4 Cornerstones of Genealogy Research

We all know the classic first rule of starting your family tree. "Start with yourself." Think back to your earliest genealogy research, and I'll bet you have a list of do's and don'ts.

I got interested in genealogy the year before my wedding. We were planning a honeymoon in Italy, and I had visions of finding distant cousins on my travels. (I didn't.) All I knew for sure was my grandfathers' hometowns, and that my maternal grandmother's family came from either Pastene or Avellino.

I filled a notebook with facts from ship manifests on the Ellis Island website. I pieced together families on squares of paper, laying them out on the floor. That looked stupid, I'm sure. So my husband bought me a 2002 version of Family Tree Maker software. It came with a basic subscription to Ancestry.com.

Now I had access to census sheets. They helped me piece together my grandmother's generation in New York City. I discovered Grandma's grandfather was my first immigrant ancestor. I finally learned his branch's town of origin from a ship manifest: Sant'Angelo a Cupolo. "Pastene," which I'd heard from my grandmother and great aunt, is a hamlet in the town of Sant'Angelo a Cupolo. Finally, I could find it on a map!

Learning the exact place of origin for Grandma's parents was so important. I realized it's a cornerstone to family tree building.

Cornerstone #1. Learn your ancestor's town of origin before going any further.

You see, I'd been going down the wrong path trying to find Grandma's Sarracino ancestors in Pastene. There's another town called Pastena (a one-letter difference) with a big Sarracino family. After adding the Pastena Sarracinos to my tree, I learned they were all the wrong family.

I struggled to find the hometown of my dad's maternal grandmother, too. A cousin-in-law who found me on a message board in 2006 knew my great grandmother. She often mentioned her town, calling it (phonetically) "pisqua-la-matzah."

Try finding that on a map! Here's how I figured it out. I searched Ancestry's immigration records for anyone named Caruso from a town that might be "pisqua-la-matzah." I found some from Pescolamazza. That's it! My great grandmother had to be from Pescolamazza. But it isn't on the map.

A quick search told me the town changed its name after World War II from Pescolamazza to Pesco Sannita. That is on the map, and it's a beautiful town. I've visited it twice.

The more research I did, the more record images I had piling up on my computer. That's when I realized the 2nd cornerstone of genealogy research.

Family tree research can get out of control in a hurry. Get organized now to lay a solid foundation.

Cornerstone #2. Follow logical and consistent document organization.

At first, I put every new document I found into one family tree folder on my computer. Rookie move. How would I know if a file with "1920" in its name was an ancestor's 1920 census or a 1920 ship manifest?

So I created sub-folders for each type of document I was collecting, including:

• census forms
• certificates (vital records)
• draft cards
• immigration
• passports

Then I adopted a file-naming format that makes it easy to find everything I have for a person:

• For census forms: LastnameFirstnameCensusYear. The name is the head of household.
• For vital records: LastnameFirstnameEventYear. The Event is Birth, Marriage, or Death. Marriage documents get both the groom's and bride's names, like BiancoAntonioCarusoMariaMarriage1818.
• For draft cards: LastnameFirstnameWW1 or WW2.
• For ship manifests: LastnameFirstnameYear. I could have included Immigration before the year, but sometimes it's travel, not immigration. If multiple people are traveling, I use the name of the eldest or head of family.

This system works well for me. However, there were too many times when I downloaded a terrific new record, only to find out I had it already. I needed some sort of cheat sheet to keep from doing that again.

Cornerstone #3. Track what you have and what you need.

I created a document tracker spreadsheet. Each column is a different type of genealogy document. Each row is a different person. The last column lists the documents I still need to find for each person.

I think every nationality has the problem of too many people with the same name. I distinguish same-named people in my document tracker by including their father's name.

While I was cruising along, super organized, DNA came into the picture. We're all frustrated when a good DNA match has no family tree to view. But it's just as frustrating when their trees have no sources. They're completely unreliable.

I never want anyone to doubt my family tree. And that leads us to the final cornerstone of genealogy.

Cornerstone #4. Add sources or your family tree is worthless to others.

I support the facts in my family tree with detailed sources and links to the original documents. I'm on my way to having the best family tree on earth for my ancestral hometowns.

If you don't know your ancestor's hometown, ignore that family tree that seems so promising. If those people are from the wrong town, they're not your family.

I had these 4 cornerstones in mind when I started this blog in January 2017. If you go back to the beginning, you'll see I outlined them in the first few articles. Each one comes from experience. It would have been better if I knew them from day one. And that's why I spend so much time on this blog. I want to encourage other genealogists, no matter where they are in their journey.

How solid is your family tree foundation?

How to Use Proper Genealogy Style

If you always format names, dates, and places properly, you may be a Family Tree Fashionista. And that's a good thing!

Let's take a look at the Big Three. How do you record Names, Dates, and Places in your family tree?

Names

Entering names in your family tree is such a hot-button issue. People have strong feelings about their chosen style.

Maiden Names. I'd estimate my 25,718-person family tree is 95% Italian. Since Italian women keep their father's last name for life, it would be crazy to list them by their married name. That simply is not their name.

As someone who has legally had 3 last names in my life:

• You don't want to call me by my ex-husband's last name.
• I'll always answer to my husband's last name.
• I definitely identify as my father's last name. I even have it as a vanity license plate.

Since a woman's maiden name is on her birth, marriage, and death certificates, you've got to list her by her maiden name. That's who you're documenting. Let the marriage facts you enter tell you her married name. Let the family tree layout tell you who she married.

There shouldn't be any debate about how to record names in your family tree.

Case. I have lots of Italian names beginning with a lower case d', di, de, or del. Putting those last names in all capital letters would be destructive. How would you know if the name DELGROSSO is spelled delGrosso, DelGrosso, or Delgrosso? You wouldn't.

Name at Birth. I'm careful to preserve each person's name at birth. I was adding the 1819 marriage documents for a couple to my family tree. The bride was Antonia Piacquadio. That's the name on her birth/baptism record, and on her marriage papers.

The groom's case is a little different. On the marriage papers, he's Luigi d'Agostino. Then I saw his 1798 birth record. His full name at birth was Luigi Maria Vincenzo Michelangelo d'Agostino! I will preserve Luigi's full name because that's what makes him unique.

Dates

Genealogy research isn't isolated to one country or one language. Your date format needs to be universal.

Years ago, I interacted with people from around the world as part of my job. I realized how important it is to use a date format that can't be misunderstood. If you're an American, you'd write my son's birth date as 5/6/1989. To you and me, that means May 6th.

But in Europe, 5/6/1989 is the 5th of June. My kid would get his birthday gift really late, wouldn't he?

To avoid this confusion, enter dates in your family tree in this format: 6 May 1989. It's the date, the 1st 3 letters of the month (Jan, Feb, Mar, Apr, May, Jun, Jul, Aug, Sep, Oct, Nov, Dec), and the 4-digit year. In many languages, the 3-letter month abbreviations are similar. It's a safe bet that someone who speaks another language would understand 6 May 1989.

If you use Family Tree Maker, go to the Tools menu and click Options. Then click the Names/Dates/Places tab. You can tell the software how to display your dates, no matter how you type them. Consistency is important for the very reason that my other son's birth date is 12/10/1992. Is that December 10th or the 12th of October?

Places

The proper style for place names (the exact words vary by country) is City, County, State, Country. In Italy it's Comune, Province, Region, Country.

To me, American place names can look confusing when you list all it together like that. Monsey, Rockland, New York, USA. I adopted a slight variation that is now supported by Family Tree Maker when I let it resolve place names.

I add the word County. I feel that Monsey, Rockland County, New York, USA is clearer.

An Italian example would be my grandfather's town: Baselice, Benevento, Campania, Italy. Seeing the complete place name makes it clear to anyone exactly where you're talking about.

Consistency of place names, down to the street address, offers benefits to your family tree research.

A woman online said she wanted to remove the USA from the end of all her American place names. I don't know why, but I recall I didn't use USA early on. It seemed so obvious. All my people were from New York. Everyone knows where New York is.

But as my tree grew, it became clear that I should use the proper naming convention. When you enter place names properly, Family Tree Maker does a nice job of rolling them all up in a list. You can select a country, then a state, province, or region, and continue down to a specific address to see everyone who was there.

Proper style ensures that your family tree will live on and be helpful even when you're gone. Make sure you're working on it for future generations. Make it speak the same "language" generations from now.

And speaking of names and dates:

• This Genealogy Policy Takes the Guesswork Out of Names
• Where Did Your Last Name Come From?
• When to Use Estimates in Your Family Tree

Make Your Genealogy Documents Speak Volumes

Census sheets, ship manifests, birth, marriage and death records. These are the documents that bring your ancestors to life. Without them, you have no tangible evidence for your extended family.

The digital documents I collect are the heartbeat of my family tree. And I spend a good deal of time processing and caring for them.

My goal today is to get you thinking about how you handle your digital documents. What can you do to be more efficient? More thorough? More careful? More importantly, how can you make your family tree more valuable?

Careful work pays off in the form of a highly reliable family tree.

Note that I have very few paper documents, and I've scanned them all into digital files. You won't find anything about color-coded binders and folders on this blog.

I have a vast collection of meticulously annotated, logically filed, safely backed-up documents. I make a habit of putting each new digital document through a series of steps. After downloading the digital document, I:

1. Name the file in my usual style, which is most often LastnameFirstnameEventYear. For example, MartuccioMariaDeath1801.jpg. Note: I name census sheets and ship manifests for the head of the household or the traveling group.
2. Crop the image in Photoshop to remove excess background or an unneeded facing page. Many old Italian birth and death records have 2 or more records in an image.
3. Enhance the contrast so the document is easier to read, if necessary. Photoshop has a few good controls for this.
4. Add a title and description to the document file's properties. These 2 field carry over when I drag and drop them into Family Tree Maker. I follow a pattern like this:
   • Title: 1801 death record for Maria Martuccio
   • Description: From the Benevento State Archives [followed by the exact URL of the image]
5. Attach the image to the appropriate person(s) in Family Tree Maker. I turn the earliest image I have into a person's profile image.
6. Create a source citation for each fact in the document.
7. Add a notation to my document tracker spreadsheet so I know I've got this document.
8. Keep the image file in a special folder, waiting for my weekly backup of all new files.
9. Move the file to its final destination in my collection of digital family tree folders.

Annotated images tell you exactly where they came from.

Yes, it's a lot, but it all serves my goal: To have the best family tree as a resource for anyone with roots in one of my ancestral hometowns. I want to be the absolute go-to family tree because of how carefully I document every fact in my tree.

Consider these ideas for your family tree document handling and care:

• 4 Important Steps for Each New Document lays out the same philosophy in an easy-to-follow flow.
• Get into a Groove to Fortify Your Family Tree gives you a simple way to think about, and follow, this practice.
• Can Your Genealogy Work Survive Without You? offers advice on preserving your genealogy research for future generations.
• How to Make Your Family Tree Fireproof! explains why I keep everything possible in digital form, and how to preserve it.
• 10-Minute Genealogy Tasks You Can Do helps you develop a discipline for handling your documents smartly. These tasks are a great way to make genealogy progress in small amounts of time.

What do you say? Is your family tree—your legacy—worth doing right?

3 Steps to Solving DNA Matches

When I figure out my exact connection to a DNA match, I add a note to them on Ancestry. These notes are visible as I scroll down my list of matches. I used some color-coding dots, too. A green dot means I figured them out.

I have to scroll down far into the 4th–6th cousin range to find an unsolved DNA match with a tree.

Mark up your DNA match list with colors and notes for greater efficiency.

There are 3 basic steps to figuring out these matches. This is going to make it sound super-easy. Once in a while, it is.

1. Search their family tree for familiar names.

I'm so familiar with my ancestral hometowns, I can look at a last name and tell you which of my towns it's from. If a DNA match has a tree showing no Italian last names, there's no obvious way for me to connect.

That's the situation with one match with a very small tree. I think his unnamed grandmother is his Italian ancestor, but I don't know who she is. I researched his Irish-American grandfather. But I couldn't find him marrying an Italian-American woman.

Let's assume, though, that you do see a last name or two you recognize.

2. Find a birth or marriage record for their ancestor.

If you can't find anything that connects your DNA match's people to your people, save them for later. Leave yourself a note that you tried and failed to find the connection.

When I couldn't find an Italian connection to the DNA match I mentioned above, I looked at our shared DNA matches. This is a very helpful feature on Ancestry DNA.

A quick look at our shared matches tells me my relationship to this guy with an Irish name is on my mother's side. I took a look at one shared match and realized her original last name is from one of my towns. That ties these matches to my 2nd great grandmother Vittoria. She alone came from a different town than the rest of my family.

3. Use your research and their tree to get a match into your tree.

The shared match whose name I recognize has a tree that includes her grandfather. But he was born later than the available vital records.

Once again, I turned to shared DNA matches. There I found a woman whose full name I recognize. I wrote to her years ago, and she told me the proper spelling of the last name. I'd only seen it once at that point, and it had been hard to read.

It was high time I worked this woman, who'd been helpful to me in the past, into my family tree. Her 7-person family tree includes her 2 sets of grandparents.

If you've read this blog before, you remember me. I'm the nut who downloads all the vital records from my ancestral towns and spends an eternity renaming the files. When the file names include the person's name, all the records are searchable on my computer. I searched for and found this match's paternal grandmother's birth record. In the margin is the date she married my DNA match's paternal grandfather. There's no doubt I have the right person.

I need to trace both grandparents back further, using the vital records I've renamed. I'll keep going until I find some sort of connection to myself.

To quote Bugs Bunny, "Well whaddya know? The stuff woiks." I found the connection quickly. This DNA match is my 3rd cousin 3 times removed (3C3R). Her 2nd great grandfather is my 5th great grandfather.

All I ask of my DNA matches is a little bit of a family tree I can investigate.

Once you can work a DNA match into your tree, you'll see their exact relationship to you. Be sure to add a note to this person in your match list, stating the relationship. I like to use abbreviations like 5C2R for 5th cousin twice removed, or 3C1R for 3rd cousin once removed. I saw a genealogist on Twitter using that abbreviation and loved it. It's short and unmistakable.

I'll continue picking off as many of the shared DNA matches as I can. If I keep figuring out our shared DNA matches, I may find my connection to the match with the Irish name. The connection may be in one of their trees.

Figuring out a DNA match is like a fishing expedition. Wait, no. I went along with a fisherman once, and it was an endless amount of waiting around. This is more of a hunting and tracking expedition without the weapons.

I track my DNA match's ancestors, following their path until I've got them in my sights. Then they become family. Yeah; that's my kind of hunting expedition. What genealogy fan doesn't enjoy that?

And speaking of DNA Matches:

• Are Your Dead Ends Hiding DNA Matches?
• How to Sharpen Your DNA Detective Skills
• How to Use the Power of Shared DNA Matches

Revisit Your Genealogy Journal Often

You may not have 417 blog articles that document your family tree research plans. You may not write down your theories, or the steps you took to make new discoveries. But I do.

I've written so many articles that I can re-read them and have no memory of the big discoveries they describe. It's clear I need to revisit my past ideas and make good on their promise.

My advice is that you start keeping a genealogy journal. It can be handwritten or in something like OneNote, if that's your preference. It can even be a plain text file, which is my choice. Whichever you choose, Keep Track of Your Genealogy Theories and Tasks. And revisit your journal often.

You got to keep track of your family tree discoveries. Revisit your genealogy journal often.

I try to do a bit of work on my family tree every day, and I spend the weekend tackling big research projects. All too often I can't find the time to follow my own advice to you, like:

• It's Time to Review Old Genealogy Messages. There's a Word doc on my computer, waiting for me to review and follow-up on old conversations.
• Catch and Fix Your Missing Source Citations. I created a better list of unsourced family tree facts by using Family Tree Maker, rather than Family Tree Analyzer. Three months later, I've only begun to work my way through it.
• Use Every Tool to Solve a Family History Mystery. More than a year ago I hit upon one ancestor with a strong likelihood of being my parents' common ancestor. (They share DNA.) I decided to seek out every possible descendant of this 3rd great grandfather. But I haven't yet.

I have so many open family tree research projects, I'm never at a loss for something interesting to do. But I would like to finish some of them!

Weekend is coming. How will I spend those hours of research time? Two recent projects are calling out to me the loudest:

1. Imagine a Register of Your Entire Ancestral Hometown. I have a book detailing every single person in Grandpa's hometown in the year 1742. I want to work them all into my family tree. (The whole town's related.) I know I can finish my first pass this weekend. I'm up to household 343 out of 560. About one-fourth of them will be easy to place in my tree.
2. Be More Thorough with Your Family Tree. I began looking at every person in my family tree with my maiden name, Iamarino. That's a lot of people. For each one, I'm searching their hometown's vital records for their missing documents. I'm completing each person as much as I can. I'm marking in my document tracker which documents I've found, and which are not available.

OK, it looks as if I've got my weekend genealogy plan. I'll work my way through that book, making sure I find any available records for each person I add to my tree.

Then next week I'll continue fully documenting every Iamarino in my family tree. I'm up to those with a first name of Giuseppe.

How can you make good on your past genealogy promises to yourself? Your genealogy journal would answer that question.

What Was it Like When Your Ancestors Lived Here?

We watched "I Love Lucy" so much when I was a kid that my family still speaks in phrases from the show. One favorite comes from Lucy imitating Ricky mispronouncing "soak up some local color." It sounds like "sock up some lockel collar."

Whenever a member of the family is going on a trip, we tell them to "sock up some lockel collar." We can't go anywhere in 2020. So why not use a free online newspaper to get the "lockel collar" of the town I call home?

You can do this, too. Start at a Wikipedia page listing online newspaper archives from around the world. Many are free. Many are on the Fulton History website you may know, but others are not found there.

I went straight to the New York state newspapers and chose my Hudson Valley region. That led me to Hudson River Valley Historical Newspapers.

What if we search old newspapers for our ancestor's town instead of their name?

In the 12 March 1909 edition of the "Kingston Daily Freeman" is a story about a church less than 5 miles from my home.

The headline is "THE DEVIL IN CHURCH." I'm intrigued. This is a very small chapel within steps of a main road near the border of Fishkill, New York.

The article reads as follows:

"While holding prayer meeting in a small churh [sic] at Wiccoppe [sic], near Hopewell Junction, Dutchess county, the congregation was startled by the appearance of a figure clad in black wearing horns and a black mask and a pitchfork held in his hands. One of the members made a grab for the masker but he ducked out into the street and disappeared. The affair has stirred up a great scandal in the village."

What did he do? Hop on a Model-T motoring by?

Next I searched for my town in a paper called the "Rockland County Journal." I grew up in Rockland County, and it's an hour away from me now, across the Hudson River. I chose the earliest article in the results, from 20 March 1875.

I've lived in a lot of towns without knowing details of their past.

An article called "Bridging the Hudson" talks about some critical infrastructure in my area. There's a National Park near here called the Walkway Over the Hudson. It's a former railroad bridge turned into a walking and biking path. They completed the railroad bridge in 1889. Following a fire, they closed and abandoned it. Finally, they rebuilt it for pedestrians in 2009, and it's very popular.

The article says Boston merchants wanted New York to build the bridge. Boston is a 3-hour drive from me, and more than 4 hours from New York City. There is no other railroad bridge across the Hudson between here and New York City. The lack of a crossing isolated Boston merchants from the rest of the country.

Boston appointed a committee that, 14 years later, resulted in the bridge's completion. It also recommended the completion of a road from my little town to the city of Poughkeepsie. That's where the bridge is. That road, Route 9, is now the main artery connecting every town from here to Poughkeepsie. It's a 12-mile strip of:

• every franchise in America
• retail stores
• medical offices
• hotels
• restaurants
• businesses, and
• banks.

I always complain that I can't find my ancestors in newspapers. They weren't big businessmen. They weren't socialites. I haven't even found an obituary. And in Italy where they came from, most people were illiterate in the 1890s when my people left.

That's why we genealogists may find it useful to learn about our ancestors' hometowns. We may not find their names, but we may find their neighbors. I have one branch that lived in Western New York state. Their little town is ripe for newspaper exploration.

What local news can you find that had an impact on your family?

And speaking of history:

• What Was Happening When Your Ancestor Died?
• Did Your Ancestors Break the Mold?
• Finding Your Family's Fallen War Heroes