3 Ways to Find Double Ancestors in Your Family Tree

Double ancestors reduce your allotment of direct ancestors.

In 2007 an historian from my grandfather's town gave me an ancestry surprise. My paternal grandparents were 3rd cousins.

Sure, I knew my grandparents had the same last name. My grandmother was born in New York. But I knew her father came from my Italian-born grandfather's hometown. But even Grandpa didn't seem to know the exact relationship. Or else he never wanted to tell us.

Two of my 3rd great grandfathers were brothers. That means their parents, Francesco and Cristina, are my double 4th great grandparents. They, and all their direct ancestors, appear twice in my pedigree chart.

This is what's known in genealogy as pedigree collapse. My grandfather Pietro married his 3rd cousin Lucy. They shared a set of 2nd great grandparents. So, instead of having 64 4th great grandparents (as we're all allowed to have), I have 62.

The amount of ancestors you have doubles for each generation. So we're all allowed 128 5th great grandparents. But because of double ancestors, I have 124 5th great grandparents. Notice the number of double ancestors also doubles with each generation. I have 2 double 4th great grandparents, and 4 double 5th great grandparents. I have 8 double 6th great grandparents, and so on.

There may be double ancestors hiding in your family tree. Here are 3 ways to find them.

1. Check Your Family Tree Chart

Your family tree, online or on your desktop, may point out your double ancestors.

• If you use Family Tree Maker, click the Publish tab and generate a Vertical Pedigree Chart for yourself. You may see some people in a dotted-line border. These are people who appear in your family tree twice because they're related to you in two important ways.
• If you use MyHeritage.com, look for people in your family tree with a red circle and "x2". This means this person is in your tree 2 times. They're related to you in 2 ways.
• As much as I dislike Geni.com, it also points out your double ancestors with a green "x2" in the lower left corner of a double ancestor.
• If all else fails, create a pedigree chart (direct ancestors only) and look for repeated people.

Check your family tree for hints that you have double ancestors.

2. Color-Code Your Ancestors

This is how I'm using the relatively new color-coding feature in Family Tree Maker. I gave each of my 4 grandparents a unique color: yellow, pink, green, blue. This lets me see at a glance which branch any direct ancestor belongs to.

I find this to be the best and easiest way to spot double ancestors. So far, I have double ancestors on my father's side of the family tree only. The Iamarino family is from a small town in Italy. They had a good number of cousins marry, as well as siblings marrying siblings.

My double ancestors show up in the Index panel with 2 overlapping color dots. In the tree view, each double ancestor's color bar is split to show half yellow and half pink. The colors show they are the direct ancestors of my grandfather (yellow) and my grandmother (pink).

Color dots in the index and color bars in the tree view tell me which branch, or branches, an ancestors belongs to.

3. Use Ahnentafel Numbers

Each of your direct ancestors has a very specific, unique number. The Ahnentafel numbering system follows a strict pattern. Run your Ahnentafel report from Family Tree Maker. Or do it manually (here's how). You may find that some of your ancestors qualify for 2 different Ahnentafel numbers.

I've created a color-coded ancestor spreadsheet with an Ahnentafel number in each cell. (Download one for yourself.) You can enter your ancestors into the chart and discover your dual-number ancestors.

On my ancestor spreadsheet, I'm giving double ancestors a blended color. Since Grandpa is yellow and Grandma is pink, I make their shared ancestors orange.

There's a strict method as to who gets which Ahnentafel number. They can help you find double ancestors.

As they say in every sales pitch, "But wait! There's more."

These 3 techniques cannot show you your double cousins. My grandfather's paternal uncle married his maternal aunt. Their children are Grandpa's double 1st cousins.

This is the type of thing you'll find by accident, and it may confuse you at first.

My great grandfather was Francesco Iamarino. He had a brother Teofilo. Francesco married my great grandmother Libera Pilla. His brother Teofilo married Libera's sister Filomena. That created an extra joining of 2 families. The children of Teofilo and Filomena were my grandfather's maternal 1st cousins and paternal 1st cousins. Double cousins.

I've met relatives in Canada and in Italy who knew about the 2 brothers marrying 2 sisters. It was not unusual at all. Nearly everyone in my ancestral towns married someone who lived right nearby. If one merger of the Iamarino and Pilla families was a good thing, why not 2 mergers?

Going through vital records from Grandpa's town, I found another double wedding. On 20 December 1852, Damiano Marino and his sister Libera Marino married Rosa Zeolla and her brother Giovanni Pasquale Zeolla.

That was a very practical wedding. It's like the line in Hamlet: "Thrift, thrift, Horatio, the funeral bak'd-meats did coldly furnish forth the marriage tables." In other words, if you're gonna combine these 2 families, you may as well do it with 1 wedding feast and save money.

Can you find any pedigree collapse in your family tree? Do you think the marrying cousins knew they were cousins?

7 Genealogy Projects We All Need to Do

Have you ever given someone genealogy advice, and not followed it yourself?

This is my 297th blog article in 2½ years. I publish twice a week. To keep up with that schedule, I spend time each day working on my family tree. Then I write about whatever I've been doing.

If I'm working to connect with a DNA match, I write about that. If I'm developing a system for naming and tracking my files, I write about that. If I discover a useful website, I write about that.

But with all the writing, I rarely get a chance to complete the projects I recommend for you. This is a recap of some of my favorite recommendations that I wish I had time to complete. Which ones appeal the most to you?

1. It's Time to Revisit and Improve Your Earliest Family Tree Research

We all need to take another look at our earliest genealogy work and make improvements. I still have some unofficial sources I want to replace with better sources and images. I have some facts that came from the family tree of a distant relative. That's not good enough. I need to find a reliable source.

I liked this idea enough to write about it again in Trade Up to Better Family History Sources.

Imagine the look on your future descendant's face when she finds your collection of family history books.

2. How to Share Your Family Tree Research with Relatives

One of my biggest desires as a genealogist is to find the best way to share what I've found with my relatives. This article describes how to create a family tree book you can share. Imagine presenting a book to everyone at a family reunion.

I covered this idea again in 5 Steps to Writing Your Ancestor's Life Story, and the very popular article, How to Create a 'Book of Life' for Your Relatives.

3. Add Proof and a Breadcrumb to Family Tree Documents

I've been really good about following this advice. But my older documents need my attention. If you add facts to the properties of your digital documents (like census sheets, ship manifest, etc.), you'll never wonder where they came from. And you'll be able to get right back to their source.

Annotate your image the moment you get it. You'll never forget where you found it.

4. How to Find Official Sources for Family Facts You Just Know

Yes, we need to replace unofficial sources with official ones. But we also need sources for the modern-day facts we just know. For example, I was baptized in a church in the Bronx, New York. The only source for that fact is my baptismal certificate. I could scan and add it to my family tree. I could add my birth certificate, too. But if you're adding documents for anyone who's living, make the images private. They're mainly there for you.

5. Closing the Book on One Family at a Time

One of the genealogy goals I set for 2019 (and completed) helped me close the book on some families. "Closing the book" means finding all the documents you're missing for a family. For example, think of your great uncle. Do you have every census record for him? Do you have all his immigration and naturalization papers? His birth, marriage and death records? What about documents for his children?

When you have all the documents, you can "close the book" on that family.

6. This Memento Provides Key Facts for Your Family Tree

When I wrote about the funeral cards I'd collected for some relatives, my cousin texted me photos of a ton more. Funeral cards serve as evidence for death dates. And sometimes they can say more—or have a photo. I still need to clean up the images my cousin sent me and place those funeral cards in my family tree.

A "Book of Life" isn't meant for celebrities only. Make them for your family.

7. It's Time to Tame Your Family Photos

I started dealing with my family photos, but I have a long way to go. They're stored in too many folders on my computer. That makes it hard to find the exact one I want. I've got to name and file them properly. Then I've got to double-check that I've scanned all the old photos my mother left with me when she moved. Finally, I have to make sure they get into my family tree.

Make Your Digital Genealogy Documents Searchable

Who needs a search engine? Your computer is a search engine!

I'm constantly bouncing all around in my genealogy research. One day a person with my last name mentions their grandparents' birth dates. Another day a DNA match reaches out to me looking for our shared ancestors.

I need a quicker way to search for these connections.

One of my genealogy goals this year is to enter the details from thousands of Italian vital records into a spreadsheet. Then I can use Excel to search for a particular man's name and find the one who's married to the right woman. Or I can find all the babies born to a particular couple.

I've done a chunk of that work, but it's going to take years to complete.

Luckily, I found a faster method I can use in the meantime. Now that I've somehow become a "morning person", I'm using the evenings for an easier genealogy task. It's not exactly a no-brainer, but it is simple. And the benefits are really big.

This can apply to you, too, even if you don't have a huge collection of vital records on your computer.

Don't worry where you filed that document. Your computer knows where it is.

Whenever you're not quite up to serious family tree research, but you have your hands free, you can do this, too.

Rename your digital genealogy files to include the name(s) of the primary person.

I'll bet you've done that with census sheets, ship manifests, and other documents.

But did you realize you can search for any and all of a particular person's files on your computer at once?

This will really help you when you need to:

• answer a question from a new possible relative
• find the marriage record for a new person you added to your family tree
• figure out if the "Pasquale Iamarino" in this document is the same as the one in that document

I was especially happy to see how smart the search function can be. For instance, if I search for "Mary Murphy", but her full name is "Mary Jane Murphy", I'll still find her.

If I had any doubt about the value of renaming my files, one search washes all doubt away.

To save tons of time on future document searches, I've been renaming files like a madwoman.

At night, with the Yankee game on TV, I open my collection of Italian vital records. I've renamed every marriage record image from 1816–1860 to include the names of the bride and groom.

That means I can search at the town-folder level to find a marriage between any particular couple. A search for "Antonio Martuccio Maria Maddalena Paolucci" delivers their 1849 marriage record. Instantly!

The benefits are so important that I'm excited to rename more and more files. Plus, doing this makes me an expert on the names that come from each town. While renaming one file I thought to myself, "the groom must be from my other grandfather's town". And I was right.

Is your genealogy document collection named so it's searchable?

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.