When Unrelated People Finally Fit Your Family Tree

What do you do when that unattached branch takes root in your family tree?

Before 1900, all my ancestors came from small towns in Italy. In the 1800s there was very little moving around. Each person stayed in one town their entire life. Unless they arranged an inter-town marriage. And even then, the spouse was usually from a town or two away.

Because of all the intermarrying, I'm related to entire towns. By blood or marriage, I can find some relation to nearly everyone in each of my town's vital records. (Find out how to download vital records from your ancestor's Italian hometown.)

I found this out by recording every vital record for my grandfather's town. The documents ranged from 1809 to 1860 and included the names of more than 15,000 people.

As I added people to a separate Family Tree Maker file, I saw how they were all related. I connected more than 10,000 people to my grandfather. Then I imported them to my main tree.

That'll boost your family tree size!

Lately, as one of my 2019 genealogy goals, I've been adding a bunch of unrelated people to my family tree. I'm adding every baby born in my other grandfather's hometown who has the last name Pozzuto. (That name has some strong DNA matches.)

The idea is to figure out their relationship to me. I add a baby and its parents. I look for the baby's siblings and then for the parents' marriage. If I find the marriage, I can learn the baby's grandparents' names. I may even learn the great grandfathers' names. (Not sure why you'd want to add unrelated people to your tree? See "2 Reasons to Add Unrelated People to Your Family Tree".)

As I add each person to my tree, I:

• Compare their facts to anyone in my tree with a similar name.
• Attach my "No Relationship Established" image as their profile image. (Find out how to find the unrelated people in your family tree using Family Tree Analyzer.)

If I can't find my connection to that random Pozzuto baby's family, I move on to the next baby.

About 200 people in my family tree are sporting that "No Relationship Established" image. But there are magical moments that make it so worthwhile.

In Family Tree Maker, it's easy to see who's attached to any image.

I'll be building out a family. The bride was already in my tree, and now I know who the groom is. When I attach them to one another, boom! Suddenly the guy's description goes from "No direct relationship found" to something wild, like "Grand nephew of wife of 1st great-uncle of husband of paternal grandmother of husband of 1st great-aunt" of me!

Now the groom, his siblings, their spouses, his nieces and nephews, his parents and grandparents, are ALL related to me in some way.

But they still have that big blue "unrelated" image. That has got to go.

It's beyond tedious to view each newly related person and remove that image.

So I found a shortcut. While looking at the family in tree view in Family Tree Maker:

• Click each person and put a 1 at the beginning of their last name. Onofrio 1Pozzuto, Donato 1Pozzuto, Rosa 1Martuccio, and so on.
• Choose one person and click to see their Media tab.
• Select the "No Relationship Established" image and click the link icon.
• Click the checkbox for each person at the top of the list whose last name begins with a 1.
• Click the "Unlink Selected" button. If you select a lot of people, you may have to wait a minute for the process to finish.
• Remove the 1 from the beginning of each last name.

You'll love this tip when a big branch suddenly has a relationship to you.

I get such a rush out of this. I took a random baby and turned him into 50 new distant relatives.

I've visited my ancestral hometowns and felt a deep, strong connection. That's what inspired my endless, giddy pursuit of tons of relatives. My DNA is 96% from this Southern Italian region with just a touch of Greece. These towns ARE my DNA. They are me.

That's my inspiration, and it's why I'll be practicing genealogy until I can no longer use a computer.

I hope this tip will help you turn prospective relatives into deep-in-your-bones relatives.

You're the Scientist in Your Family Tree

Don't have a Bachelor of Science degree? You're still an honorary scientist.

There's a reason why genealogy has that "ology" at the end. An "ology" is any science or branch of knowledge. According to Dictionary.com, genealogy is the study of family ancestries and histories.

So doesn't that make us all scientists? We're amateur scientists, exploring and studying family ancestries and histories.

That's why we should approach our genealogy passion like a scientist. I wrote about this idea 2 years ago when I saw that being as disciplined as a scientist gets you better results.

My maternal grandmother's roots are here.

As an honorary scientist, I conduct experiments in my family tree. One of them involves the Muollo family of Pastene. Pastene is a little hamlet of the town of Sant'Angelo a Cupolo in the Bevento province in southern Italy.

My 2nd great grandmother, Maria Luigia Muollo, lived and died in Pastene. Vital records for Pastene are scarce:

• Births: 1861–1915, with no documents for 1872, 1895, and 1906–1908
• Marriages: 1931–1942, but 1937 is missing
• Deaths: 1931–1942, but 1937 is missing

Based on the births of 5 children, I know Maria Luigia Muollo was born in about 1843. I hired a pair of Italian genealogists to find church records for me. They found that Maria Luigia Muollo married Giuseppe Sarracino on 9 December 1864 in Pastene.

But even the researchers didn't find much. They told me this little hamlet had avoided keeping records. Like a little rebel town giving Napoleon the finger. And I want to learn her mother's name.

What would a scientist do in this situation? She'd be logical, methodical, and follow the evidence.

This is one reason why you must find all the children; not only your ancestor.

Let's look at the facts.

• Maria Luigia's birth record is not available. I found her age only on her son Biagio's 1879 birth record: 36. That's also the only record that say Maria Luigia's father is Antonio—and he's still alive in 1879.
• Maria Luigia's death record is not available.
• Maria Luigia's 1864 marriage record offers no information but the marriage date.
• A search for any much-younger siblings comes up empty. There are no Muollo babies born to an Antonio who's the right age in the 1860s.

But I may have gotten lucky.

A Muollo girl was born to a father named Antonio 2 years before the available birth records. She's 16 years younger than Maria Luigia, but that's not impossible. When you have a baby every other year from marriage to menopause, the kids span a lot of years. My first-born grandfather was 20 years older than his youngest sister.

This other Muollo girl was Maria Saveria. Like my 2nd great grandmother, she also married a Sarracino man from Pastene. I found birth records for 10 babies born to this couple between 1880 and 1903.

Maria Saveria is in my tree because of her husband. Is she my great aunt, too?

My break came when I found that members of this family came to America. Maria Saveria and her 2 youngest children came to New York City after her husband Orazio died. At least 2 of her other children were here in New York.

Maria Saveria died in New York City on 10 January 1944, and that's why I was able to see her death certificate. (Many thanks to the generous reader who gave me the document image.) Her death record gave me these facts:

• She was born on 24 May 1859
• She lived on Courtlandt Avenue in the Bronx for just about her entire time in America
• Her father was Antonio Muollo
• Her mother—and this is what I most wanted to find—was Giuseppina Torrico
• She's buried in the same place as nearly all my Bronx ancestors: St. Raymond's Cemetery

That gives me new data to analyze:

• I can continue to piece together the lives of Maria Saveria's children in New York.
• I can try to find out where her husband Orazio was living and if he died in America.
• I can investigate the name of her mother: Giuseppina Torrico.

Torrico feels like more of a Spanish name than an Italian one. There are plenty of records on Ancestry.com supporting that.

But it is an Italian name, too. I used the Cognomix website to check the name Torrico in Italy. It's not a common name, but there are a few families with that name in my part of Italy: Campania. In the province of Caserta, not far from my Benevento province, the Torrico name exists in 3 towns.

I checked out the town of Carinola because it has the most Torrico families. I needed birth records around 1834 and they are available.

Methodically, I checked the indexes for every birth year from 1821–1839. I was looking for a Giuseppa, Giuseppina, or Maria Giuseppa Torrico.

I found two:

• Giuseppa Torrico was born on 6 December 1828 to Felice (born 1797) and Anna Robbio (born 1798)
• Giuseppa Torrico was born on 15 April 1837 to Francesco (born 1972) and Anna diCioco (born 1797)

Next I checked the Carinola marriage records for Antonio Muollo and Giuseppa Torrico. It was a long-shot, so I gave up after checking the 4 most likely years.

So far, this experiment is a failure due to a lack of Italian documents. I don't know if Maria Saveria is the sister of my 2nd great grandmother. Or if Giuseppina Torrico is my 3rd great grandmother.

Someday I want to spend months at a time researching in Italy. Until then, I'll keep searching for U.S. documents for Maria Saveria and her family.

I hope you see how being scientific will keep you from going down the wrong path and making a mess of your family tree. I'd like you to choose one of your brick walls and lay out all the evidence. Where does it lead you?

It's Mid-Year Genealogy Goals Checkup Time

Half a year left. It isn't too late to start your genealogy goals!

I had such a wildly productive 4-day weekend of genealogy research. I want every day to be as filled with joy and accomplishment as that.

I had enough hours to bounce around, finishing off tasks that weren't even on my to-do list. Not officially. For example:

• Upgrade my unofficial sources to official sources. I researched facts that I'd borrowed from other distant relatives. I found documentation to prove or fix what they'd told me.
• Go through my old to-do list in Family Tree Maker. I followed up on several questions and answered a bunch of them.
• Find the family connection for branches that are floating loose in my family tree. I knew these people had to be related somehow. I figured out a bunch of them.

Then I realized we've just passed the halfway point of 2019. It's time to refocus on our 2019 genealogy goals. How are you doing with your list?

The bigger your family tree gets, the easier it is to get lost. Your goals can keep you on the right path.

Making Progress on Genealogy Goals

These are the realistic genealogy goals I planned for 2019 and their status:

• Enter the first five years' worth of birth records from each of my ancestral towns into a spreadsheet. DONE!
• Search for all missing census forms in my document tracker spreadsheet. DONE!
• Enter every "Pozzuto" birth and marriage from the town of Colle Sannita into my family tree. MAKING PROGRESS. I'm up to 1841 BIRTHS going forward, and 1852 marriages going backwards.
• Find Erie Railroad documents from the time my great grandfather worked there. TRIED and FAILED. There is a 1938 Erie Railroad magazine issue that includes my ancestor's name. Maybe the Hornell, New York, library has it.
• Figure out when my 2nd great uncle moved to Illinois. NARROWED DOWN to between 1906–1910.
• Search 1920–1925 New York City newspapers for the mutual aid society to which my 2nd great grandfather belonged. TRIED and FAILED.
• Enter every "Muollo" baby born in Sant'Angelo a Cupolo into my family tree. Find all available documents for the ones who emigrated to Pennsylvania. MAKING PROGRESS.

The first 2 items on the list took a pretty long time. They were tedious. But finishing them was such a rush.

All I can think about is the next step—my 2020 genealogy goals:

• I want to enter more vital records from my ancestral towns into that spreadsheet.
• I want to search for the missing draft registration cards for every American man in my document tracker.

It's like potato chips. Once you start, you just can't stop. (See "Plowing Through My 2019 Genealogy Goals".)

The more I add to this database of my ancestral towns, the more valuable it is.

Time to Get Busy

Now here's what I'd like you to do:

• If you never made a 2019 goals list, write a short, achievable list of goals.
• If you did make a 2019 list, see where you stand with each item.
• Figure out which goals you can make the biggest dent in beginning now.
• Think about which goals are better left for next year.

Never stop making progress in your family tree research. Anyone who enjoys this crazy-obsessive genealogy hobby knows the secret: Finding that next important fact is everything! That's what keeps us going. And loving every minute of it.