of the items were duplicates, and others weren't.

It's time to straighten this out!

I randomly jumped in by opening a folder called passport applications. I found a 2-page document I'd labelled as no_relation_PillaMichele1922-p1.jpg and -p2.jpg. I thought maybe now I know whether or not he's a relative.

Page 1 of the application showed me Michele's exact birth date and town. So I checked my family tree. Surprise! Michele is my 4th cousin twice removed. And his passport application is already in my family tree, along with 12 other documents. Michele was born in my grandfather's hometown in Italy and came to live in the Bronx, New York. He left quite a paper trail.

I can delete the entire passport applications folder from my gen docs collection.

I'm horrified that I never added these treasures to my family tree. Now's the time.

Next I opened a census folder and found a sub-folder called "don't remember why." You know that isn't good. It means that when I categorized it all into sub-folders, I already didn't know why I had saved something.

One turned out to be a 1930 census that included my childhood dentist as a little boy. Why?? I hated that guy. He traumatized me for decades. That gets destroyed right now. The other mystery census is for an Italian family in western New York state. Their last name is vaguely familiar, but it isn't in my big family tree at all. Now it's trash.

There was another sub-folder called "Oliveri clues." The folder held a 1930 and 1940 census for a couple who may be the parents of my grandfather's cousin Lina's husband, Vincenzo Oliveri.

Sometime after I saved these files, I created an in-law rule for my family tree. I do not fully document the family of a distant in-law like this. I am interested in documenting cousin Lina's husband, Vincenzo Oliveri. But I won't go beyond his parents. And I won't do very much work on his parents.

I learned his parents' names from Vincenzo and Lina's 1919 marriage certificate. On closer inspection, these are 2 different families in 1930 and 1940. And it's unlikely they'd live in Brooklyn when their son lives in the Bronx.

Because of my in-law rule and the uncertainty, these saved documents are trash.

This is a one-of-a-kind document that was lost on my computer.

I'm continuing to examine saved documents and make judgment calls. My family tree has developed a lot since I saved many of these documents. My collection of Italian vital records has improved, too. I made them searchable by renaming each document image to include the name of the person in the document. That's helping me rule these gen docs in or out.

The point is to deal with these saved items right now. No more waiting. No more leaving them sitting there so long that you have no idea why you saved them.

I challenge you to spend a genealogy session or two dealing with your saved items. Take another look at the documents you stashed somewhere. If they belong in the "Place in family tree immediately" pile, do so! If they belong in the "Delete immediately" pile, then free up that space right away.

Past You definitely thought there was a reason to keep these things. Present You needs to follow through. You may find some gems in your genealogy closet.

Don't Miss Out on Your Ancestors' Culture

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

I've also learned from studying these documents that:

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

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

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

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

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

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

Improving on the MyHeritage Photo Enhancer

I'm not a fan of colorization. As a college film student, I learned to appreciate the clarity and beauty of black and white images. When Turner Classic Movies began colorizing old movies, I was horrified.

Now MyHeritage.com has an amazing Photo Enhancer. You may have seen other genealogy fans sharing their results. I still bristled at the colorization, but some of their results looked very realistic.

I decided to give the MyHeritage Photo Enhancer a try. Note that I do not have a paid account with MyHeritage. You can do this with a free account.

What struck me right away was the mind-blowing clarity. I've been a Photoshop user since before it was Photoshop. (Does anyone remember Aldus PhotoStyler?) Photoshop has sharpening tools that work well. But I can't come close to the magic that MyHeritage has harnessed.

I was ready to embrace colorization to gain that sharpness—if I could get good color results. What I'm finding is that the tool overdoes the color. It's too saturated and un-lifelike. But I can fix that in Photoshop.

Because I need Photoshop for my work, I pay a $10.80/month subscription fee. You can go to the CNET website to search for low- or no-cost photo editing tools.

MyHeritage Photo Enhancer sharpened and colorized my grandfather's photo; I edited the color.

I have this World War I-era photograph of my grandfather and his buddies. I ran it through the MyHeritage Photo Enhancer and got tremendous clarity. But the men's faces were too orange and their gray uniforms looked purple.

I used Photoshop's Color Balance and Hue/Saturation tools to adjust the photograph. I wanted the uniforms to look gray and the faces lifelike.

Always work from a copy of the colorized photo so you can compare the before and after.

The MyHeritage tool brought this photo to life! I took the redness out of great grandmom's face.

There's also a powerful Healing Brush tool in Photoshop. I've had great luck using it to remove scratches, creases, stains, and tears in old photos. It makes decisions about what should be in that spot by looking at what's nearby. I restored a whole section of wallpaper in a photo of my grandfather with the Healing Brush.

Whether you use Photoshop or another program, these free Photoshop tutorials can teach and inspire you. Wouldn't you love to fix those one-of-a-kind, precious family portraits?

Get into a Groove to Fortify Your Family Tree

We each have the ability to be thorough, organized genealogists. But we don't always have the time.

I'm going to show you my multi-step process (accent on the multi). I follow this routine for each document image I add to my family tree.

First, let me explain what prompted me to write about how I get my genealogy groove on.

I found 4 notes in my genealogy task list that I wrote a long time ago. These notes list details about birth records I need to add to my family tree. The notes include the person's name, birth date and place, and the URL of the document image.

When I compared the notes to my tree, I realized I had added the facts to each person, but not the birth record images. I must have been in a hurry that day.

Now that I'm looking at those notes again, it's time to complete each task and delete those notes from my task list. Here's what I need to do for each one (deep breath):

1. Go to the birth record stored on my computer. I have tons of Italian vital records downloaded from the Antenati website. I file them in nesting folders by province, town, and year/type of record.
   
   

   

   When you add to your task list, be specific so you can complete the task.
   

2. Crop the image and boost its contrast in Photoshop if needed. Export the cropped image to my "working" folder. This makes my in-progress images easy to find.
   
   
3. Edit the properties of the image file to include a title and comments. The title might be "1835 birth record for [Full Name]". The comments might be: "From the Benevento State Archives: [full URL of original image]". These facts stay with the image and get pulled into my family tree program.
   
   

   

   Adding information to the image itself helps in your tree and when you share the file.
   

4. Attach the image to the right person in Family Tree Maker and make it their profile image. (I don't have photos of my ancestors beyond most of my great grandparents.)
   
   
5. Edit its properties to include the date on the document. Note: I don't put the date in the file's properties because it doesn't carry over into my software.
   
   

   

   Not only do the image's facts get pulled into your tree, you can use them to create a source citation.

6. Select a document category. (I save birth, marriage, and death records as "Vital Records".) This may be a Family Tree Maker thing only.
   
   
7. Add each fact provided by the document to the person. That may include their full name, birth date, baptism date, place of birth, etc.
   
   
8. Add a source citation to each of these facts. The URL I attached to the image is critical to the source citation.
   
   
9. Add mention of this document to my Document tracker. I add a line to my spreadsheet for this person, if they aren't already in there. If I have an 1835 birth record image, I'll add this to the Birth column: "1835 (cert.)". The "(cert.)" tells me I have an image of the certificate. It isn't a fact pulled from somewhere else. It's the actual birth certificate.
   
   
10. Move the image from my "working" folder to my "certificates" folder. It sits there until I do my weekly computer backup. After the Sunday morning backup, I move it to the right sub-folder of "certificates". I have so many certificates that I break them up into alphabetical groups.

OK, now I see why I didn't have time to do this when I found the records.

Despite all the steps, I'm happy to do each one. I know that when I'm done, I'm completely done, with no loose ends dangling. It's all a matter of getting into a groove, making each step a part of your routine, and enjoying the results.

Pressed for time? You can either:

• Leave yourself a detailed note in your task list, or
• Get that document as far as your "working" folder (step 2 or 3) and come back to it later.

Think of yourself as a genealogy manufacturing production line. You are cranking out a piece of perfection.

Keep Track of Your Genealogy Theories and Tasks

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

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

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

Use your task list to keep track of:

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

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

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

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

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

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

I added this line to my task list:

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

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

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

I added this line to my task list:

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

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

I added this to the task list:

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

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

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