How to Use Ancestry ThruLines for Research Leads

The other day I found myself looking at Ancestry ThruLines® for the first time in a while. That's when I hit on a way to kickstart more growth in my family tree. I scrolled way down my list of direct ancestors to my 5th great grandfather. His name is Biaggio Trancuccio from Apice. That's the Italian ghost town whose vital records I've indexed so they're searchable.

Don't have an AncestryDNA test? MyHeritage has a similar feature. Choose Cousin Finder™ from the Discoveries menu. Find an interesting match and click View relationship.

What a pleasant surprise it was to find DNA matches among Biaggio's descendants. I have 2 DNA matches belonging to Biaggio's son, Giuseppe, my 4th great granduncle. I've already documented Giuseppe and his 9 children in my family tree. But I haven't looked into the marriages and descendants of the 9 kids yet.

Take advantage of these evidence-based line of succession genealogy hints.

Thanks to ThruLines, I have some evidence of Giuseppe's direct descendants. I can use the names I see on ThruLines, search the vital records, and make my way down to these new DNA matches. Note that ThruLines shows these direct descendants based on other family trees. Maybe the builders of those trees have discovered more than you have.

Start With What You Know

In ThruLines, I see that my DNA matches descend from Giuseppe's son Angelo, my 1st cousin 5 times removed. I can use the town's vital records to find all his children. I'll start with the 1878 birth record of my matches' ancestor, another Giuseppe. His birth record tells me who his father Angelo married. Knowing her name is Teresa d'Oro, I can find the couple's other children.

Going through the vital records, I found 9 children for Angelo and Teresa. Later I'll document Teresa and her family, but first I'll look at ThruLines again. My DNA matches descend from Angelo's son Giuseppe and his son Salvatore. Salvatore and his siblings were born too late to be in the online Italian vital records. This would be the end of the paper trail, but one of the DNA matches doesn't have an Italian last name. There's a good chance I can find the family in U.S. records.

Jackpot! Salvatore was born in New York and is well-documented. That means his father Giuseppe came to America. The search results for Giuseppe are an absolute treasure trove. He came to New York in 1902, single. Census records from 1920 through 1950 show me his children's names. He married a woman called Florence.

Take advantage of a different kind of genealogy hint that puts you on the right trail.

You've Got to Get Down to Climb Up

The real game-changer is the New York, New York Extracted Marriage Index. I see two mangled names with a 1911 Bronx marriage certificate number. At first glance, this seems to me to be Giuseppe Trancuccio and Fiorentina Frusciante. The transcription says Torentino Truscianti. But my knowledge of Apice names tells me it should be Frusciante. And Fiorentina is a common first name in the town.

I found the 1911 marriage certificate on the NYC Municipal Archives website. The clerk wrote Giuseppe's last name as Trangucci—exactly like the transcription. His birthplace is Apice, and his parents are Angelo and Teresa d'Oro. This confirms his identity. His wife's name, it's clear to me, says Fiorentina Fruscianti, born in Apice. Her parents are Sabato and Rosa Verginio.

With these details, I can climb cousin Giuseppe's Apice-born wife's family tree.

Turning to the Apice vital records, I found Maria Fiorentina Frusciante. She was born in 1893 to Sabato Frusciante (who is already in my family tree) and Rosa Virgilio. The last name Virgilio is not an Apice name, but it's clear she was there. She and Sabato Frusciante had 5 children besides Maria Fiorentina in Apice. Three of them married in Apice.

Be Ready to Pivot

So far, ThruLines looks correct. One of the DNA matches should be my 4th cousin twice removed, and the other, her granddaughter, my 6th cousin. I know exactly where they fit in my family tree. Now it's my job to use available records to prove it.

But something is off. ThruLines lists the older match (who died in 2017) as the daughter of Salvatore Trancuccio. Her obituary and her last name say otherwise. Evidence says she was the grandmother of the younger DNA match. But there's no connection to the Trancuccio name. Was the older match born out of wedlock? She came from the same New York borough as my Trancuccio clan, and she was born 5 years before Salvatore married.

She and I share 3 matches I've already connected to my 3rd great grandmother from Apice. I know we're related, but every record says otherwise.

She made it onto the 1940 census as an infant of 0 months. But there's a twist. The head of household is her mother. There is no husband listed, but there are 4 children, ages 7, 6, 5, and 0. In the 1950 census, my match's mother is a widow, but there's a new child who was born in 1943. The more I dug into this family, the less I understood.

In the end, I won't add these DNA matches to my family tree. I'll add notes to my DNA match list and drop the matter. If it is a case of misattributed parentage (I hate that phrase), I don't want to make any assumptions. But all is not lost. The leads generated by ThruLines have helped me expand my family tree and deepen my roots in the town of Apice.

Keep Expanding

Everything I found through this exercise gives me more leads to follow to expand my family in Apice. And it's all thanks to an Ancestry ThruLines line of succession from my 4th great granduncle. It would be easy to spend weeks harvesting these leads. And a lot of fun.

The Dangerous Jobs Your Ancestors Endured

When you look at early 1900s ship manifests, one thing is very clear. Rich people didn't leave their homeland. They didn't need to leave. Anyone related to me arrived in New York City with a few dollars in their pockets and nothing more. They were lucky to have scraped together enough money for the ticket.

Fourteen-and-a-half million people came to the United States between 1890 and 1920. They came to earning a living and escape hardship. Their numbers are staggering:

• nearly 4 million Italians
• almost 3 million Eastern Europeans
• more than 2 million Germans
• close to 2 million from Austria-Hungary
• 1¼ million from the UK and Ireland
• just over 1 million from Mexico
• ½ million from Scandinavia
• less than ½ million from Canada
• almost 1½ million from other countries

Read about what was going on in their homeland when your ancestors emigrated. After visiting Italy, I couldn't imagine why my ancestors left such a beautiful place. But history was never kind to Southern Italy. My grandfathers and some of their ancestors needed employment. They heard about the availability of jobs in other countries, so they left home.

How does your life compare to your recent ancestors' lives? A little research adds eye-opening insight to your family tree.

Hard Work Was Their Only Option

When the 14½ million did arrive, were their lives better? Well, they were alive. They were able to secure jobs. They managed to start families and raise their children. But these immigrants often worked the most difficult, dirty, and downright dangerous jobs.

During these years, most men in my family tree worked for:

• railroads
• steel manufacturing plants
• coal mines

These jobs had long hours, low pay, and almost no safety oversight.

My great grandfather Pasquale's job was to clean the boiler in locomotive trains. He was scrubbing the caked-up coal residue off the walls of the boiler. Were there any safety precautions? No. Did he develop black lung disease? Yes, he did.

My grandfather Pietro worked in two steel mills before getting fed up with the work and leaving. (The second part sounds like me!) He wanted a job that wasn't as likely to kill or maim him. He moved his family to New York City and landed a job as a stone setter for a jewelry manufacturer. He sat at a workbench all day and used hand tools. My grandmother Lucy worked, as so many women in New York City did at the time, for a clothing manufacturer. Talk about specialization, her job was to snip off the extra bit of thread around button holes on shirts. Together they earned enough money to raise and educate their children. They were lucky.

Many of Pietro's friends from the old country went to work in the coal mines of Western Pennsylvania. Every day they risked:

• collapsing cavern roofs
• gas explosions
• suffocation
• black lung disease
• serious physical harm.

In the steel mills, men worked near open furnaces, gigantic ladles of liquid metal, and coke ovens. It wasn't uncommon for them to suffer serious burns, amputation, heatstroke, and worse.

The labor conditions for shipyard workers weren't any better. Injuries, many fatal, were common. Think about the wives and children of these injured men. Imagine how difficult their lives became without their primary wage-earner. But at least child labor was plentiful. All the little kids in the family could earn a pathetic wage for dangerous, difficult work, too!

My grandfather Adamo fared much better because he had a trade. Trained as a shoemaker, he worked for shoe manufacturers, and even opened up his own shoe repair shop. He was lucky to have a trade to keep him out of the mines, railyards, and steel plants.

Death-defying work conditions led to workers' unions. Was anyone in your family tree an organizer?

Class Struggles Lead to Progress

Both immigrants and native-born Americans had hoped for better lives than this. Imagine risking life and limb for 12 hours a day, six days a week, and still struggling to feed your family. While the titans of industry became obscenely wealthy, their workers fought to survive.

It's no wonder these conditions led to the formation of unions. Before unionization, workers were faceless cogs in the machinery. They had to stand together to force corporations to treat them with any decency at all. What a rough time it was to make your way in America.

Many of today's U.S. immigrants work in farming, construction, manufacturing, and healthcare. They're also finding work in hotels, restaurants, and warehouses. There are more safeguards in place than our ancestors enjoyed. But many workplaces slip through the cracks of oversight and safety regulations.

It's fascinating to think of how conditions can change for one family over a few generations. My ancestors left behind abject poverty. They each found different ways to provide for their families. A boiler cleaner, a stone setter, a shoemaker, a tavern keeper. The stone setter's children became an insurance executive and an IBM manager. Their children became an insurance executive, a television producer, a college sports commissioner, and a website manager. And we all take work safety conditions for granted.

My family improved their lot over a couple of generations. But today is day one in another immigrant family's story. They're struggling now so their grandchildren can have a safe job and a good education. The cycle continues on and on. We all hope for a better life for our children.

Take a closer look at your ancestors' occupations on their census forms. It's one thing to know that an ancestor worked for the city department of sanitation. It's quite another thing to research the conditions of that job in that place and at that time. It makes you feel lucky to be alive.

Note that I used Microsoft Copilot to ask questions and get summaries and links to more information. Here are a few resources I found to get you started:

• "Labor Strife during the Development of Industry in America, 1890-1920" from Rutgers University.
• "America at Work, America at Leisure: Motion Pictures from 1894 to 1915" from the Library of Congress.
• "American Labor in the 20th Century" from the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics.

How to Find Location Errors in Your Family Tree

I love how family tree software uses predictive typing to keep us consistent. Predictive typing is a software feature that suggests words or phrases as you type. It can save you keystrokes and avoid typos.

I take advantage of this feature when entering addresses in my family tree. Why type out the full church address (Chiesa di San Leonardo Abate, Via Roma, 6, Baselice, Benevento, Campania, Italy) when I can type is "chiesa di san l" and choose the matching result?

But I've been adding facts to my family tree since 2002. I'm sure I've made mistakes. The places in our family tree need us to review them.

Let's see how the free Family Tree Analyzer (FTA) can help us find mistakes and inconsistencies.

Make that genealogy map work for you! Use this tool to find inconsistent place names in your family tree.

Your first step when using FTA is to generate your tree's latest GEDCOM file. If you use desktop family tree software, you can export a GEDCOM file from your software. If you work on your family tree online, go to your tree and export a GEDCOM file from the website.

Now open your GEDCOM in FTA and give it a moment to load. Then click the Export menu and choose Locations to Excel. This will open a spreadsheet in the generic *.csv format on your computer. Since I have Excel software, I'm prompted to save it in the Excel format right away.

Because genealogists love maps:

• Collect Important Family Places to 'Tour' Anytime
• 3 Spring Cleaning Tasks for Your Family Tree
• Without Vital Records, What Can You Do?

Get Your Places in Order

If your spreadsheet software allows, sort the contents by Country, Region, Subregion, Address, and Place, in that order. Scroll through and scan your spreadsheet for anomalies. Look for anything that strikes you as being a possible mistake. Highlight the suspicious Places in yellow so you can find and act on them later.

Here's one surprising thing I found. Looking at the town of Santa Paolina, Italy, I noticed two different church addresses. I thought I knew which one of them was wrong. But when I went to Google Maps, I realized I'd been using the wrong church name and address for this town! The bad information comes from an Italian parishes website I use often. From now on I'll have to double check its facts on the map.

Did a bad address creep into your family tree? I had one that came from a "reliable" source!

I switched to Family Tree Maker and looked at the Places tab. When I located the now-wrong church information, I was ready to make the correction. Here it's easy to overwrite all uses of the wrong address at once. With a copy and paste, I changed them all to the correct church name and address. This eliminated the wrong church from my family tree file. That will prevent the wrong church from showing up in predictive typing, too.

If your family tree is online only, open your GEDCOM file in your favorite text editor. This is how you'll see where you used the bad address. Search the entire file for the street address in question.

If the place is part of a birth, baptism, death, or residence fact, scroll up until you see a line beginning with 1 NAME. This shows you the name of the person in your family tree who needs you to fix this address. But if the address is part of a shared fact, like a marriage, look just above it for a line beginning with 1 HUSB or 1 WIFE. Copy either of their ID numbers (e.g., @I30048@) and scroll to the top of your GEDCOM file. Now search for another instance of that ID. I found a line showing 0 @I30048@ INDI. The very next line gave me the name I needed, 1 NAME Rocco Enrico /Gambino/.

Focus on the Street Address

There's another way to sort the Locations spreadsheet that will be useful to you. Try a new A to Z sort on the Place column only. When I did this I noticed three entries for 210 Ridgewood Avenue. Each one was in Allegheny County, Pennsylvania. But they all showed different towns: Bellevue, Pittsburgh, and West View. What's going on there?

Use this free genealogy tool to find location errors in your family tree. Fix them and improve your consistency.

I looked for the street address in Family Tree Maker's Places tab, but you can search your GEDCOM file, too. All three instances belong to one man. His 1930 and 1940 censuses say the address is in the West View Borough of Pittsburgh. His World War II draft registration card says it's in Bellevue. His 1950 veterans compensation application says it's in Pittsburgh.

On Bing Maps* and Google Maps, I found that 210 Ridgewood Avenue is part of the West View borough of Pittsburgh. The front window of the nearest U.S. post office (seen on Google Maps) says, "West View Branch, Pittsburgh, PA". I'll use 210 Ridgewood Avenue, West View, Allegheny County, Pennsylvania, USA, as the location. This puts a very accurate pin in the map within Family Tree Maker. The pin is right at the front door.

* I love Google Maps for its Street View, but Bing Maps points out the county or province and gives you the full information.

But why does his draft registration card say Bellevue? They wrote his address as 210 Ridgewood Ave., Bellevue, Allegheny Co., Penna., twice. On Google Maps, I found another Pittsburgh borough of Bellevue. It's right near West View, but it doesn't have a Ridgewood Avenue.

The logical answer was on the back of the draft card. The local draft board itself was not located in tiny West View, but in tiny Bellevue. It may have been a clerical error, or else that's how they were recording everyone they registered.

Without Family Tree Analyzer, there's only one way I could have found this discrepancy. I'd have to be looking at this man's list of facts in my family tree. Since he's the father-in-law of my 3rd cousin, that might never have happened. I'm glad to be able to sort this out today so I can see this cute little house in Google Street View.

I'm eager to work with this spreadsheet and add consistency to all my addresses.