3 Ways to Prove Your Family Tree is Correct

You may not trust someone else's family tree, but you can stand behind your facts. Right?

Every now and then you're going to find a very intriguing hint. From what you can see, it looks like it's your family. It's got a lot of names you're missing. You get a little excited.

Then you realize this potential jackpot of a family tree has no sources. No documents. They haven't even capitalized all the proper names. This is not a carefully crafted family tree.

Excitement over.

This sad story should motivate you to fortify your family tree. Make your tree be the exciting find that keeps on giving.

Here's how other genealogists are going to know your family tree is the real deal. It's extremely well-crafted. These 3 things will prove to anybody that your family tree is correct.

If your tree has this much solid evidence, who could doubt you?

1. Official Documents

Gather and add to your tree as many government-issued documents as possible. Whatever country your ancestor is from, their government will have created certified-reliable documents, including:

• birth records
• census forms
• marriage records
• death records
• citizenship papers
• military records
• passports

Other official records don't come from a government:

• ship manifests
• church baptism records
• school yearbooks
• city directories
• newspapers

The last 3 might be the most likely to have errors, but they can provide supporting evidence.

What aren't official are stories passed down through the generations, family bibles, and my brother's college project to write about our family history. (Sorry, Jay.) You've got to strive for those official documents.

2. Official Sources

Lots of times you can't find an official document or an image of a document to support a fact. A good example is the "last place of residence" listed on the Social Security Death Index (SSDI). That's a fact you want to put in your family tree, but you haven't got any document.

That's when it's important to record the source of the fact. You can find details about the source wherever you're viewing it. If it's a website like Ancestry.com, there is a detailed description of the source. If you're in the archives looking at microfilm, the film's box or the beginning of the reel will hold some information.

What's most important is to capture the accurate name and origin of the source. "U.S., Social Security Death Index, 1935-2014; Social Security Administration. Social Security Death Index, Master File."

Then capture something more specific to your ancestor. My late step-grandmother's SSDI listing has an additional source citation: "Number: 081-07-1687; Issue State: New York; Issue Date: Before 1951".

If someone's tree has that level of documentation, are you seriously going to doubt them?

3. Supporting Sources

I spend tons of time going through Italian civil records, piecing together my ancestors' families. I love it when an ancestor's official birth record has annotations in the column. Those notes may include their marriage date and place, spouse's name, and their death date.

That's official and corroborating evidence.

Do your best to gather all a person's documents, and you'll find that you have supporting sources, too. A mother's maiden name on your ancestor's death record is not reliable. But if it matches the name on your ancestor's birth and marriage records, it is very reliable.

Make Your Tree Provable

If you've been reading this and thinking, "I'm not sure I can prove my tree is correct," you've got some work to do:

• Start replacing your sketchier sources with more official ones. Some of my sources are "my cousin told me." That might be fine if your cousin told you "this person's nickname was Baldy." But if the facts are important, track down an official source or an official document.
• Try to get as many documents as you can for your people. This way you'll have supporting evidence that says, "Yes, he was born on this date in this place. It says so here, here and here." Find each major, available document for the people in your tree and close the book on them.
• Be consistent in how you record dates and names. Your online tree should show each person's full name. If you're not using software that automatically formats your dates, take the time to type them in the same style.

Hopefully you're thinking your tree is in pretty good shape. If so, keep these ideas in the back of your mind. The next time you're reviewing someone in your tree, think about how you can make their facts more bulletproof.

Make your family tree be exactly the type of tree you'd love to find as a hint!

Closing the Book on One Family at a Time

Follow along as we figure out what's needed to "finish" documenting my grandmother's family.

It's time to work closer to home.
Complete your closest families' documents.

Last time I talked about 4 keys—4 things to focus on that will make you a better genealogist. One of them was "finishing" your research on individual families.

There's never going to be an end to the things you can learn about any given family in your family tree. But you can "close the book" on getting copies of their major documents.

You'll find this exercise more meaningful if you stick to your closest relatives. I'll choose my paternal grandmother Lucy, her brothers (Mike and Frank), and her parents (Pasquale and Maria Rosa).

The head of this family unit was my great grandfather Pasquale Iamarino. He was born in Italy, came to America in 1902, lived in New York and Ohio, and died in 1969.

I've had a lot of luck finding Pasquale's documents. (See "How to Use a Paper Trail to Recreate Your Ancestor's Life".) I have his:

• 1882 birth record from Italy and his baptismal record from the church
• 1902 ship manifest when he came to New York City
• 1905 New York State census
• 1906 marriage certificate with my great grandmother
• 1908 Hornell, NY, directory
• 1910 Federal census and 1915 New York State census
• 1918 World War I draft registration card
• 1920 and 1930 censuses when the family lived in Ohio
• 1931–1935 city directories from Ohio
• 1940 census
• 1942 World War II draft registration card
• 1969 death certificate from the state of Ohio

That's a pretty good haul! But there is a major piece of documentation I've never found for Pasquale. His naturalization papers.

The 1910 census calls him an Alien. The 1920 census says he had filed his naturalization papers. The 1930 census says he is a naturalized citizen. I can narrow it down further with his WWI draft registration card. In September 1918 he was a Declarant.

He began the citizenship process by September 1918, but did he file his papers in New York? He lived in Albany in June 1915, and he was an Alien on the 1915 state census. Or did he file his papers when he moved to Ohio?

I have a theory that Pasquale moved from New York to Ohio for a better opportunity with the railroad. Maybe the Erie Railroad preferred that he become a citizen.

It's a good bet that Pasquale filed his papers in the court nearest to Girard, Ohio, outside Youngstown.

My great grandfather's documents: so close to complete.

That's one set of papers I need. What about the rest of this family of five?

For my great grandmother, Maria Rosa, I have her:

• 1880 birth record from Italy
• 1906 immigration record
• 1906 marriage certificate
• 1910–1940 censuses
• 1931–1935 city directories from Ohio
• 1970 death certificate

According to the 1940 census, she never became a citizen. I don't expect to find any other documents for her.

Since she doesn't seem to have become a citizen, my great grandmother's documents are complete.

I'm missing my grandmother Lucy's birth and death records. Recently I solved the mystery of her missing birth record. I found her in a birth index with a misspelled last name and no first name. Now I have the document number and the wrong last name (Merino). I should be able to order that from New York, and I can order her death certificate from Ohio.

For my grandmother's brothers, my great uncle Mike and great uncle Frank, I have each census and lots of facts. As for their vital records, I have all the dates, but I don't have certificates of their births, marriages and deaths. I don't know about you, but I pay to get certificates only for my closest relatives. My dad loved these, guys, but I'm afraid I never met them.

So, the final tally of what I need before I can "close out" this family:

• Pasquale's naturalization papers, probably from Ohio
• Lucy's birth certificate from New York
• Lucy's death certificate from Ohio

I'm ashamed of myself for not having purchased my grandmother's 1954 death certificate. Somehow I overlooked it. And I'm even more ashamed that I never before figured out when my great grandfather became a citizen. (It still doesn't come up in a search.)

This is exactly why I'm encouraging us all to go back to basics. Look at the families closest to you—each of your grandparents' families for starters. Figure out what's missing:

• What can you find online?
• What will you have to send away for?
• What can you find on a genealogy road trip?

Take a day off from one of your distant-cousin-searches and come closer to home. Find the missing pieces for your closest relatives. Then share what you've learned with your family.

4 Keys to Make You a Better Genealogist

Even 1 key will get you going. All 4 might unlock a ton of treasure.

If you could pick only one, which of these family tree accomplishments would make you a better genealogist?

1. Perfecting your file, folder and document ORGANIZATION
2. Cleaning up your FACTS AND SOURCES and doing them right from now on
3. "FINISHING" your research on individual family groups
4. SHARING your findings with relatives

Let's take a look at each one so you can decide. And once you do choose one, you've got your 2019 Genealogy Goals in your sights.

They're not just shiny objects.
They are the heart of solid genealogy.

Organization

How quickly can you locate your maternal grandparents' 1940 census document? Your great grandfather's ship manifest? Your great uncle's World War II draft registration card?

If you don't know exactly where to look and exactly how you would have named the file, you may need an organization upgrade.

Create your organization style, and stick to it. Almost from the beginning, I decided:

• how I wanted to name my document images and
• how I wanted to organize those images in file folders.

I'm 99.8% digital; so little paper that it's in one manila folder.

I name my folders, all within my FamilyTree folder, for the type of document:

• census forms
• certificates (that's all birth, marriage and death records)
• city directories
• draft cards
• immigration
• passports, etc.

I name my document images for the person (or head of household, if it's a census) and the year: LastnameFirstnameYear. The file names can get very long for a marriage, where I include both the groom's name and the bride's name, plus the year. But then the file name is very descriptive.

This system has worked incredibly well for me ever since I started this crazy hobby.

Facts and Sources

As you work on your family tree year after year, you may find you do things differently than you did before. Hopefully you're doing them better than you did before.

If you want others to recognize your family tree for the good work it is, fix your facts and sources.

Revisit your earliest work and put in the sources you skipped in your excitement. (See 6 Easy Steps to Valuable Source Citations.) Add annotations to your document images within your family tree. (See How to Increase the Value of Your Family Tree Images.)

Finishing

Yes, I know all the jokes and memes. Genealogy is never finished.

But you can finish gathering all the known documents for a given family. Pick a particular nuclear family—like your grandparents, your mother and her siblings.

You can finish your search for their:

• census forms
• birth, marriage and death records
• immigration records
• military records

Your family tree probably has lots of nuclear families you didn't finish working on. Why not finish searching for their key documents now?

As you "finish" each family unit, you can consider moving on to this next goal.

Sharing

Imagine your mother and her family again. You've got as many documents for that family as you can get.

This would be the perfect time to create a booklet or a scrapbook about them. Write their story, based partly on the documents and facts you've collected. Put something together and share it with your loved ones.

I wrote a brief life story for my grandfather recently, and it made my mother incredibly happy. (See 5 Steps to Writing Your Ancestor's Life Story.)

If one or more of these ideas hits home for you, why not make it happen in 2019? I haven't finished annotating my document images (Facts and Sources), so I definitely want to do that. I'm also very eager to finish some families, or at least finish gathering all the census forms that I'm still missing.

I want us all to be better, more thoughtful and accurate genealogists. These 4 keys can definitely put you on your way.

My Cousin Has a Genealogy Surprise in Store

Sometimes your family tree research can uncover uncomfortable secrets.

Growing up, my mother had a cousin who was her dear friend. But she had no idea how they were cousins. My mom would tell me, "Oh, she's a Saviano, but I don't know how."

Angela's identity became clear when
I spoke to my mom's 3rd cousin.

When this cousin asked me to look into her family tree, I learned about her tragic grandmother, Angela Letizia Saviano.

• On 21 May 1898, Angela sailed from Italy to New York. She was with my great great grandfather, Antonio Saviano, his wife and 2 of his children.
• Angela was 18 years old and from the same small town as my Saviano family.
• She listed another of Antonio Saviano's children as her cousin.
• Antonio Saviano was her uncle; Angela's grandparents were my 3rd great grandparents.
• Angela's 1880 birth record shows that her mother had the same last name as my grandmother. Was she a double cousin?
• Angela married a man from the same little town, and her mother-in-law was on that ship in 1898, too.
• Angela had one child, a daughter Catherine, in New York City in 1899.
• Angela died at the age of 21 of a leaky heart valve. She'd been under a doctor's care for 1 month.

Angela's only daughter is the reason my mom's cousin "was a Saviano." Angela was this cousin's grandmother.

One of my 1st genealogy finds had the mysterious Angela.

Last week this same cousin asked if I'd found out anything about her father's side of the family from Bari in Italy.

I can do that research now. With online access to Italian birth, marriage and death records, it should be easy. (If you have any Italian ancestors, find out about the Antenati site.) I started by looking at the U.S. documents I'd collected for my cousin's father and his brothers. I had their names and approximate ages, their father's name (Francesco), and their hometown (Alberobello).

I searched the Alberobello birth records for the 3 brothers and found them all. Now I knew their mother's name was Isabella. But there was something unusual written on the side of the first-born son's birth record.

It's right there on his birth record:
his parents married later.

Vincenzo's 1891 Birth

His birth record said his parents married in December 1891—that's 6 months after he was born. It says they got married to make this baby legitimate.

OK, maybe that's not such a big deal (although this was 1891). But the couple's marriage document shows that the mother of the baby—the new bride—was 14 years old. The father, Francesco, was 25.

As ewww as that is, there's more. Francesco first got married in 1888 to a woman who must have died by mid- to late-1890. And while this wasn't uncommon, the then 13-year-old girl he got pregnant in late 1890 (that part IS uncommon) was the half-sister of this first wife.

How do you think that went? The little girl is consoling him over the loss of his wife, her sister, and it winds up getting physical? Bye-bye childhood, Isabella. It's mommy time.

Francesco's 1866 Birth

I found one more twist to this tale. Another shotgun wedding. Francesco, who made baby Vincenzo with 13-year-old Isabella, was also born out of wedlock. His birth record also says that his parents married to make the baby legitimate.

Francesco's father, also named Vincenzo, was 30 years old when he married for the first time. His wife, already the mother of his child, was a widow and only 23 years old. Maybe this is how they consoled widows and widowers back in the day!

My cousin who wanted this information isn't online. I'll have to print out the information and documents and mail them to her. I'm still trying to figure out how to lay out these facts as clinically as possible.

I want to keep digging into this family's vital records. I'd like to find the relationship between Francesco's grandmother and Isabella, his child bride. They have the same last name. (Of course they do.)

I'm expecting a few more plot twists ahead.

And speaking of surprise babies:

• My 5th Great Grandfather: A Random Act of Kindness?
• When I'm Sixty-Four (I'll Still Have Only Two Children)
• Finding Your Ancestor's Lost Babies

My Genealogy Jigsaw Puzzle: DNA Matches and Vital Records

Like any big puzzle, it helps to start with the edges and find pieces that fit one another.

Last time, I told you about a DNA color-clustering method. It shows you visually how you're connected to your DNA matches. This method, and the online tree of a crucial DNA match, showed me where I need to focus. Right down to a specific last name.

You see, my parents share DNA. This was a surprise to them, and I'm eager to be able to show them exactly which set of ancestors they share.

I'm focusing on the last name Pozzuto in the town of Colle Sannita, Italy. There were a lot of people in town with that name. And they must have been distinct families, because a high number of men married women with the same name.

I began by looking at the parents of one key DNA match, both named Pozzuto. The tree is not well sourced, and much of the information comes from my 97-year-old DNA match herself.

I have 77 people in my tree with this last name, but that's not enough pieces for this puzzle.

I turned to the massive collection of Italian vital records that I have on my computer. When you've got all your ancestral town's documents on a local drive, research is fast and easy. (Find out how you can download a collection like mine.)

I've been trying to confirm the names and birth dates of the people on both sides of the Pozzuto-Pozzuto tree. I find a person's birth record, then try to find their father's birth record and their grandfather's birth record. The goal is to identify someone who is already in my tree with a blood relationship.

After adding several people to my tree this way, I realized something. I have a cousin in Italy who's about my age and is named Pozzuto. His mother's side of the family is related to my father's side of my family. So his being a Pozzuto is a coincidence.

But…I've always thought he looks like my cousin on my mother's side of my family. What if this cousin, related to my dad but with a resemblance to my mom, is the key?

I started digging into the little bit of information he'd given me about his father. I quickly found his father's parents' 1932 marriage documents. I learned my cousin's grandparents' names and kept going until I had some of his great grandparents' names.

But I couldn't tie this Pozzuto family to that of my DNA match. Time for a new strategy.

Last summer I read about a genealogist's massive effort to build out family trees for everyone in his DNA match list. I think the Pozzuto family is my key. Why not put together every Pozzuto family sitting in my collection of vital records?

That's how I built a tree of 15,000 people from my maternal grandfather's hometown. I took the information from each vital record and entered people into a Family Tree Maker file. I placed babies with their parents. I found the parents' marriage records and gave them their parents. After a while, all the families fit together.

These are some of the files I've identified with this name so far. Lots more work to do!

I'm going to pick a year, like 1860, and find each Pozzuto baby born in the town. I'll put them in my tree and give them my "no relationship established" marker (find out why that's important). As I go from year to year, I'll find babies that are siblings to the babies I found earlier. I'll build each family.

This will take lots of hours, but I'll wind up grouping together Pozzuto families. Some of them will be people I have in my tree already. Eventually I will find a direct line to my DNA match.

Still, that's not the goal. I need to find someone in that gene pool who married someone with a last name from my mother's side of the family.

All my ancestors came from neighboring towns. The prospect of marrying someone from the next town is very real. I've seen it. I'm eager to find a girl from Colle Sannita who married a guy from either Baselice or Pastene (most likely).

It's exciting to have all those documents waiting for me to read them. The answers are there! I simply need to dig and dig until I find them.

Can you do this with your ancestors' towns and your DNA matches?

And speaking of piecing together families:

• How I Gained 2 More Generations in 1 Day
• 5 Steps to Grow Your Italian Family Tree
• How to Find More Great Grandfathers for Father's Day

The Leeds Method May Have Solved a Big Family Puzzle

This method makes cousin connections clearer than black and white.

Earlier this week I gave up hope of meeting one of my 2018 Genealogy Goals because it was too broad and may never happen.

That goal: To find out why my parents share DNA. There's a set of ancestors in my tree that ties my father's and my mother's families together.

But now I have a fighting chance of meeting that goal this year.

A friend pointed me to The Leeds Method created by Dana Leeds. To read all about it:

• Here is Dana Leeds' description of her creation, The Leeds Method
• Here is her description of using DNA clustering to visualize your DNA matches
• Here is her exploration of using The Leeds Method with 4th cousins

I jumped right in and used Dana Leeds' color clustering method with my DNA match list from Ancestry.com. In the first column I added my parents' names with a 0 in front of them. I added my one 1st cousin who took the test, with a 1 in front of his name. And I added 3rd cousins with a 3 and 4th cousins (the first page's worth) with a 4.

The numbers allowed me to sort the names by relationship and then alphabetically. In the end, I used this method on 104 people.

Assigning colors to your DNA matches reveals hidden treasures.

What you'll do is pick one of your matches and see which matches they share with you. In one column, give that person and all their shared matches a unique color. Find the next person in your list without a color and view their shared matches. This time, in a new column, give this person and their shared matches another unique color.

I was seeing a lot of blue (my dad) and green (my mom). But it wasn't until my 10th round of adding colors to shared matches that I saw something amazing.

Three people out of 104 had both green and blue. They were a match to both my mom and my dad.

This is a breakthrough!

Of those 3 people, only 1 has a tree online. I saw lots of familiar last names from my paternal grandfather's hometown. So I wrote to the person who owned the tree. She administers the DNA test for 1 of the 3 important matches.

She told me that the DNA test was for her paternal grandmother, and that I must be a match to her father, too. Yes, I am! Her father is also 1 of the 3 matches. From what she told me, the 2 most important last names tying us together are Zeolla and Pozzuto.

As I explored her tree, I saw that facts weren't sourced, but I have all the vital records from that town on my computer. So I can look up people's birth, marriage and death facts.

After a while, climbing up and across this tree, I found this one couple. Nicolangelo Zeolla and Giovannangela Pozzuto were the parents of someone in this tree. Nicolangelo and Giovannangela are my 4th great grandparents!

The Leeds Method helped me identify a potential shared branch for my parents.

If I hadn't tried plotting the colors as suggested by The Leeds Method, I might never have found the right branch to research.

So where do I take this lead? I'm scouring the town's vital records for births and marriages of children in this family. I'll keep building out the individual families.

I hope I'm going to find a marriage of someone from this gene pool to someone with a last name from my mom's side of the family.

I'm more motivated than ever to find that cousin connection between my parents. And now, it really looks like a goal I can reach.

And speaking of DNA:

• Making Sense of Your DNA Results
• Delving Deep into Your Genealogy with DNA
• When DNA Says You're Related, You Determine How