Work in Batches to Strengthen Your Family Tree

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

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

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

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

Here's what I mean.

Add Descriptions to Images

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

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

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

Great annotations make your facts reproducible and verifiable.

Be Consistent with Addresses

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

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

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

Cite Your Sources

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

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

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

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

Be Consistent in Everything

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

5 Steps to Grow Your Italian Family Tree

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

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

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

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

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

Read how to use the Antenati site without understanding Italian.

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

Here are 5 steps for climbing your Italian family tree.

1. Start with your youngest ancestor

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

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

2. Search for siblings

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

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

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

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

3. Search for the parents' marriage records

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

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

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

4. Scour the death records

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

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

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

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

5. Trust the earliest-recorded age

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

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

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

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

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

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

How I Gained 2 More Generations in 1 Day

Maria Rosa Caruso,
my great grandmother

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

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

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

Here's what happened.

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

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

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

Maria Rosa's birth record.

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

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

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

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

Key facts from an Italian marriage record.

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

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

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