How to Handle Foreign Words in Your Family Tree

I record occupations in my ancestor's language.

Years ago I dove headfirst into transcribing Italian vital records for my family tree. I visited a Family History Center, viewed the microfilm, and typed into my laptop. I memorized the Italian words for numbers, months and family members.

When a document included a person's occupation, I typed the Italian word and kept going. I didn't translate the words on the spot, but later I created a file of Italian occupations and their English definitions.

My Italian occupations cheat-sheet.

The translation file helped me memorize many words, but I entered only the Italian occupation in my family tree. I felt it made sense for my ancestors who never left Italy.

But now I'm thinking more about my family tree as a legacy. If someone else continues my work, these Italian words may not be understood.

Wouldn't it be better to include the Italian word and its English translation? Uh oh. How can I make this sweeping change to my tree of more than 19,000 people?

Hiding in plain sight.

I decided to try the Find and Replace feature in Family Tree Maker. It's in the Edit menu.

You can use find and replace to makes lots of improvements and corrections. But be careful. Think hard about unintended changes that might happen. For example, if you wanted to replace "Smith" because you found out your ancestors were actually named Smythe, what would happen to your cousin who was born in Smithtown, Long Island?

I did a test changing "calzolaio" to "calzolaio (shoemaker)". I checked the boxes to find whole words only and look only in facts and notes. Then I clicked Replace All.

It was a success.

Click once, fix 180 entries. Not bad!

Now I can work through the most common Italian occupations in my family tree. Then I'll look at some other facts I wish I'd recorded differently. For example, long ago I recorded every immigration fact the same way, beginning with the words, "Arrived aboard the..." followed by the ship name. Later I changed where I put the ship name. Maybe I can use find and replace to bring more uniformity to my facts.

It's more useful with the English translation.

The lion's share of the people in my family tree were born and died in Italy. I believe in preserving some of their facts in Italian. Aside from occupations, I record the Italian names of the churches where they married. Chiesa di San Leonardo Abate and Chiesa di San Giorgio Martire.

Think about two things:

• Which original-language facts do you want to preserve?
• How can you prevent that foreign-language information from losing its meaning?

Does your family tree software have a find and replace feature?

You may also enjoy:

• How to Read an Italian Birth Record
• How to Read an Italian Death Record
• How to Read Italian Marriage Records

How to Keep Track of All Your Surnames

I'm in the midst of a huge genealogy project. I'm trying to find the common ancestors my parents share.

Yup. DNA analysis shows that my parents are not-so-distant cousins. By adding more and more great grandparents to my ancestor chart, I should find the couple that connects my parents.

If you've had a DNA test, you should be able to download your raw DNA file. Then you can create a free account at GEDmatch.com and upload your raw DNA file there for analysis. One of their tests is called "Are you parents related?" See Free DNA Analysis Finds Kissing Cousins.

I've also had my parents' DNA tested, and Ancestry DNA estimates they are third to fifth cousins. That's why I'm scouring my downloaded Italian vital records for that one magic couple.

As I explained last time, I'm trying to be efficient with those Italian records. I'm entering the basic facts into a spreadsheet, and focusing on the names that matter most to me. See Genealogy: Where Endless Searching is Part of the Fun.

Last night I found the last name d'Emilia in some early 1800s marriage records. My fifth great grandfather was Ferdinando d'Emilia and his father was Giuseppe d'Emilia.

So I grabbed all the details from these marriage records and compared them to my Family Tree Maker file. I had a hit! Annamaria, Francesco Saverio and Costantino d'Emilia were the siblings of Ferdinando and the children of Giuseppe d'Emilia.

But what if I'd forgotten that I had d'Emilia in my tree? My family tree has more than 19,000 people. That's a crazy amount of last names.

How can I keep them all top-of-mind while I'm searching through these Italian documents?

Today I found a feature in my family tree software that I've never used before. It's a filter you can add to the name index. This allowed me to show the names of only my direct ancestors. That's the list of names I want to remember as I'm sifting through my collection of vital records.

I can also restrict the index by using Family Tree Maker's new color-coding feature. I gave my ancestors a green color. If I click on green, only my ancestors appear in the index.

Then I realized I could customize a report to show:

• only my ancestors
• only last names
• no other facts

This leaves me with a list of my last names.

It's a long way to go, I realize. But if I can commit those names to memory, or glance at the list, it will help me find that missing link for my parents.

The lesson: Break out of your comfort zone. Explore everything your genealogy software or genealogy website can do for you.

Genealogy: Where Endless Searching is Part of the Fun

All last week I was looking forward to my three-day weekend. I would have so much fun with non-stop genealogy!

Chasing genealogy facts is this much fun.
©The Simpsons

Saturday was great. I identified more than 200 people in my family tree who were not connected to me. These are families I think belong to me, but I haven't yet found the connection. And I also found 11 people to delete from my tree.

I attached one image to each of these people so I could find them again anytime. (See How to Handle the Unrelated People in Your Family Tree, and be sure to read my comments at the end.)

Sunday was full of distractions. Once things settled down, I got productive. I documented in a spreadsheet every 1810 marriage from my Grandpa Iamarino's hometown.

I'm documenting births, marriages and deaths to meet two of my genealogy goals for 2018 (see What Are Your Genealogy Goals for 2018?):

• Log my downloaded documents from the Antenati website into a spreadsheet.
• Find my parents' connection (our DNA says they're distant cousins).

I hope these early Italian vital records contain the ancestors my mom and dad have in common.

Yesterday I had a wonderfully productive day documenting these towns. I'm using a time-saving, productivity-boosting technique that you can use, too.

I record the basics from each document. When I find someone I need, I fill in all the facts and put them straight into my family tree.

A Tip for Large-Scale Research Projects

I have thousands of vital record images from my ancestral Italian hometowns on my computer (and backed up in two places). Now I have to harvest them for family tree information.

Slogging through one year of marriage records for one town, as I did on Saturday, is very slow and tedious. If I weren't obsessed, I'd have given up.

Then I realized I can find the juiciest documents faster by using this method:

• Open up your family tree software.
• Go through an image collection, such as one year's marriages, one at a time. Enter the most basic information for each document into your data spreadsheet. This could be nothing more than the document number and the names and ages of the bride and groom.
• When you see a last name of interest, check your family tree. Are the bride or groom in your tree already? How about their parents?
• When you find a match, even if it's a distant match, examine that document. Enter all its facts into your spreadsheet.
• If this document belongs in your family tree, put the facts and image into your tree now.

I followed this method yesterday with Photoshop open, too, so I could crop the images before putting them into my tree.

Thanks to this more efficient method, I completed the 1811 and 1812 marriages. All the basic information from these hundreds of documents is in my spreadsheet. Plus, the 10 or so marriages including my maiden name of Iamarino are now in my family tree.

Oh, and I had one more document open. That was my document tracker where I keep my up-to-date inventory of every document image I've placed in my family tree. (See Track Your Genealogy Finds and Your Searches.)

I can see it now. I can see how I'm going to spend nearly every waking moment when I hit retirement age. This passion for genealogy gives us all a reason to live to at least 100. We'll never be finished with our genealogy research. But the search is very much part of the fun.