Finding and Fixing an Awkward Typo in Your Family Tree

I spent too many months fixing errors in my family tree to tolerate any more. I knew my previous lemon of a computer was the main source of the errors. Tons of duplicate source citations were born of failed syncs between Family Tree Maker and Ancestry.com. (See "Take the Time to Improve the Sources in Your Family Tree.")

Recently, I keep seeing another type of error. I'll notice a person with a male name marked as a female. I wondered if it was a typo I kept making. When I add a new name, my fingers are so fast on the keyboard that I sometimes press F for female before I realize it. I've caught myself doing it, and then I can fix it before moving on.

How many of these typos are in my huge family tree? How many men did I mark female? How many women did I mark male? How can I find them all?

Is this type of error hiding in your family tree?

Don't read anything snarky or political into this subject matter because it isn't there. There's one very important reason to make sure you've used the right gender. If you wind up with a wife labeled male, the couple's children will get her last name. Is that how names work in your culture?

The less important reason for fixing this error is you don't want to look like you don't know what you're doing. If you're recording history, you've got to strive for accuracy. I record each person by the name on their birth certificate, even if they went by another name in life. So I'm going to record their sex, too.

Looking for an Easy Way to Spot the Error

Since I use Family Tree Maker to build my tree, I wondered if a filter might help. I created a filter of all people in the tree with a sex of female. That cut my 66,000-person family tree list of names about in half. But that's too many names to scroll through and spot the out-of-place names.

I thought of Family Tree Analyzer because I knew I could sort the data like a spreadsheet. I opened my latest GEDCOM file and went to the Main Lists / Individuals tab. I sorted the Forenames column from A to Z (an important first step). Then I filtered the Sex column to display only F for female.

If you only keep your family tree online and do your work there, download a GEDCOM from the website. Open the file on your computer with Family Tree Analyzer, and make all the corrections one by one.

My list was still long, of course, but it didn't take too long to scan. With the first names in alphabetical order, I could scroll quickly past everyone named Maria, for instance. I acted on 4 types of first names:

1. Clearly male names. If you have lots of names based in another language, understand the rules of that language. Most of my Italian first names ending in the letter a will be female, but there are exceptions. Nicola, Mattia, Andrea, Giambattista, Zaccaria, etc.
2. Possibly male names. Among my Italian ancestors, the first name Felice could belong to either a male or a female. In English, think of a name like Dana or Chris.
3. Typos that stood out in the alphabetical list. I saw Antona instead of Antonia.
4. A last name as a first name. A name like Viola may be a first name, but in my tree it's also a last name. I need to see this person's full name. Italian names are often written last-name-first on vital records, so I may have absentmindedly entered a name backwards.

Of all the females, there were 92 I needed to review in my family tree and a much smaller number to change to male. When I finished, I changed my filter in Family Tree Analyzer to display only people with an M in the sex column. I scanned the long list for any female names, questionable names, or typos. I didn't count them, but there were at least 10 I changed to male.

If you're working on your family tree, a wrong-sex error is very visible when you find one. The person's name may be in a field of pink instead of blue, or they're on the left side when you expected them to be on the right.

I don't know how each of these errors happened. Now that it's top-of-mind, I'm hopeful I won't keep making the wrong choice out of muscle memory.

This Number is Crucial to Your DNA Match Research

Another day, another look at my mom's DNA match list. This time I wanted to find the first still-unknown person in her list worth researching. A video by DNA expert Diahan Southard encouraged me to research a match who shared a long segment of DNA with Mom. That means looking past the total number of shared cM to see the longest "segment" of shared cM.

You can find the longest segment length by clicking the amount of shared cM to see more details. This is true on most if not all DNA websites.

Researching a DNA match led me to 5 more children of my 3rd great uncle. They were born in another town.

Increase Your Odds of Success

I began this exercise by looking only at matches who showed a family tree. A quick look at a few trees told me who they were. "Oh, that's my 3rd cousin through Immacolata Leone. Noted."

The match I chose to research has my great grandmother's maiden name in her family tree. Saviano. I'm always interested in finding another Saviano. And they've been hard to find.

This match shares with Mom a longest segment of 27 cM. Diahan Southard didn't specify a longest-segment range worth researching, but her example showed 32 cM. So 27 cM is pretty close.

Do the Research Yourself

First I had to figure out my connection to her ancestor, Giuseppe Saviano. This match supplied an exact birth and death date for him in her family tree, but no locations. I knew the dates would be a big help.

A search on Ancestry told me Giuseppe came to America and lived in Cleveland, Ohio. I know lots of relatives who wound up in Cleveland, including my father. I found Giuseppe in someone else's Ancestry tree. He had the right dates, Cleveland as his place of death, and San Nicola, Salerno, Italy, as his place of birth.

My absolute first thought was, "I wonder if he was really born in San Nicola Manfredi." (That's in Benevento, not Salerno.) Why would I think that? Because that town borders the town where my Saviano ancestors were born. I know there was a decent cross-over between the two towns. And I have all the San Nicola Manfredi vital records at my disposal. I've found many familiar last names in the San Nicola Manfredi vital records.

So, was Giuseppe Saviano actually born in San Nicola Manfredi on 1 Jan 1889? Check the documents—yes! Here he is. And Giuseppe's U.S. World War II draft registration card confirms he was born in San Nicola Manfredi on 1 Jan 1889.

But the true brick-wall busting moment came from the other facts on that birth record. Giuseppe's parents were Giovanni Saviano and Giuseppa Sarracino. I know that couple! They're in my family tree!

In my tree I saw Giovanni was my 3rd great uncle. He's one of only two siblings I've found for my 2nd great grandfather, Antonio Saviano. They come from a little hamlet called Pastene in a town called Sant'Angelo a Cupolo. The town was part of the Papal States, so they didn't keep civil records before 1861. Don't get me started on that. I could cry at the dead ends that causes me.

I'd already found 6 children for Giovanni and Giuseppa. They were all born in Pastene or in greater Sant'Angelo a Cupolo. One of their daughters came to America in 1898 with my 2GG Antonio Saviano and his family. She died in 1901. But I don't know anything else about the other children.

Expand Your Search Area

Thanks to this DNA match and a hunch, I now know Giovanni Saviano and Giuseppa Sarracino moved to neighboring San Nicola Manfredi. Or maybe the borderline moved and they stayed put. Either way, they had 2 more sons in San Nicola Manfredi in 1889 and 1890. I went through the birth records year-by-year looking for more. What I found tells me that Giuseppa died and Giovanni remarried and had 3 more children.

I wish the last 3 were born at the same address as the previous 2, but they weren't. I do know this Giovanni Saviano is the only one around who's having children during these years. And, like his brother (my 2GG), his occupation changes all the time:

• 1875–1880: farmer
• 1882–1885: merchant
• 1889: shopkeeper
• 1890–1896: industrialist
• 1898: farmer again
• 1901: shopkeeper again

The best thing about this discovery is that I've found Saviano cousins with roots in Ohio.

Lessons Learned

What lessons have I learned from this research?

1. Don't frustrate yourself with DNA matches who show no family tree. Unless their shared matches have a story to tell, you may get nowhere.
2. You may not find your connection to a DNA match with a short "longest segment." I don't know where the cutoff is, but you've got a better chance of success if their longest segment is about 30 cM or more.
3. When your DNA match's family tree has sparse details, research their ancestor yourself. You may be more interested in genealogy research than they are. Or they may prefer to limit how much information they put out there.
4. Spend time with online maps. Know the names of the towns surrounding your ancestor's town. Take a peek at records for neighboring towns to see if any last names are familiar to you.

I'm thrilled to make some kind of progress on my mother's dead-end branch. While I can't see vital records from their town before 1861, I may find traces of my family in neighboring towns.

Overlooked Website Finds Immigrant Ancestors

I'll bet we all do it. We save notes or bookmarks to remind us of a genealogy find we need to explore. And then we forget all about it. I found a web address and single sentence on line 420 of my constantly updated text file named Notebook.txt. It says this:

http://www.ciseionline.it/portomondo
Search for family names; based on dates and ship names, piece together families.

This free-access Italian website belongs to CISEI, an organization that translates to the International Center for Italian Emigration Studies. The site provides a simple search form that lets you find Italian relatives who emigrated to:

• Brazil
• The United States
• Argentina
• Canada
• Australia

And you can search all 5 locations at once.

The key benefits of this site, which does not show you the actual ship manifests, are:

• Italians compiled much of the information. They're less likely to mangle the spelling of an Italian name.
• You'll get each key detail from a manifest typed out clearly and with great care.
• You'll get details about the ship, a photo*, migration statistics, and links to more information.
  * The photo may not be the actual ship, but it will say so.
• You'll see a map of the long migration path across the ocean.
• It's free!

Search 5 countries at once on this free website to see where your cousins disappeared to.

Start Your Search with a Name

Remember, you can copy the site's URL into Google Translate and click the result to see the site in your language.

To use the search form:

• Enter a last name in the first box. This is mandatory. Wild characters like * and ? do not work. Incomplete names do not work.
• Enter a first name if you choose. This can be helpful if you would otherwise get too many results.
• Choose a destination country, or keep the Everyone/Tutti selection, to search all available ports at once.
• Click the button to submit your search.

To test this search engine, I searched for a record I know very well. It's my 2nd great grandfather's 1898 trip back to America with his whole family. He'd been to New York 2 or 3 times before this, and the last time, he left his eldest son in the Bronx to await the whole family.

When you find the result you want, click the icon in the column on the right. You'll see a full transcript of this line from the ship manifest. I was happy to see that the results were all correct. I already knew the ship name (California). I knew my relatives were heading to 149th Street in the Bronx, New York. I knew they were joining the eldest son in the family, Simplicio Saviano.

A second search for only the last name Saviano let me find the rest of the family. I already saw that the arrival date was 8 June 1898 (written here as 08/06/1898), so they were easy to spot.

With a few more clicks, I found:

• 13 people named Saviano who emigrated to Brazil
• 6 who went to Argentina
• 8 who went to Australia
• 122 who came to the USA.

I can check my family tree and vital records to try to identify cousins in these lists.

The immigration path looks daunting, doesn't it? Find out more about your ancestor's journey.

Be on the Lookout

The main page tells you which years this database includes for which ports. There's such a variety that I won't list them here. But if you don't find your person, check to see if the database covers their year of arrival.

I didn't find my great grandparents' arrival in July 1899, and the website says it should be there. I didn't find either of my grandfathers' arrivals, either. Still, I'm excited by what I can learn from this very concentrated database of emigrants. I'm especially interested in family members who went to Australia, Argentina, and Brazil. They could help tie up some loose ends.

I noticed a few name abbreviations that tell me that's how the manifest shows the name. For instance, I found one Francesco Iamarino listed as "FCO." complete with the period at the end. Another Francesco is "FRANCO" on his manifest. Yet another, this one a Francesco Saverio, is "FRANO.SAVO." These people will be harder to find, so you should leave the first name blank on the search form and try again.

Once you've done a search or two, you shouldn't need Google Translate to get the facts you want. Some headings on the pages are images, so Google can't translate them for you. But, with the Google Translate app on your phone, you can aim your phone at the screen to see a translation. (If you're doing the search on your phone, you may need to borrow a second phone!)

Hurray! Another genealogy project! How late can you stay up tonight?

And speaking of immigration:

• 5 Ellis Island Videos Dispel Immigration Myths
• Who Was Your First Immigrant Ancestor?
• 6 Key Genealogy Facts on a Ship Manifest