How to Overcome a Town Clerk's Errors

Some of the mistakes I'm seeing on vital records are shocking. No one's perfect, of course. But you'd like to think the clerk recording a birth record got the facts right.

As I work my way through the vital records from Grandpa's hometown, I'm uncovering lots of errors. The errors fall into a few main categories:

• Wrong date. Sometimes you'll see a February 30th slip in there. Other times the date of birth is a day after the date they wrote the document. Not possible.
• Wrong first name of parent. People with multiple names may go by any one of them. A Giuseppe Nicola Bianco may call himself either Giuseppe or Nicola. I have to keep that in mind when I try to find this person in my tree. But I've seen my ancestor Saverio called Francesco when Francesco was never part of his name.
• Wrong last name of mother. I've had trouble placing a baby in my tree when their mother's last name is wrong on the birth record. I try to verify the right name with the child's death record or the births of their siblings.
• Wrong ages for parents. This is far too common and not the clerk's fault. Before you had to state your birth date regularly, people didn't know exactly how old they were. They're generally in the right ballpark, but sometimes they're way off.
• Wrong last name for baby. This has tripped me up a few times. Somehow the parents' names are correct on the birth record, but the baby's last name is an error.
• Spelling variations. I know my ancestral hometowns, so I know the typical spelling variations to watch out for. Iamarino becomes Marino. Iavasile becomes Basile. Iazeolla becomes Zeolla. These names are sometimes interchangeable.

We want to take vital records as gospel, but human error will always find a way in. Here's how to handle these errors in your genealogy research.

How to Know What's Correct

As I've mentioned so many times that you're sick of reading about it, I'm working my way through ALL the vital records for Grandpa's hometown. At least 95% of the people can fit into my family tree somehow. As I build out every single family, these errors become plain to see.

The other day I began going through the 1854 birth records. I found one baby, and when I finally located her parents (there was a name error), I saw my note. It seems I'd already found this baby's death record and entered that date. But I couldn't find the baby's birth record (because of the name error). For a birth fact, I had a calculated year based on the age at death, and one of my standard notes in the description field. "Birth record not found."

Now I know why I couldn't find the birth record. The document had an error. But by process of elimination, I know know that the birth record with the error can only belong to this person.

How to Record the Errors

I've made a habit of adding a standard line of text to explain the error. I put this text in the description field of the fact with the error. For example:

• If a birth record has the wrong last name for the baby's mother, I enter: His mother's last name is Marino on his birth record.
• If a death record uses a different first name for a person, I enter: She is called Mariangela on her death record.

If documents provide competing facts, I add a bookmark to the person and a more detailed note. For example, Italian marriage records can include the death record of the groom's grandfather. Many times I've found that it's the wrong record. Right name, wrong guy. But sometimes it's a different date, and it isn't clearly another guy. This calls for a note.

With a broader knowledge of your ancestor's town, you can see past the human error in vital records.

Rules to Keep in Mind

If you get familiar with the people of your ancestral hometown, a lot of things will become clear to you.

• People didn't always go by their given name.
• People didn't know how old they were.
• People's names can get really messed up.
• If a person died in another town, that town's clerk may have no idea who the deceased's family members are. Or how old they are. It's not like they were carrying a driver's license or had an In Case of Emergency contact on their cellphone.

If you're familiar with the last names in town, you'll be ready to search for a Basile when you can't find a Iavasile. And if you know how the vital records work, you won't rely on a person's stated age unless you see:

• their birth record, or
• their marriage record for which they had to supply their birth record.

Human errors can be so frustrating to your genealogy research. I know I feel better about my choices when I leave a note to point out the discrepancy. If new evidence comes up and proves I made a wrong choice, it's good to see that note and understand how it came to be.

In fact, this falls more into my own human error, but I want to share it. For my ancestral hometowns, the marriage records end in 1860. After that, the clerk usually wrote a marriage notation in the column of the birth record. As I enter a baby into my family tree, I add their future spouse's name and their marriage date. In the description field I enter either, "From her birth record" or "From his birth record." When I find the right spouse's birth record, I change the description to "From both their birth records." That's a nice confirmation when there is no marriage record.

The other day I found that I'd made a wrong assumption about a groom. When I found the right groom, with the same exact name, I had a dilemma. But then I saw my note. For the wrong groom's marriage fact, it said only "From her birth record." Now that I'd found the groom with the matching marriage notation, I knew for certain that the other guy was wrong. I detached him from the bride and her kids.

Remember that mistakes happened a lot. Examine as many records from the town as possible to get a feel for the names and make these errors stand out. And develop your own standard language to let future you know why you did what you did.

How to Find What's Missing from Your Family Tree

One morning I had the idea of "finishing" one family unit in my tree at a time. Finishing them means locating and adding every document I know is missing. I thought I'd take a look at the hints on Ancestry.com and compare them to what my Document Tracker says I'm missing.

The first family in my alphabetical Document Tracker is the Abbate family. I found the 1898 marriage certificate for Francesco and Mary Abbate I'd been missing. It gave me their parents' names and their Manhattan addresses. I added the certificate image and its source citation to all the associated facts. I added "1898 (cert.)" to the marriage column of my Document Tracker for both Francesco and Mary. That tells me I have the certificate image in my family tree.

But Francesco Abbate is the father-in-law of the 1st cousin once removed of the wife of my 1st cousin! No offense to my 1st cousin's lovely wife, but I'd like to spend this effort a little closer to home.

I wondered how many families were in my enormous family tree. When I opened my latest GEDCOM file in Family Tree Analyzer, it said I have:

• 46,600 individuals
• 15,472 families
• 9,587 blood relations

Woof! Where do I start? The answer has to be with my parents. I know I downloaded their 1950 censuses, but I haven't added them to my tree yet. What else can I find for them before moving on to their parents?

If you focus on one document-type at a time, you'll be more efficient and consistent in how you capture facts for your family tree.

You may be wondering why on earth I haven't added their 1950 censuses to my family tree. When they released the census, but Ancestry hadn't yet indexed it, I downloaded 44 images. Then I held them until I could use Ancestry's source citation and link. I haven't gotten back to it yet, but the images are ready and waiting for me.

A Generation-at-a-Time Process

So let's start. Look at your parents. What documents and records can you still find that belong in your family tree?

• Do you have every census they appear in?
• Do you have birth, marriage, and death records?
• Do you have yearbooks and directories?
• Do you have key photos and mementos, such as a wedding invitation?

I tracked down my dad's 1950 census on Ancestry. I added a correction to the family's last name. It was off by one letter. Now I have the source citation I need for the document image I saved months ago. Dad was on line 2 of his census page, meaning they asked him extra questions at the bottom of the page. I learned that he was in his first year of college in 1950, and he was not working while he studied.

I love how specific this census is. It says his family lived at 562 Morris Avenue. But it also says they're on the 4th floor (which I knew) in apartment 16 (which I didn't know). I'm adding "4th floor, apartment 16" to the description line of the 1950 residence fact for my dad and his family.

Now my dad's 4-person family has their 1950 census images and source citation. I added the 1950 census to my Document Tracker for all 4 people.

Once you've finished your father, how will you proceed? You can stay in that generation and finish gathering your mother's documents. Then go up a generation, gathering everything for each of your grandparents. Will you spread out to gather documents for the siblings of each generation? How soon will this process spiral out of control? My mind is reeling already.

A More Manageable Process

Instead of plodding through every level of my family, one-by-one, I have another idea. What got me started on this whole project was a random hint featured on my Ancestry homepage. It was the immigration record for someone in my family tree.

I opened my Document Tracker with the idea of locating all my immigration records. That's what brought me to Francesco Abbate.

An up-to-date document tracker is your best friend when trying to "finish" a family unit in your family tree.

What if we pick one type of document and concentrate on nothing else? Don't you think that will be productive? When I look at the list of all my hints on Ancestry, there's a unique category for the 1950 census. I can click that to see only those hints and work my way through them.

You can sort this list of hints by last name or first name, or choose to see the most recent. If you sort by last name, you'll see families grouped together. That makes the most sense because you're going to pick off whole families at a time.

As you work your way down the list, be sure to add your new finds to your Document Tracker. As you do so, take a look in your tree at each person you're adding. Make note of which other documents you have for them, and which you're missing.

When you've finished locating one type of document, like the 1950 census, move on to another type. You can tackle:

• other census years
• immigration records
• naturalization papers
• vital records, and more.

Through repetition, you'll get better at creating source citations. You'll make a habit of adding new finds to your Document Tracker.

If you've been busy with a brick wall for a while, this project will make you feel great about your amazing progress.

How to Master the Unrelated People in Your Family Tree

I remember how the first group of people in my family tree became disconnected. My mom wanted to know how her cousin Jean was her cousin.

Jean and Mom lived in the same Bronx neighborhood and knew each other as cousins. Jean's maiden name was Saviano, and that was Mom's grandmother's maiden name.

As I pieced together Jean's paternal branch, everything seemed fine. When I realized I didn't know who her 3rd great grandfather was, the connection fell apart. And without available records from their hometown in Italy, I had no way to find our true connection.

Some of my other disconnected groups are families built on speculation. I believe I can find their connection some day, and I want to hold onto what I've learned.

Today's project is an easy way to identify every person in your family tree who is not related to you. We'll find them, tag them, justify them, and make them easy to find again with a click.

The best way to identify your unrelated people is with the free program Family Tree Analyzer. Here's what to do:

• Export your latest GEDCOM file and open it in Family Tree Analyzer.
• Click the Main Lists tab to see a table of everyone in your tree.
• Scroll over to the right to the Relation column.
• Click the little arrow next to the word Relation. Then choose to display only the UNKNOWN relationships.
• Scroll left to the Surname column.
• Click the little arrow next to the word Surname and choose to Sort A to Z.

FTA finds every disconnected person in your family tree. In a few steps, you can totally own them.

I'm starting out with 242 unrelated people in my 45,684-person family tree. I know that 25 people named Saviano are in this list because of cousin Jean, and I want to keep them. A lot of Saviano's came to America from their tiny Italian hamlet of Pastene. They are cousins for sure. It's a lack of vital records from Pastene that's keeping me from finding our common ancestors.

What I want to do today is:

• Make sure I want to keep all these hangers-on. It's possible I can let some of them go.
• Identify them visually in my Family Tree Maker file. I'll use my "No Relationship Established" profile picture and a red color-code. That way I'll see the moment a marriage record turns a group of stragglers into relatives.
• Create a filter in Family Tree Maker so I can easily see only my unrelated people.
• Add a note to explain why I'm keeping them. I'll use a few standard notes:
  • Related to Saviano branch (This is important for spouses and parents not named Saviano.)
  • Related to Sarracino branch (This is my great grandfather's name, from the same tiny hamlet.)
  • Related to Muollo branch (Same hamlet/same story!)
  • Expect to find connection (That's based on my current mega-project.)
  • "Colle Sannita nel 1742" (This is a priceless book detailing every family in Grandpa's hometown that year. I hope to connect to everyone in the book.)

Borrow this!

I've made a habit of putting important notes like this in the description field of a person's birth fact. It's always right there for me to see when I view a person in Family Tree Maker. That's where I'll put the notes I listed above.

If you build your tree online, use tagging and filtering options to reach this goal.

With my "unrelated" filter in place, I can turn my attention to this group of people at any time. I can spend a day searching for U.S. documents that may solve the problem of missing Italian documents.

There was one extended family from my Pastene with no connection to anyone else. When I put them in my tree, I must have thought they had a connection, and it fell apart, too. I'm going to delete this group from my family tree. There were a few others who had no place in my tree either.

The results?

• Now I have 201 people in my family tree with no documented relationship to me.
• They're all there for a reason, and now those reasons are in plain sight.
• I can use my new Family Tree Maker "Unrelated" filter at any time to focus on this group of people and try to connect them.
• Anyone seeing my family tree on Ancestry will know that I don't know my connection to these people.

With this profile image and a red color-code, I'll know the moment an unrelated branch becomes connected in my family tree.

To create my new "Unrelated" filter, I had my Family Tree Analyzer list of unrelated people on one screen, and Family Tree Maker on the other. I included everyone from the list in the filter.

It's a big improvement for me to be able to identify my stragglers so easily. It's plain to see that most of them are relatives from one town, the only town throwing up brick walls for me. The rest are people I hope to connect. They're on my radar as I go through every available vital record from my ancestral hometowns.

This project is a one-time investment of your time that can pay off for you again and again.

How to Fix Bad or Missing Source Citations

Regular spot-checks are a great way to see where your family tree needs your attention. Today I checked one type of source citation in my family tree to see what needs improvement.

I randomly chose the source title "New York, U.S., State and Federal Naturalization Records, 1794-1943." (That's the database title on Ancestry.com.)

The value of thorough source citations is clear. Each one you create properly is a victory.

I used to create a generic source citation for many types of documents. For example, each U.S. Census year, NY naturalization records, ship manifests, and so on. Then I'd attach the generic citation to every fact that came from that source. But that didn't help to prove the facts.

Now that I know better, I like to do it right and make individual citations with all the specific facts.

The only way to turn these generic source citations into proper citations is one at a time. I have 30 NY naturalization citations, and 23 of them are generic. Here's what I'll do for each one:

As I view my source citations, I'll go to the person attached to a generic citation.

I'll check the document image to see if I've saved the specific details about this source. If I did save the facts, I can use them to build the new source citation. If I didn't save the facts, I need to search for this person's naturalization record online again.

Storing details in the document image notes is a terrific genealogy practice.

These days I make a habit of storing all the citation details with the associated image. But I didn't always do it that way. This first image has:

• a caption beginning with the year
• a date from the document
• a document category
• some facts about the image, including its image number, database name, and URL.

That's a good start. I can return to that saved URL and view its source information. What I want to add to this image is this:

Source Citation:
National Archives and Records Administration; Washington, DC; NAI Title: Index to Petitions for Naturalizations Filed in Federal, State, and Local Courts in New York City, 1792-1906; NAI Number: 5700802; Record Group Title: Records of District Courts of the United States, 1685-2009; Record Group Number: RG 21

Description: Vol 022 3 May-6 July 1905

Source Information:
Ancestry.com. New York, U.S., State and Federal Naturalization Records, 1794-1943 [database on-line]. Provo, UT, USA: Ancestry.com Operations, Inc., 2013.

Now I have everything I need to make a customized source citation for the facts tied to this document. I'll work my way through the list, updating and customizing the generic citations.

When you first began this obsessive hobby, I'll bet you weren't as careful as you are today. There will always be citations we can improve. For me, fixing citations mostly means customizing generic citations. But there will be plenty of places where there's no citation at all.

Start by:

• Picking a category, like naturalization
• Viewing your document images
• Checking the person attached to each image.

Do their source citations show your best work?

Fully detailed source citations that include the document image in question are highly valuable.

The key to any overwhelming task is to divide and conquer. I'm starting with NY Naturalizations because I don't have a ton of them. I tend to pick off smaller items so I can shorten my overall to-do list. I know I'm tricking myself, but it works for me.

You can also start with your closest relatives and fan out. Or tackle all your direct ancestors and then pick off entire families, one at a time.

Your family tree software or website should have source citation templates. Let these templates help you understand what you need to fill in. Wherever you found the document image, the source citation information should be there.

I like to add line numbers to my census form and ship manifest citations so I know exactly where to look. And so does anyone visiting my tree. The idea is to add enough detail that anyone can retrace your steps and find the same information.

My family tree is rapidly closing in on 45,000 people. Due to special circumstances (see How Do You Define Your Ultimate Genealogy Goal?), most of my people have no source citations. But following this method, I can clean up all the citations for my U.S.-born people.

It's all a matter of making it a priority and diving in!

And speaking of source citations:

• Make Smarter Progress on Your Family Tree
• Finding a Genealogy Victory in Defeat
• Catch and Fix Your Missing Source Citations

7 Days to a Better Family Tree

Each week I offer advice on how to fortify your family tree. But because my pet genealogy project is so massive and enjoyable, I rarely make the time to follow my own advice.

Today I'm offering a method that'll help us make noticeable progress on our family tree goals. The idea is simple. The next 7 days you decide to work on your family tree, pick one of these goals and work on only that one thing. No distractions allowed.

With any of these items, keep track of where you left off so you can return to complete the job.

Here are some of the tasks I've been ignoring for a while. What would you add to, or substitute in this list?

Day 1: Create charts to show you who's missing.

When I wanted to search for the eldest ancestors on any given line of my family tree, I created a fan chart. This showed me exactly which set of ancestors to focus on. See "Search the Treetops to Focus Your Genealogy Research."

Or make your Ahnentafel chart to see how many direct ancestors you've found, and who's missing. See "How to Visualize Your Ancestor-Finding Progress."

Spend a day trying to find those missing direct ancestors in your family tree.

And of course there's the priceless (and free) Family Tree Analyzer. See "How to Plug the Holes in Your Family Tree" and learn how to use FTA to focus on who and what your family tree is missing.

Day 2: Go after missing censuses.

When they released the 1950 U.S. census in April, I got busy. I searched for and downloaded documents for my closest relatives. Then I moved on to higher priority projects.

We can gather missing censuses more thoroughly if we stick to a plan. My plan hinges on my document tracker. It's a spreadsheet where I mark down every document image I've saved to my family tree. (Download a copy for yourself at the bottom of "Why Use a Genealogy Document Tracker?")

When your document tracker is ready, you can see which census years are missing. Scan your tracker to see which families you have in the 1940 census that you need to find in the 1950 census.

Still having trouble locating some families? See "Try This Tool to Find a Missing Census" and adjust for 1950.

Day 3: Digitize and organize your family photos.

I was doing a nice job of enhancing, labeling, and storing my digitized family photos. (See "It's Time to Tame Your Family Photos.") Then it got away from me.

We should all have digitized versions of our physical photographs. Scanners are not expensive, but you can do a decent job with your cellphone, too. But please take the photo out of its frame or sleeve so there's no reflection or glare. And take the photo straight-on, not at a distorted angle.

Read the steps I take with digitized photos in "How to Improve Old Photos and Genealogy Documents." Once your digitized files are in shape, "It's Time to Organize All Your Family Photos." Pick a storage strategy for both physical and digitized photos. Make sure they're safe, and that you can find the ones you want easily.

Day 4: Add well-crafted source citations.

My family tree is a beast. I have 44,000 people, most of whom are Italians from the 1700s and 1800s. Because I'm adding up to 300 Italians a day, I'm skipping their source citations. "Sacrilege!" you say. Not really. I know I can easily find my source for any facts on these people. I'll add them if someone is interested in a branch.

But that should not be true for anyone from the 1900s or later. In my tree, those are the Americans with a good amount of documentation. In "Taming a Tangle of Source Citations," I detailed my process for making high-quality source citations.

The best way to tackle this goal is one document type at a time. For example, I can view the media gallery in Family Tree Maker and choose to see only the census forms. Then I can see which ones need improvement and do the work.

Find the documents and facts in your family tree that need a proper source citation.

Day 5: Search for missing vital records.

One of my favorite new resources is a treasure for my Bronx-based family. The New York City Municipal Archives finally made their vital records available online. And it's free. My family settled in the Bronx in 1898 and stayed there. There's so much for me to harvest from the Archives' website.

I began downloading these records by searching my tree for the notes I'd made. When I know the document number for someone's vital record, I add it to the details of that fact. (Ancestry.com indexes often include the document number.)

Finding the document number, place, and year can lead you to the vital records you need.

To be thorough, I could start with my 2nd great grandfather, Antonio Saviano. He's my first immigrant ancestor. If I go through his descendants one-by-one, I'll see exactly who needs a document from the Archives' site.

Or I could scan the birth column of my document tracker. The Archives' site says they have:

• Bronx birth certificates ending in 1909
• Bronx death certificates through 1948
• Bronx marriage certificates ending in 1937.

The years vary for the different boroughs of NYC.

If I filter my document tracker to show people who fall into those years, I can find their certificates one at a time. For your family tree, there will be other resources to search. It's a matter of finding the people, and performing that search.

Day 6: Categorize your DNA matches.

DNA websites offer tools to help you label your DNA matches and add notes. On AncestryDNA, I created 6 categories I can add to any match:

• Both sides, because some matches are related to both my parents
• Father's side, for people connected only to Dad and me
• Mother's side, for people connected only to Mom and me
• Figured out, for matches I've identified
• Needs work, for matches I should be able to figure out, but somehow cannot
• Extremely low match, for people I wanted to preserve when Ancestry was cutting out matches below 9cMs or so.

Adding these categories and notes, helps me understand who I'm looking at. At any time, I can view particular categories. I like to regularly view only my unviewed matches to see who's new. I know exactly who one of them is, so I'll add him to Mother's side with a note. He's my 3C1R.

Day 7: Check your notes for unfollowed leads.

I'm sure everyone who works on their family tree keeps notes somewhere. A paper notebook, OneNote, a text file, or a pile of papers. Save day 7 to re-read your saved notes. Do some notes no longer apply? Throw them away. Can you complete other tasks because new document collections are available? Go do that!

What gem of a lead did you leave for yourself, and forget about? See "How Many Genealogy Gems Are You Sitting On?"

Now all that remains is to follow through and do this! Yes, I'm saying that to myself as much as to you.

Finding Fallen Soldiers in Your Family Tree

With more than 43,000 people in my family tree, I'm bound to have lots of loose ends. A lack of vital records is usually to blame.

Today I decided to find my Italian relatives who died in World War I. If you have Italians in your family tree, you can search for their name or hometown. Start at https://www.cadutigrandeguerra.it/CercaNome.aspx.

Before you click away, this article covers more than Italy!

I began with my grandfather's hometown of Colle Sannita since I've been doing a ton of research there. The town lost 96 of their men in World War I. The second man on the list is a perfect example of a loose end.

I knew that a man named Agostino Basile had married Orsola Marino in 1908 because her birth record says so. But I didn't know anything about him. This website led me to a page showing the details of Agostino's military service. It included his birth date, so my first step was to find that record and see who his parents were. His birth record also mentions his 1908 marriage to Orsola Marino.

The website tells me Agostino was in the 47th infantry. He died of his wounds in combat in an area called Carso. When I looked into that, I found it's a region on the border of Italy and today's Slovenia. Italy lost thousands of men in this general area during the war.

When vital records don't tell you the end of the story, military records may have the answer.

Agostino is no longer a loose end. Now I know he died 8 years after marrying Orsola, who is my 3rd cousin 3 times removed. Her birth record also says she married another man in 1923—seven years after her 1st husband died. I wonder if it was a long time before Orsola knew Agostino was dead.

There's also a website to help you find Italian soldiers who died in World War II. Scroll way down the page at https://dimenticatidistato.com/elenco-nazionale-caduti-per-comune-di-nascita to find a list of provinces. Click yours to open a PDF that's divided by town.

To find casualty lists from other parts of the world, go to the FamilySearch wiki and type "world war i casualty" into the search box. The search results include:

• The United States
• Hungary
• Bavaria
• Germany
• Czechia
• Poland
• East Prussia
• and a ton more, including individual counties in the U.S.

Follow the links on each page to see what types of documents and information are available.

One resource gives you access to tons of international military records.

Whichever resources are the best fit for your family tree, bookmark them right away. I have another 94 men to look into from the Colle Sannita casualty list alone. And I've got a bunch of ancestral hometowns I want to explore next.

And speaking of soldiers:

• Fallen Soldier Memorials Inspire a Research Project
• POW: My Grandfather's World War I Experience
• Appreciate the Veterans in Your Family Tree

3 Ways to Best Use Family Tree Hints

I've always done my family tree building in desktop software (Family Tree Maker). Then I synchronize it with my Ancestry family tree. I don't have "hints" turned on in my desktop software.

I didn't see much value to hints. They were usually wrong for my family. I never looked at them again.

Recently, I've been collaborating on several family trees, working directly on Ancestry. As a time-saver, I tested out the hints for these trees. I have no doubt that the technology behind Ancestry's hints has improved.

If you keep a few things firmly in mind, these hints can be a terrific benefit to your research. Very basically:

• Don't accept every hint you see.
• Don't believe someone else's unsourced family tree without investigation.
• Think of hints as a little voice in your head saying, "Maybe this is the answer."

That little voice can save you time and steer you in the right direction. But you still have to proceed with caution.

Before I continue with the best ways to use family tree hints, a quick word about unsourced family trees. My own 42,800-person family tree serves up tons of hints to people of Southern Italian descent. But much of my work is missing sources. What's my excuse? I'm working to connect everyone who lived in my ancestral hometowns. If I added the images and sources as I went, I might not live long enough to complete my project! I'm building this tree as a database, and eventually I will add more and more images and sources.

The family trees you see as hints may have facts without sources, too. Don't dismiss them right away! Those trees may represent a family's oral history. Or the builder may be doing what I'm doing—gathering facts from published vital records. Take these hints as what they are: HINTS.

Now let's look at the 3 ways to best use family tree hints.

1. Locate Many Documents at Once

Hints in themselves are a powerful search tool. Instead of sifting through all the search results for a person, you can see the best results in one step.

I finally see the value in Ancestry hints. Here's how to use them without getting into trouble.

As an example, let's look at my step-grandmother, Sadie. When I view her profile in my Ancestry family tree, I see 3 hints (you may see many more):

• Sadie in 3 other family trees
• Sadie's naturalization papers, complete with her photo
• Sadie's Social Security Death Index listing

Since I do the work myself, I already have Sadie's naturalization and SSDI. These 2 results are a quick way to add solid facts to your tree without the effort.

Don't accept the Ancestry member trees hint without giving it a lot of consideration. More on that next.

2. Find People From the Same Family

When you do look at the Ancestry member trees hint, there are a few things to consider:

• If they have different information than you, what is their source? Do they have something right that you have wrong?
• Why is your person in their family tree? Are they a relative?
  • In my 1st of 3 tree results, I've stumbled upon the great grand-nephew of my step-grandmother. I don't have much info on Sadie's nephew, so this is a way to see who his descendants are.
  • In my 2nd tree result, someone has pulled most of my family into his tree. When I went to send him a message asking why, I found that we'd already had a conversation about this long ago. We do have an extremely distant connection.
  • My 3rd tree result belongs to my friend and collaborator. Her husband is the nephew of my great aunt.

A family tree can be a valid hint, but don't accept it. Think of it as your homework assignment.

It's not uncommon for me to find family trees that have pulled facts and documents from my tree. I can look at these trees to find my connection to their family, and maybe discover a new branch. But these are not hints to simply accept and add to your tree.

Instead, explore each hinted tree to see what they've done. Then do the research yourself. For example, I will not pull in my step-grandmother's nephew's family. But I will use that tree as a suggestion to search for more documents on Sadie's nephew and his family.

3. See Who Other Researchers Believe to Be Ancestors

Some time ago, Ancestry added Potential Father/Potential Mother hints. These show up in your tree as bright green icons. Click a potential parent, then click Review Details to see the source of the hint. I found these hints for my uncle's grandmother. I had her last name, but not her first name.

Rarely do I believe a potential father/mother hint. But this family tree showed extensive genealogy research.

The hint for her potential father had a completely different last name. The hint for her potential mother showed the same family, but it had a document image as a source. This is worth reviewing. There isn't a direct way to get to the source tree, but if you click "Where is this information from?" you can see the name of the source tree and the owner. You can then do a Member Search for the owner and find the tree to review.

When I went to that tree, it was clear this person had done extensive research on my uncle's family. The last name I have for my uncle's grandmother may be wrong. I'm horrified to say that I have know idea of my source for that name.

This potential father/potential mother hint seems valid. But I won't simply accept the hints. Instead, I'll explore this person's tree and try to recreate her work.

The vital records for my uncle's hometown are available online now, but they weren't there a year ago when I last looked. This person seems to have found church records. I'll contact her and hopefully we'll collaborate. If she's right, I've opened up an enormous new branch for my uncle's family. This was a great hint.

One of the worst things you can do when building your family tree is click to accept every hint. They're called hints for a reason. They are suggestions of where to look.

Use hints as search shortcuts. Use hints to find distant relatives. Use hints to expand your tree. But do these things carefully to keep from going in the wrong direction.

And speaking of hints:

• 3 Ways to Tell If That Hint is No Good
• Spinning a Hint into Genealogy Gold

In response to the comment below, Blogger is being idiotic and will not let me reply. So, I updated the 2 articles explaining how to use Antenati. Getting a high-res image is way easier than it was before. See https://family-tree-advice.blogspot.com/2017/05/how-to-use-online-italian-genealogy.html and https://family-tree-advice.blogspot.com/2022/01/antenati-tips.html

Look Past the Misspellings to Find Your Ancestors

My second grade teacher taught us to read by making us "sound it out." I remember my class sounding out a sentence in one voice. "We went to the park" sounded like: wuh ee, we; wuh en t, went; tuh oo, to; thuh uh, the; puh arr k, park." It sounded weird, but it worked.

That lesson from too many decades ago helped me break down a family tree brick wall last week.

There's an Italian-American woman who wants to visit her ancestral hometowns. She wants to identify her ancestors so she might connect with people in the towns. One branch of her tree was giving me problems. I couldn't be sure where this particular husband and wife came from, and my searches were coming up empty.

Then she shared a family history that her ancestor wrote about this brick wall branch. The document had exact birth dates for the couple. It listed 2 or 3 hometowns for both the husband and wife. That was curious. Then again, it could mean that they were born in one town and their parents were born somewhere else.

I focused on the husband first. I checked a website that lists the names of every town in Italy. Of the 3 hometowns in the family history document, only one existed. I did not find him there.

The other 2 towns did not exist, and the spelling didn't look like proper Italian. I figured this was how the town sounded to the family history author when her ancestor said it. This was a phonetic spelling of the town.

Say It, Don't Spell It

With that in mind, I kept saying the 2 misspelled town names aloud, over and over again. I scanned the list of Italian towns as I repeated the sounds again and again. I didn't find them.

You may not know how to spell the name of your ancestor's town. What to do? Sound it out.

One of the best methods for finding a hometown is to find your ancestor on a ship manifest. I knew I wouldn't find the hometown on his ship manifest because he came to America too early. My ancestors were kind enough not to arrive before 1898, giving me a good look at the names of their hometowns.

The family history document had one more good clue about this couple. They got married in Manhattan in about 1888. I went straight to the search page for the New York City Municipal Archives. I knew I should find the marriage document there. I hoped it would have the bride and groom's parents' names. I did not expect it to list a hometown.

My searches failed. I couldn't find this couple, even when I included all the city's boroughs and expanded the years. Then I searched for a variation of the bride's last name. Experience tells me that an Italian last name ending in i usually ended in o at an earlier time. So I searched for her name ending in an o. This produced a long list of possibilities. I looked at the search results, hoping to find one with both her name and his.

That's when I found them. I never thought a clerk would misspell his very common last name. I swear, the NYC clerks in the late 1800s were illiterate. Who spells Italy Ytali? Someone who hears an Italian pronounce Italy and can't spell, that's who.

See How It Sounds

Now I had my couple's parents' names, even though the clerk mangled each one. (Saverio is a first name. Saviero is not.) Since the groom's mother's name was not common, I did an Ancestry search for her. The one search result made me gasp. (I guess I'm a gasper.) It was someone else's family tree that included my groom's entire family—but not him.

Everything about this unsourced tree made perfect sense to me. The parents matched the NYC marriage record. The family history mentioned the groom's sister and brothers, and here they were. I never accept someone's family tree as fact, but I was able to verify what they were showing.

The one thing that made me certain this was the right family was their hometown. Remember those misspelled town names? The ones I kept saying aloud to hear their sound? This tree had one of the town names. When I said it aloud, I knew for a fact it was the misspelled town from the document.

Keep sounding out that foreign town name as you search for something that matches the sound.

Now it was time to prove this person's tree right or wrong. I searched the properly spelled town for my groom's birth record. I found him in the year before the date from the family history. (Always assume early ancestors may not know their own birthday.) There he was with the same parents I'd found misspelled on his NYC marriage record.

Knowing the right town, I used vital records to take the groom's family back 4 generations!

Most people would see that other family tree and think, "That's not the town great grandpa used to talk about." But I saw the town name and said it aloud as an Italian would. I heard it as a match for the botched spelling in the family history document.

When you pronounce an R in Italian, it sounds like a D. My grandfather used to call my grandmother Mary something that sounded like Moddy. That wasn't a D sound. It was a rolled R. That's why the family history had the town name so wrong.

What Else Makes That Sound?

My second grade teacher's "sound it out" method is still working for me. Have you heard your ancestor's hometown spoken with a foreign accent but never saw it written? You may not know how to spell it at all.

I used this method in my own family tree once before. (See Case Study on "What If There's No There There?") My great grandmother used to talk about where she came from. Her granddaughter passed that along to me as a phonetic spelling: Pisqualamazza. That's not a town. So I searched passenger lists for anyone around her age with her last name. I looked at each search result to see the hometown. When I saw Pescolamazza, I knew that was it. And that's where I found her birth record. Now I can name her 3rd great grandparents.

If you can't locate your ancestral hometown, keep your mind and ears open. Sound it out as you try to mimic the right accent. If you heard your grandfather say it when you were a kid, try to remember exactly how it sounded. Then see what sounds the same.

Genealogists Can Find Shocking Family Stories

Today I want to share a shocking story of discovery about my cousin's grandmother. This blog is about sharing genealogy best practices. I hope the steps I went through to flesh out this story will be helpful to you.

It all started when my mother's 1st cousin asked me if I could research her husband's mother. I've known and loved her husband my entire life. Back in 2007 I found out he didn't know his mother's maiden name. I couldn't imagine such a thing! So I began researching her for myself.

I found his mother's maiden name on her mother Filomena's naturalization papers. Now I knew the name of Filomena's hometown in Italy, and I found her birth record.

I don't remember how far I took my research in 2007, but now it was time to push further. My cousin's key question was, "Did my mother have any siblings?" He and his siblings had a vague memory of 2 uncles who "looked like twins." My cousin even thought he may have met them.

Unknown aunts and uncles told a tragic tale once I found them.

I started by having another look at Filomena's 1874 birth record. In the column of her birth record were 2 annotations for 2 marriages. In 1910 she married my cousin's grandfather, but earlier in 1898 she married another man.

I began looking into the first husband, Tommaso. Filomena and Tommaso married in her hometown and he left for America. She followed him in 1902. At the age of 33, Tommaso died of heart failure in the Bronx in November 1906.

What happened next to Filomena? Her birth record said she married the second time in her hometown. I returned to the vital records for Baiano in Avellino, Italy. Could Filomena have been pregnant with twin boys when her husband died? I checked the birth records in Baiano for each year after Tommaso's death.

In the 1907 birth records, I found more than I expected. Indeed, Filomena was pregnant when her husband died. She gave birth to a daughter, Tommasina, in January 1907. But there was a lot more to see in the 1907 records.

Filomena formally declared the births of her 2 American sons, Bartolomeo and Carmine. As I read the statements, I realized the boys were born a year and a half apart in the Bronx. I jumped over to the New York City Municipal Archives website. They recently made vital records available online. I found the boys' birth records.

The documents told me a very pregnant, widowed Filomena brought her 2 sons home to her family in Italy.

I already knew Filomena would marry in 1910 and come back to America with her new husband. But the boys and Tommasina are not with their mother in the 1915 New York census. Where were they?

When I searched for their names on Ancestry, I found 2 men with the right names living in New Jersey. I had no way to be sure these were my cousin's half uncles. After searching for a while, I wondered, did the 3 kids all die in Italy?

I went back to the Baiano vital records, focusing on death records. I knew all 3 kids were alive in January 1907, so I began in 1907 and searched the death records year-by-year.

The baby girl, Tommasina, named for the father who died before she was born, died in Baiano in early 1908. It was a gamble, but I had to keep looking for any sign of the boys, Bartolomeo and Carmine.

What I found horrified me. In April and May 1914, the boys died in Baiano. This was 4 years after their mother remarried and returned to America. It was 3 years after their half-sister (my cousin's mother) was born in the Bronx. It was the same year that another half-sister was born in the Bronx.

Bartolomeo was 10 years old and Carmine had just turned 9 years old. Italian death records rarely include a cause of death, so I don't know what happened to the boys. I can only imagine that their mother left them with her family members and sailed away with her new husband.

I didn't know these siblings existed until I found them in an unexpected place.

Why hadn't she sent for the boys when she re-settled in the Bronx? Filomena's 5th baby, Carmela, is one year old in the 1915 New York census. She's missing from future censuses, and I can't find a U.S. death record. And someone else is missing after 1915. Filomena's 2nd husband, Domenico. (He's my cousin's grandfather.)

I returned to Filomena's naturalization papers from the 1930s. She declares that her husband died in March 1920 in Naples, Italy. Is this true? Was he returning to Italy to see his family? Filomena and one of her daughters are in the Bronx for the 1925 New York census. But they're all missing from the 1920 census.

We can imagine that the family of 4 took a trip to Italy to see their relatives. Maybe that's when her husband and younger daughter died. But I can't prove that idea with a ship manifest showing Filomena's return to America. And I did not find death records for the husband and daughter in Filomena's hometown or her husband's hometown.

Filomena's story turned out to be a lot more tragic than I could have expected. Her life started out with so much promise and took some very dark turns:

• She marries and moves to New York.
• She has 2 sons and is pregnant with her 3rd child.
• Suddenly, her husband dies.
• She takes her sons back to her hometown in Italy and gives birth to a baby girl.
• One year later, the baby girl dies.
• Two years after that, she marries a man from Napoli and returns to New York, leaving her sons behind.
• In 1911 she has a baby girl with her 2nd husband in the Bronx.
• In 1914 she has another baby girl, but her 2 sons die in Italy, one month apart.
• By 1920, her 2nd husband and youngest daughter are gone.

Filomena was alive, at the age of 76, for the 1950 census. My cousin is in that census. He remembers his grandmother being sick in bed for a long time, and his mother taking care of her.

My cousin's family never knew this story. They'd heard that their grandmother married twice. They knew there were 2 boys who looked like twins. But when I pulled the whole story together, it was completely shocking to us all.

Always keep your mind open to what might have happened.

• If I hadn't thought, "what if Filomena went back to Italy?" I wouldn't have learned about Bartolomeo, Carmine, and Tommasina.
• If I hadn't wondered, "did the boys stay in Italy?" I wouldn't have discovered their shocking deaths.

As you can see, it's well worth checking someone's hometown when they're missing from their new town. If you have a hunch, follow it!

And speaking of shocking discoveries:

• Don't Ignore a Genealogy Hunch
• Is This Name a Coincidence? I Aim to Find Out
• Imagining the Journey of Our First Immigrant Ancestors