6 Building Blocks of Genealogy Research, Part 1

Six months ago I wrote about my general approach to genealogy research. Let's look at the specific building blocks that can make anyone a productive and efficient family tree researcher.

I don't want to short-change any of these concepts, so this article is in two parts. You'll find a link to part 2 at the bottom of this article.

1. Spell Out Your Goals

Did you make your list of genealogy goals for 2018? I made a list that I look at anytime I feel like I'm searching for documents without a specific goal.

Sometimes it's fun to go off on research tangents. But it's far more rewarding to focus on a goal and make real progress. Your goals might be to:

• find a specific ancestor's parents
• clean up your source citations
• add details to every photograph and document image in your family tree
• prove a family story true or false

Come back to your goals again and again and whittle down the list.

2. Cast a Wide Net

I spent five years making trips to my local Family History Center. I ordered microfilm (it's available online now) from my maternal grandfather's hometown in Italy. I knew nothing beyond his parents' names, so I wanted to find out more.

I soon realized I couldn't tell who was related to me unless I pieced together all the families. So at the center I typed the data from each birth, marriage and death record. At home I entered it all into Family Tree Maker. In the end, I had a tree with 15,000 people. More than 10,000 of them had a connection to me.

Cast a wide net to capture all your ancestor's siblings and their children.

If you don't want to go that far, at least gather all your ancestor's siblings. Say you find your 3rd great grandmother's birth record. Now you know your 4th great grandparents' names. Next you can search the surrounding years for babies born to the same couple.

Find those siblings and you can begin to identify your ancestor's close cousins. You're going to want those names when you're reviewing your DNA matches.

3. Take Advantage of Software

Here's a small piece of my priceless
vital record collection.

There are a lot of talented programmers out there creating free genealogy software. I finally gave up trying to write my own program when I found Family Tree Analyzer. This program takes the germ of an idea I was playing with and puts it on steroids. You can run reports, correct errors, and slice-and-dice your family tree in a bunch of ways.

And thank goodness I found GetLinks. Using GetLinks, I easily downloaded thousands and thousands of vital records from 7 of my ancestral hometowns in Italy. (Note: This downloading solution doesn't work anymore.)

Don't do things the hard way when other genealogy whizzes have created a solution for you.

Please continue to part 2 of this article. I get into the nuts and bolts of my genealogy philosophy with 3 more building blocks.

My Family Isn't In the Newspapers

I've tried using subscription newspaper websites for my family tree research. I never get anywhere.

My ancestors were not in the society pages. They weren't captains of industry. All I've ever found are some of my great grandfather's real estate transactions.

Today I tried a different approach. I learned more about my ancestors' lives by examining one important historical event.

This Nov. 7, 1917 New York Tribune headline is my grandfather's story.

I turned to the free, online resources of the Library of Congress. Their "Chronicling America" project gives you access to historic American newspapers from 1789 to 1963.

To get started, choose a state and a range of years. You can also try adding some keywords to your search.

How I Chose My Historic Event

Last month while visiting Italy I saw and photographed my grandfather's World War I military record. I know the name and dates of the major battle in which he was captured. I know he was a prisoner of war for a full year.

He had been in New York before the war. He'd joined a few of his first cousins in Manhattan and was working as a shoemaker, living with his cousin.

A dream come true! Visiting the Italian
archives to see my grandfather's records.

When his Italian Army regiment called him up for duty, he sailed back home. He was in the infantry in 1915. He was promoted to Corporal on January 1, 1917.

Then, like a few hundred thousand other Italian soldiers, my grandfather was captured in the Battle of Caporetto. The German Army imprisoned him in Mauthausen, Austria, for one year.

Using the Library of Congress, I searched the New York Tribune newspaper for the dates of the Battle of Caporetto. I watched the story unfold on the front page of the paper day after day.

I read about the prisoners, the casualties, and the devastating losses.

Did my grandfather's first cousins—the ones who stayed in New York City—read this too? Did they wonder if their cousin Adamo was part of this epic battle? Did they wonder if he'd been killed or captured?

Now It's Your Turn

Today we get our news so fast, it's hard to imagine waiting for the newspaper to tell you what's happening in the war overseas.

Here's how you can put these free, digitized newspapers to work for you. Choose an event from history that was big news during your ancestor's lifetime. Something they would have heard about nearly every day.

Narrow your search to a single year. Click the checkbox to show only front pages. You'll see much more at a time, and the biggest stories will be on the front page. Look at the captions and find the most important date for this event. Then click that image.

Get started searching American newspapers from the Library of Congress.

You can view the newspaper page by page, zoom in and out, and save any page as an image or a PDF. If your story is really big news, click to go to the next issue.

By looking at the front pages of several newspaper issues, I saw the story of my grandfather's World War I battle unfold day by day. This battle has great significance for my family history.

What were the big stories that changed your ancestors' lives?

And on that note:

• How I formed a theory about my grandfather's World War I experience
• How I planned my super-productive visit to the homeland

How to Tame Your Jumble of Genealogy Leads

As time passes, you'll find you have more genealogy leads than you can follow. More irons in the fire than you can tend to.

It's getting to be overwhelming, right?

Hold on a sec. Take a breath and think about why you're researching your family tree. If you expect to reach the finish line one day, take a look around you. Genealogy hobbyists work on their trees for the rest of their lives.

And we love that!

Don't let the amount of leads—or the amount of brick walls—stop you from loving this hobby. It's the searching, the leads, and the discoveries that give us the joy. Every step of the process IS the fun.

A well-organized email collection
will help you follow genealogy leads.

Now that you've got your attitude adjusted, let's get busy managing all those leads.

If you've loaded your tree on any public genealogy website, and if you've got your DNA results out there, too. You're going to have people contacting you.

People are contacting me in two ways: messaging me on Ancestry.com and emailing me.

When I exchange messages on Ancestry, we typically move the conversation to email so we can share files.

My emailbox becomes my storehouse of genealogy leads. The key is to organize your email.

Manage Your Files Logically

I have email in my Microsoft Outlook file going back as far as the year 2000. If I might need something again, I put it in a folder.

I have a genealogy folder. Within that are folders for my ancestral hometowns: Baselice, Colle Sannita, Pastene. Within the town folders are folders for last names from the town. And within those folders are emails from people with a connection to that name.

If sorting by town of origin doesn't work for you, sorting by the family name may be better.

The important part is, if you've saved your email conversations, you can return to them when you're ready to do the research. You can search your email at your genealogy folder level and find that conversation from a few years ago.

Keep your genealogy leads organized. And keep on keeping them.

As of this moment, workers are uploading vital records from my "missing" ancestral hometown of Santa Paolina. Hurray!! I've already downloaded (find out how you can do this, too) and started processing the records from 1809–1865. I'm eagerly awaiting the post-1865 files.

Now that I'm able to document that one branch of my family I couldn't get to before, it's time to go back to my email folders. It's time to reconnect with my leads for that portion of my family tree. And because I'm so ridiculously organized, I can find those leads in a heartbeat.

If you're an office worker in the business world, you're used to organizing your email. You need to be able to find what you need when you need it.

But are you being that efficient with your genealogy email? Isn't it time to tame all those messages to make them usable?

P.S. If you've got leads with no email trail, either:

• create a series of genealogy folders on your computer, each containing a simple text file with necessary information, or
• create one text or Word document with all the notes.

It's easy to search for anything when you've got it typed out and on your computer.

Don't let those once-hot leads slip away from you!

And speaking of organization:

• How to Create Your Ancestral Hometown Database
• Make Progress with a Guilt-Free Genealogy Task-a-Day Calendar
• Time-Management Tips for Genealogists

Paying it Forward with Genealogy

Why not share your photos on Find-a-Grave?

You may not have time to transcribe genealogy documents as a volunteer. And goodness knows there are a lot of opportunities to help out in that way.*

But what if the genealogy research you're doing for yourself can help people you don't even know? Wouldn't it thrill you if someone else shared research work that's invaluable to you?

Last month I took a deeply satisfying genealogy vacation to Italy. I visited each of my 4 ancestral towns in the province of Benevento. I visited each town's cemetery and took lots of photos. I concentrated on last names that meant something to me, but then I'd find 30 graves with that last name.

Now I'm going to share those photos on the Find-a-Grave website.

First I clicked the Cemetery tab on the website to browse for cemeteries in Italy. There were no listings for my 4 cemeteries, so I'm creating them.

To prepare for my vacation, I saved the longitude and latitude of each cemetery in Google Maps. Now I can use those numbers to precisely locate my 4 cemeteries on the Find-a-Grave map.

I took a photo of the cemetery entrance just so I could add it to Find-a-Grave.com.

Once I create the new cemetery, I can upload a photo of its entrance. You see, before my trip I read someone's tip to be sure to take a photo of the cemetery entrance. So I did.

Next, I can drag and drop all my photos from that cemetery at once. After dropping the photos, I simply go down the list adding the deceased's name as the caption.

If you know the person whose grave you're uploading, it's nice to add a memorial. A while back I added a photo of my great great grandmother's grave in the Bronx, New York. I also wrote a paragraph outlining what I knew about her. Today my research on her family has gone much further, so I updated my memorial.

I created, then updated, the memorial for my
great great grandmother.

I have so many photos to upload, and then I will detail each one with the dates I see on the grave. Someday, I hope relatives of the deceased will contact me. Maybe we'll be cousins!

What can you do to preserve your family history and, at the same time, pay it forward?

* Volunteer Opportunities:

• Indexing record images at FamilySearch.org
• Fulfilling photo requests at Find-a-Grave
• Taking photos or transcribing for Billion Graves
• Transcribing images for the Italian Genealogical Group

And on that note:

• Why I Recorded More Than 30,000 Documents
• How to Create Your Ancestral Hometown Database
• Taking a Do-It-Yourself Genealogy Vacation, Part 1

Using First Names as Evidence of Family Relationships

If you don't have at least 10 people in your family tree with the exact same name, you may be new to genealogy.

Many cultures follow specific baby-naming conventions—but not always. For example:

• name your first-born son after his paternal grandfather
• name your first-born daughter after her paternal grandmother
• name your second-born son after his maternal grandfather
• name your second-born daughter after her maternal grandmother

My paternal grandparents followed this convention. They named my father and his sister after their paternal grandparents. My mother's family did not follow the rules. If they had, my grandmother and I would both be named Mary Louise.

For help with your ancestors' child-naming customs, follow these links:

• Albanian
• British
• German
• Italian
• Jewish
• Portuguese (in Brazil)
• Russian
• Spanish

If I've left out your ethnicity, try a Google search including the ethnicity and "naming customs" or "naming conventions".

Here's an example of an Italian couple who followed the rules, but put a slight twist on them.

Giorgio and Maria followed the naming rules closely, but not perfectly.

Giorgio and Maria named their first son and daughter after Giorgio's parents, Onofrio and Lucia. They named their second daughter after Maria's mother, Concetta.

But their 2nd through 5th sons were not named after Maria's father, Francescantonio. Instead, 3 of those sons had the Antonio part of Francescantonio in their name:

• Giovannantonio
• Giuseppantonio
• Antonio

You can use your ethnicity's naming customs to help you place a person in a particular family.

Let's say you have a man named Pietro Iamarino. (I have 11 of them in my family tree.) You don't have his birth or death record yet, so you can't confirm his parents' names. But 1 or 2 of his children's birth records call him Pietro, son of Giuseppe.

Now you know he belongs to a father named Giuseppe. But I have 10 Giuseppe Iamarino's in my family tree! Of course I need a Giuseppe who's about the right age to be Pietro's father, but what if I have a few of those? (I do.)

When I examined the facts about my right-aged Giuseppe Iamarinos, one man stood out.

This family makes sense, but I had to track down birth records to prove it.

Giuseppantonio Iamarino was born in 1819 and married in 1840. That fit with Pietro who was born around 1848. Plus, Pietro named his first son Giuseppantonio—not Giuseppe.

But that is not proof. It's an educated guess at this point. So I attached Pietro to Giuseppantonio, but I added a bookmark and a note to Pietro to remind myself that I needed to prove this relationship. The proof came later when I found Pietro's 1848 birth record.

Use caution when you're piecing together ancestors' families from hundreds of years ago. Naming conventions can offer strong clues—clues that lead to a theory. But the names themselves are not the proof you need.

Use these naming customs to form your theory. Then prove it.

Keep searching for that proof and avoid making a mess of same-named, misplaced people in your family tree.

You may also enjoy:

• When Did Your Ancestors First Use a Last Name?
• 6 Places to Find Your Ancestor's Maiden Name
• This Expanded Resource Provided an Elusive Maiden Name

Genealogy is the Joy of Names

Yesterday I used a set of 1819 marriage records to make a big discovery. An acquaintance who I assumed is related to me is in fact my 6th cousin.

He and I share a set of 5th great grandparents. I know their names, their approximate years of birth, and some of their children's names. But that's all.

A word cloud of my closest relatives and the frequency of names.

My ancestors all came from little hilltop towns in rural Southern Italy. I visited their towns last month and got a better feel for these places. My ancestors lived simple lives that were basically undocumented and unexceptional.

That means I'm not going to find a letter from my ancestor to the king. My ancestor wasn't the mayor of the town or instrumental in a revolution. My ancestor's name and exploits weren't in the newspaper.

Without the possibility of a direct line of ancestors leading to the King of England, why do I do it?

Why do I spend countless hours gathering the documents that tie me to such distant cousins?

For me, it's the sheer joy of names. I adore all the names I find in my vast collection of birth, marriage and death records. They're repeated over and over because of the Italian tradition of naming children after their grandparents.

Although each of my ancestors' towns are close to one another as the crow flies, each town has a core set of surnames. For example, my maiden name barely exists in my grandfather's hometown anymore. But people in the town recognized it and responded to me warmly.

It's some of my closest last names that enable me to assume someone is my relative. If their name is Pozzuto, for example, and their ancestors came from the town of Colle Sannita, we've got to be cousins. It's an exciting challenge to try to find that exact relationship.

Some genealogists may look down on me as nothing more than a "name collector". But I love collecting those names. I've learned a little bit about life in my ancestral hometowns in centuries past. I can't expect to find much more.

My grandfather's one-page military record told me volumes.

Here are two specific things I learned about my ancestors' lives in Italy:

1. My grandfather told us he was a prisoner of war with the Italian Army during World War I. He had to eat rats to survive. Last month I photographed his military record at the archives in his home province.
   
   Now I know:
   
   • when he was captured
   • the name of the battle
   • where he was imprisoned
   • how long he was imprisoned.
   That's a lot of detail in a few lines on a page.
2. My great grandfather was rumored to be an Episcopal minister. An usual thing in a Roman Catholic country. It was only by visiting my cousins in Italy (his granddaughters) that I learned the story.
   
   This is not written anywhere. And even my cousins have never seen a photograph of their grandparents.
   
   My great grandfather Francesco and his brother-in-law were living and working in the Bronx, New York. It was one of Francesco's many trips to America to earn money. One day he passed by a church in the Bronx. He heard singing and loud voices, and he felt drawn to go inside.
   
   This was the type of church where people are so overwhelmed, so deeply moved by the presence of God, they begin speaking in tongues.
   
   Francesco brought his new faith back home to Colle Sannita and started his own church. His great grandchildren hold prayer services and follow Francesco's teachings to this day.

Those two stories won't get me on TV, but they're all I have so far.

Meanwhile, I'm more than happy to indulge my love of Italian names. I collect the siblings of my ancestors and their spouses and children. I love seeing the names get passed down. My 4th great grandfather was Francesco Iamarino. My great grandfather was Francesco Iamarino. My father is Frank Iamarino.

So call me a name collector. I am a name collector. These names "are" my ancestral hometowns, and I love them dearly.

You may also enjoy:

• Climbing Up, Down and Across Your Family Tree
• How to Keep Track of All Your Surnames
• Putting Yourself in Your Ancestor's Shoes...Historically