Untangling Our Twisted Family Relationships

Build your DNA match's family tree until you find the true relationship.

This article took a sharp turn from where it started. I thought I discovered an easy way to figure out your connection to a confusing DNA match.

And it is a good method. But then I realized the confusing DNA match I was looking at didn't have a direct line to me. It took a marriage to make the connection. Her 1st cousin 2x removed married my 4th cousin 3x removed.

And maybe that's where our shared DNA comes from.

Click Your Way to a Common Ancestor

Here's what I found. While it didn't work on this DNA match, it did reveal a blood relationship between my great aunt and her husband.

Originally I thought my DNA match was directly related to my great aunt's husband Donato. To see if Donato had a blood relationship to me (not just an in-law relationship), I went to Family Tree Maker. The software displays your relationship to the selected person clearly.

1. I clicked Donato's parents one at a time to see their relationship to me.
2. His mother Colomba is my 4th cousin 3x removed. A blood relative.
3. I clicked Colomba's parents to see their relationship to me. Her mother Maria is my 3rd cousin 4x removed.
4. I clicked Maria's parents to see the relationship description. Her father Vitangelo is my 2nd cousin 5x removed.
5. I clicked Vitangelo's parents. His father Pietro is my 1st cousin 6x removed.
6. Pietro's father Vitangelo is my 6th great uncle.
7. Finally, Vitangelo's parents are my 6th great grandparents, Liberatore Pozzuto and Libera Zeolla.

My 6th great grandparents are both Donato's and my great aunt's 4th great grandparents. With a shared pair of 4th great grandparents, my aunt and uncle were 5th cousins.

Are unknown relationships hiding in plain sight in your family tree?

Follow the Evidence

You're going to find that many of your DNA matches have posted a small, sparse family tree. (That's better than the matches with no tree.) Use their tree as a guideline only. Do the research yourself and try to prove what you see in their family tree.

This particular DNA match caught my attention recently. She was borrowing names and documents from my family tree and a distant relative's tree. I wanted to figure out who she is. Her tree on Ancestry.com seems to be facts she knows personally:

• her parents' names and birth dates
• her grandparents names and birth dates
• as many siblings as she knows for her parents and grandparents

Her family names tell me we're related through my paternal grandfather's hometown. Ancestry says she's about a 3rd or 4th cousin to my father and a 4th to 6th cousin to me.

Believe Nothing Without Proof

I wrote down her parents', grandparents', and great grandparents' names. Only a few had birth years included.

Then I opened my collection of vital records from my grandpa's hometown. Her parents were born too recently for my document collection, so I searched for their parents.

Bit by bit I added verified names and dates to my tree. I attached birth and marriage records as evidence. No one had a direct connection to me yet. But something had to be there.

When I found the 1866 birth record of my DNA match's mother's father's mother, a funny thing happened. The parents happened to be a couple I'd added to my family tree the day before!

Coincidentally, Libera and Giovanni are the parents of my DNA match's great grandmother. Now my DNA match was firmly rooted in my family tree. But it's one of those wacky "1st cousin 2x removed of wife of uncle of husband of 1st great aunt of" me relationships.

I thought we were related through the marriage of my great aunt and uncle. That's why I examined Donato's direct ancestors and found he was his wife's 5th cousin.

If that DNA match is distant, you're gonna need a bigger tree.

Always Look for More

Oh, these small Italian hill towns. They're infuriating and amazing at the same time. Everyone is related in some way. Donato, who married my great aunt, is related to me in his own right.

Family Tree Maker's relationship tool says Giovannangela, my grandfather's sister, is all these things to her husband Donato:

• wife
• 1st cousin of his brother-in-law, Pietro Iamarino
• sister-in-law of his 1st cousin 1x removed, Donato Paolucci
• 5th cousin

Actually, Family Tree Maker isn't displaying the 5th cousin relationship. It's as if it's throwing up its hands and saying "whatever".

Now that I've figured out how to follow the blood relationship, I can revisit more DNA mysteries. But be warned! It's easy to get lost. You may find you can't wrap your head around it. It helps to take notes along the way.

Can you find your DNA match's connection by climbing their family tree?

Adding Family Branches from Another Hemisphere

We used to look for our name in local phone books. Now we simply go online.

I could happily spend every day piecing together my ancestors. For the rest of my life!

On any given day, there's nothing else I'd rather do. It's addictive in a way that's good for your brain. It's your own personal jigsaw puzzle.

Last weekend I started working through my collection of Italian vital records. I want to review each one and see if it fits into my family tree.

I went through every birth and death record from my grandfather's town of Colle Sannita for 1809 and 1810. Most of the people had a connection in my tree! A baby's parents were already there. A deceased person's relatives were already there. So I added the new facts and document images to my family tree.

It's a wildly time-consuming project, and I couldn't love it any more.

Sometimes, though, a bright, shiny object will appear and distract you.

Can you see yourself in the faces of people from your homeland?

The object that distracted me on Monday was a photograph of Filomena, born in Colle Sannita in 1896. I don't know how else to say it. I loved her instantly. She brought out all my childhood feelings of love for my grandparents and their siblings.

The woman who posted the photo of Filomena lives in Buenos Aires, Argentina. She said she was eager to learn about her beloved grandmother's family, but can't seem to get anywhere. She needed help.

Immediately, I opened up my collection of Italian vital records. I found Filomena's 1896 birth record. Unfortunately, her parents were not in my family tree. But I'm connected to at least 90% of the town. Surely I could find a connection.

Would you have helped this woman? Knowing there was a good chance she was your distant relative, and knowing that you had all the documents. Wouldn't you help?

I jumped at the chance. She and I began chatting on Facebook. I kept combing through the vital records.

Filomena's mother's last name was Cerrone. I have a 3rd great grandmother, plus her father and grandfather, named Cerrone. They were from Colle Sannita, but there weren't a lot of Cerrone families in the town.

When I couldn't find a birth record for Filomena's mother, I looked one town away in Circello. My 3rd great grandfather—the one who married my Cerrone 3rd great grandmother—was from Circello. It seemed like a good place to look.

Sure enough, I found the 1870 birth record for Filomena's mother in Circello. I kept digging into each side of her family, in Colle Sannita and Circello. I located siblings for the last person I found. I worked my way back to their parents' marriage. That gave me another generations' names.

I've added 48 of Filomena's ancestors to my family tree so far. The whole branch is still disconnected from me, which is shocking.

I'm building this extended family, detached, in my family tree. Hopefully the connection will come.

I must keep going! Filomena's Cerrone grandfather, for example, had 6 siblings. I must have marriage records on my computer for them. There's a very good chance a Cerrone sibling married someone already in my tree.

I'm eager to find the connection and open up an endless resource for my new friend in Argentina. Our ancestors traveled far from home. Their town's descendants share deep, common roots. And genealogists know how to honor those roots.

I'll leave you with a challenge today. Search Facebook for a group dedicated to your ancestor's hometown. You may find vintage photos, important connections, and distant cousins.

Will you find a fellow genealogist in the group? Together you can spread your shared roots further and further around the world.

I'm eager to get back to my pet project, but first, I need Filomena to be my relative!

And speaking of piecing families together:

• How One Clue After Another Broke Down My Brick Wall
• Searching for My Only Missing 3rd Great Grandparent
• How a Genealogy Hunch Made a Best Friend a Cousin

Free Newspaper Site for Your Family Research

Search the news for a slice of history to round out your ancestor's story.

Newspapers haven't been very helpful to me in my family tree research. There are a few reasons for that:

• My ancestors didn't settle in the USA until 1898.
• They arrived as illiterate laborers.
• They never made news.

But that doesn't mean there's no value in old newspapers for someone like me.

I get angry when my seat on an airplane is too cramped. My poor ancestors rode in the belly of one of these.

The Library of Congress has a free collection of U.S. newspapers from 1789 to 1963. It's called Chronicling America. You may find your ancestors' social news, like engagements and weddings. You may learn that an ancestor was a criminal, or a lawyer.

Narrow your search by date, place, and newspaper, and look for clippings that belong in your family tree. Start at the Advanced Search screen and enter some information.

If you have any historic event in mind from 1789–1963, you should find a newspaper article about it.

Here are the best things I've found so far.

Ship Arrivals

My first ancestors to arrive in America were my great grandmother's family in 1898. My great grandparents followed them in 1899. Since I have their ship manifests in my family tree, I know the exact dates of arrival and the ship names.

I thought the New York newspapers should have some mention of the ships arriving each day. And they do. It's only a couple of lines, but here's what I learned about my great grandparents' 1899 voyage:

• The ship made 8 stops to pick up passengers and merchandise, before sailing to New York.
• My great grandparents boarded in Naples on 3 July 1899, which was the 7th stop on the ship's journey.
• There were 162 steerage passengers on the Karamania for this voyage.
• They arrived in New York Harbor at 6:00 p.m. on 23 July 1899.

My great grandmother's parents and siblings arrived a year earlier. Here's what I learned from the New York Tribune listing of ship arrivals:

• The ship made 6 stops to pick up passengers and merchandise before sailing to New York.
• My family boarded in Naples on 21 May 1898, which was the 5th stop on the ship's journey.
• There were 424 steerage passengers on the California for this voyage. That sounds packed!
• They arrived in New York Harbor at 7:25 p.m. on 7 June 1898.

That date is new information for me. My family's ship manifest has a blank in the arrival date field. But Ancestry.com has indexed this manifest with an arrival date of 8 June 1898. The newspaper clipping tells me the ship actually arrived the night before.

My Grandfather's WWI Battle

I've written before about using newspapers to learn about my grandfather's capture and imprisonment in World War I.

The last time I visited Italy, I went to the archives for the province of Benevento. I wanted to see my maternal grandfather's military record at the archives. These one-page records are jam-packed with facts. I've seen these records available online if the soldier died in the service of his country. But my grandfather lived to be 96 years old.

So I walked into the archive building with the volume number and record number I needed to see. I had a couple of sentences prepared in Italian to get me started.

I took photographs of the page, so now I have every last detail. I learned the name of his big battle, the date of my grandfather's capture, and the location of his prison camp.

At home I used the Chronicling America website to find news about the battle. It was an epic failure for the Italian Army. My grandfather was lucky to survive a prison camp that starved so many fellow soldiers to death.

The newspaper articles take this deeply personal story and set it on the world stage.

News at the time of my family's arrival triggered a childhood memory for me.

Your Own History

I did a more general search of Chronicling America for "Bronx" in 1898 or 1899. That's when my family arrived there. The first thing to catch my eye was an article published 60 years before I was born.

The headline is THE "ZOO" NEARLY READY. It explains that the Bronx Zoo was almost ready to open for the first time. This reminded me of my own traumatic visit to the Bronx Zoo in May 1971.

At the New York State Library 10 years ago, I found a New York Times article about the Bronx Day events happening on that 12th of May 1971.

There's a brief reference to my grade school class getting terrorized by a gang of hoodlums:

"The day was marred…by a few ugly situations. At the zoo, where hundreds of unruly adolescents gathered, the police reported a 12-year-old girl had been beaten. Several buildings and the restaurant were closed to curtail serious vandalism.

"William G. Conway, director of the zoo, said: 'Too many youngsters were without supervision. If we were host again, we'd want more supervision.'"

This really underplays what happened. My classmates know the story. But I'm glad to have this article. Now I'll always remember the date of that doomed class trip, cut short due to beatings, threats, and robbery.

If your ancestors were not in charge, not in high-society, and not on trial, you may not find their names in the paper.

If that's the case, be broader and more general in your newspaper searches. You may find clippings you'll want to add to your family tree.