Stay True to Your Genealogy Discipline

I dream about transcribing old Italian vital records. That's how much I love it. In fact, I don't enjoy U.S. censuses anymore. I'd much rather be working with my old Italians.

But a new project has come up. My son's girlfriend (let's call her V) lost her father. My son told her I'd want to do her family tree for her since she didn't know her ethnic background. V said she would like that.

I began with facts from her father's obituary. I had his parents' full names and his wife's maiden name.

I found V's grandparents right away. I discovered they had been in the same Pennsylvania county for many generations. This is the same county where V grew up. The same county where I raised my kids. The same county where V and my son live today.

Then I tapped into a few local histories that featured V's last name. In one document from the county's historical society, I found generations of V's family. As I dug into it, entering names into V's family tree, I found exactly what I was looking for. Her paternal immigrant ancestor!

Her 9th great grandfather (NINTH!) had come to America from France in 1715. He was a French Huguenot who joined the Quaker religion that was so common in his new homeland.

Let's step back a second. In my first session, I climbed all the way up to V's 9th great grandparents born in the late 1600s.

Did I feel joy about this rapid success? No. I mean, I was happy to find the unexpected source of V's Italian-sounding last name. But I was a little angry that it was all so easy to find.

I know the names of five of my 9th great grandparents. They came after years of research, and the help of an Italian historian from my Grandpa's hometown. But after very little time, I know the names of eight of V's 9th great grandparents.

What I really felt was jealousy. Is this how easy it can be for white people with deep, deep roots in America? My direct ancestors came to America between 1899 and 1920. That missing 1890 census never bothered me because my people weren't here yet! With V's family tree, I'm seeing for myself how far back you can go with records on Ancestry.com. For the first time, I'm looking at the early censuses with no names, just tick marks.

My first day working on her tree, I racked up ancestors so fast my head was spinning. I had to stop myself from going further.

Make sure all your family tree work reflects your best genealogy practices.

Why stop? Because I want to give V a family tree that shows all I've learned. I started this blog to encourage us all to be more professional with our genealogy research.

I've spent years developing a strict and thorough genealogy discipline. I want to give V the benefit of all I've learned. I want us all to apply the same discipline to someone else's family tree as we do to our own.

That's why I went back to the beginning. In this case, the beginning is the documentation I found for her grandparents.

• I downloaded each genealogy document as I found it.
• I gave it a logical file name and added pertinent facts to its file properties.
• I placed the image in Family Tree Maker and added the date of the document.
• I assigned it to a media category.
• I entered facts from the document into the tree and created the source citation.
• I shared the document, facts, and source citation with everyone mentioned in the document.
• I verified addresses from the documents by finding them on Google Maps.

In short, I used all my family tree-building discipline on someone else's family tree.

I love helping people find their ancestors among the Italian vital records. I treat their documents and family trees with as much discipline as I do my own. When I send them a batch of files, I want each jpg's file properties to include a file name and where the image came from.

It makes perfect sense to keep up your genealogy discipline for every family tree you work on. You're creating something for the ages. You're going to want people to pass it down—and rely on it. That's why you must take the extra steps to produce high-quality work every time.

As I said, I felt anger and jealousy over how easily V's family tree is coming together. But those aren't the only emotions I felt.

I felt gratitude when the genealogy community on Twitter solved a problem for me. One of V's great grandparents was an immigrant. On one census he said he was Austrian. On two other censuses he said he was German. But his World War II draft registration card said he was born in "Kofedesh" Hungary. So now he's Hungarian? I wanted to see Kofedesh on the map, but it didn't exist. At least, not with that spelling.

I put out the call to Twitter. Does anyone know what town sounds like Kofedesh? To my delight, @sosonkyrie found it almost immediately. He sent me a Wikipedia link about Kohlfidisch, Austria, that included a spoken pronunciation. What does Kohlfidisch sound like? Kofedesh!

As for the shifting nationality of V's great grandfather, that isn't surprising. His town was in Hungary when he registered for the WWII draft. It's in Austria now. And V's great grandfather was part of its German-speaking population. (Where are you from? It depends on the year.)

I feel one more emotion as I work on V's family tree. Guilt. I do some genealogy work every single day. I'm always advancing my project to document all the relationships in my ancestral hometowns. Now I feel guilty about not working on my own family tree.

Sometimes it feels as if I'm doing something wrong. Something bad. I'm ignoring my family tree. When those feelings take over, I take a "break" by working on my Italian vital records database. When U.S. census after U.S. census for V's family got to be too tedious, I went to my happy place. I renamed more downloaded Italian vital records to make them searchable.

I know my genealogy discipline will produce a robust family tree for V. And if she ever winds up creating my grandchild, guess who will inherit my work?

Keep the future in mind as you work on any family tree. Stay true to your strong genealogy discipline knowing it will always pay off.

Which Part of Your Ancestry Needs to Be Private?

The genealogy world is up in arms due to an extreme overreach by Ancestry.com. No one ever pays attention to a website's policy updates. And they were counting on us to ignore this latest change.

But the Legal Genealogist Judy Russell sounded the alarm for us all. Ancestry says they're claiming full rights to the photos in our online family trees. Your favorite family photo of Grandma might wind up in Ancestry's advertisements. And you would have no legal right to stop them.

What were they thinking? They thought they'd get away with it, that's for sure. Can you imagine the corporate meeting where they decided to own our photos?

Before the September 2, 2021 deadline, people are removing photos from their Ancestry trees. From now on, the discoveries we make in other people's family trees will be a lot more bland. No more finding photos of the 3rd great aunt you just discovered.

I do all my family tree work on my desktop in Family Tree Maker. I didn't have to "delete" my photos. I went through them in the FTM Media Library and clicked a checkbox to make them all private. Then I synchronized my tree with Ancestry.com, which removed 444 photos from the website—not from my tree.

This works fine for me. The vast majority of my people have no photos anyway. They have vital records from the 1800s. I don't own those records, so I'm happy to share them along with their URLs.

Today I remembered the large family tree I created for my sister-in-law. I don't update it anymore. I went to the tree on Ancestry and went to the Media Library. I removed every photo (not cemetery photos or documents). These photos were mostly given to me by a distant cousin of my sister-in-law, so they are not mine. I have a duty to protect their property as well as mine.

Removing or making images private in the Media Library is faster than viewing profiles one at a time. That goes for your family tree on Ancestry or your desktop tree.

Take the time right now to safeguard your family tree photos from other uses.

Does It Matter to You?

What do you think needs to be private? I'm always surprised by people who won't take a DNA test because of a perceived threat to their identity. It isn't your bank account PIN. How would someone profit off knowing you're 55% Irish? And if I have a serial-killer cousin, I want them to get caught.

I've never had a problem with my family tree being "out there," and I still don't. But I did take back my photos.

After doing that, I realized I did have my family tree in one place I'm very unhappy about. Geni.com is a free-for-all, "one world tree" type of site. People can merge your family members with theirs. They can edit your people. When I uploaded my large GEDCOM file in 2008, I thought it was MY family tree.

I wanted to delete my tree long ago, but strangers have put their hooks into it. They have made themselves managers of my closest family members—with no rhyme or reason.

I decided to delete as many people as I could from my geni.com family tree. I had to do it one at a time, which took lots of clicks and was murder on my right arm. It took me hours. You cannot delete someone if they will break your tree. For instance, someone has added to the family of my other sister-in-law's ex-husband. I can't delete his family without breaking the tree someone else built onto him. So I can't delete my sister-in-law, and I can't delete my husband. I have this type of situation in a few places.

Since I can't delete some of my closest relatives, I made sure their profiles are private. I deleted two men who made themselves "managers" of MY people. I found that one of these mystery men had a relationship to a branch of my ex-husband's tree on his English/Irish side. But why glom onto my whole family (all Italian) and my current husband's family (all Japanese)? That's insane and as much of an overreach as Ancestry.com is making.

I'm glad my photos are private. And I'm very glad I reined in my geni.com tree. But I need my Ancestry family tree to be public. It's of great value to anyone with ancestors from a handful of Southern Italian towns.

If you have a family tree on Ancestry.com, you've got a decision to make. Don't wait until the September 2 deadline. It's time to take action.

What Do You Think You Are?

When Suni Lee won her gold medal in gymnastics at the Tokyo 2020 Olympics, the press touted her as the first Asian American to do so. As the wife of an Asian American, I was curious to see which type of Asian she is.

Reading that Lee is Hmong was confusing. I'd heard of it before, but I wondered where the Hmong people come from. I read that Hmong is an ethnic group found in parts of China, Vietnam, Laos, Thailand, and Myanmar. That's a very large geographic region.

The difference between ethnicity and nationality should be important to genealogists. As shown by the Hmong people, an ethnic group can extend beyond national borders. Likewise, you can have more than one ethnic group within a nation.

Ethnicity is important when reviewing your DNA results. I'm mostly Southern Italian, which is a different ethnicity than Northern Italian. All my traceable roots come from a very small part of Southern Italy. That's why my "community", according to Ancestry DNA, is Campania and Molise—two neighboring regions in Italy.

I looked at the DNA results of my friend (who turned out to be my 6th cousin). Her core ethnicities are Central Ireland and Southern Italian. Her Central Ireland communities are specific to quite a small geographic footprint. Her Southern Italian community is the same as mine.

Remember that your DNA is oblivious to national boundaries.

How do you self-identify? Getting into genealogy has made me identify as Italian more than ever. Yes, I'm American, but my cultural and genetic heritage is Italian. We're an Italian family that happens to live in America and speak English.

Growing up in suburban New York, my classmates were Italian, Irish, Polish, German. I didn't call them American because that was a given. We were all Americans, but Americans are always something else, too. We even called it a nationality (e.g., "What nationality are you?" "I'm Irish.").

Focus on your ethnicity, not your family's country of origin, and your DNA pie chart may make more sense. My pie chart also contains some Greece and Albania, and a bit of Northern Italy. It's clear to me that Greeks, Albanians, and Italians have a shared ethnic origin. People from these areas are very similar. I can imagine we can trace our ancient roots to the same place.

My cousin's adopted daughter has 13% "Germanic Europe" in her DNA profile. Ancestry DNA says this is mostly in Germany and Switzerland, but it reaches into several countries. If you have this ethnicity, but none of your ancestors came from Germany, it would be easy to think this was an error.

She also has 11% Middle East. My first DNA results showed 44% Middle Eastern, which was confusing. But my cousin's daughter's Middle East DNA comes from a specific part of Lebanon. Having Lebanese ethnicity is quite different than the much broader "Middle East". And it's easier to understand.

The best example I've seen of an ethnic group that spans nations is "European Jewish". This ethnicity reaches back to huge amounts of people who had to move from place to place. It's a perfect example of how ethnicity is not tied to nationality.

Ancestry DNA says, "We estimate your ethnicity by comparing your DNA to DNA samples from groups of people whose families have lived for a long time in one place." I can prove my ancestors stayed in their little corner of Italy for centuries. So did their neighbors. This makes us a strong, condensed ethnic group.

So, what do you think you are? I always thought I was Italian and DNA bears me out. Do you belong to an ethnic group that comes from many countries? Did large groups of your distant ancestors migrate from one region to another?

If you have ethnicities that span countries, you may need to adjust your thinking. There's nationality (especially during the Olympics). And then there's ethnicity. Perhaps your roots are deeper ethnically than nationally.

And speaking of DNA results:

• Making Sense of Your DNA Results
• This DNA Reference Site Solved a Mystery
• How to Use the Power of Shared DNA Matches

Which Genealogy Documents Are You Missing?

Working on your family tree gets more exciting each time you discover something new. Maybe you discovered your great grandfather's brother and followed his paper trail. Maybe you went off on interesting tangents and built out several branches. Once your new discoveries run their course, you may find your family tree is a lot bigger.

How do you get back on track? How can you make sure you collect every available document for everyone in your family tree?

For me, the answer is simple. My document tracker is a 4,870-line spreadsheet that shows each document I've added to my family tree. It lists people from my tree in alphabetical order—but only people for whom I have documents. (Download a document tracker file you can use for yourself.)

This inventory of which genealogy documents you have and which you need will help you make your family tree more complete. (Never finished, but more complete.)

Most of my documents are very old Italian vital records. I do something special for those lines in the document tracker.

• If I've added all available documents for a person to my tree (birth, marriage(s), and death), I color their line green. That tells me that person is complete.
• In a completed person's "Need to find" column, I enter n/a for not applicable.
• If I can't get one or more of a person's vital records because they aren't online, I color their line blue.
• In an incomplete person's "Need to find" column, I enter what is missing, like this:
  • out of range: birth
  • out of range: marriage
  • out of range: death

Here's a 40-second video (no sound) showing the process above.

Lately I've been working to make my collection of Italian vital records searchable. Since they are searchable, I should be able to complete all my Italians' "Need to find" columns.

This is such a fulfilling task! The documents are waiting for me to get them and add them to my family tree. So why wouldn't I chase them down?

I started at the top of my document tracker, but for now, I'm focusing only on those Italian documents. I'll skip over all the people with U.S. or other documents.

One at a time, I search my computer (using a free PC program called Everything) for a person. The document tracker tells me which documents I'm missing. Now I can definitively say if a person was born, married, or died "out of range" of the online documents. And if I find a missing document, I crop it in Photoshop and add it to both my family tree and my document tracker. I also create a source citation for each fact I learn from each document.

So many lines are now colored either green for complete or blue for out of range. Some day, if I gain access to church records, I may find many of the out of range documents. My document tracker will make it easy to see which church records I want.

This level of completeness makes me really happy. I always have a bunch of genealogy projects going on at the same time. One involves identifying all my relatives from one town, Santa Paolina, Avellino, Italy. For that fast-paced project, I'm adding facts only, not documents or citations. Not yet.

Diego was born out of range of available genealogy documents, but I know I found all that's available.

Right now I want to work through my document tracker, filling in the blanks. Then I'll start adding documents and sources for my Santa Paolina people.

In my first two days of finding missing documents, I added 75 document images to my family tree. Unfortunately, there is a problem with Ancestry.com right now. No one can synchronize their Family Tree Maker file with Ancestry. I don't want to add tons of facts and documents until I get synchronized again. But I can collect and crop the images I need, and save them to add to my tree later.

If your family tree isn't too big, you can go person-by-person and see what you're missing. You may even want to create and fill in your document tracker at the same time.

My family tree has more than 30,500 people right now. I'm so glad I created my document tracker when I had less than 1,000 people. If your tree is too big to consider doing a person-by-person check, keep things close to you. Examine only your direct ancestors to see what's missing. Then branch out to the siblings of your direct ancestors.

Also, each time you view a person in your tree, for whatever reason, take note of what they're missing. As long as you're working on them, you may as well go all the way and search for everything you need.

Yes, those genealogy tangents are fun! But don't forget to double back and fill in the blanks for a more complete family tree.

How to Find Value in Your Distant DNA Matches

My DNA matches are very out of balance. My paternal-side matches outnumber my maternal-side matches by more than 2 to 1. To make up for the big difference, I need to squeeze out the value of these matches to benefit my family tree.

My tree contains about 15,000 people (I kid you not) from my mother's father's hometown of Baselice. That's a result of a years-long project where I documented thousands of vital records in a text file. Then I worked the people into my family tree. Thanks to Italy's Antenati website, I have access to the rest of the town's records through 1942.

On Saturday I published a text file and an Excel file with names and links to more than 8,600 Baselice vital records. I've done the same for a few of my other ancestral towns, including Santa Paolina, Avellino.

Having done all this work, I'm as ready as I'll ever be to fit Mom's DNA matches into my family tree.

A Familiar Name

As I scroll down my list of maternal-side DNA matches, I see one with a last name I think I know. It looks like an Americanization of the name Ricciardelli. This name comes from Santa Paolina. That's the hometown of one of my 2nd great grandmothers.

My DNA match's 3-person tree turns out to be all I need. (I didn't see that coming.) The tree consists of her, her father, and her grandfather, Michele Ricciardelli. A quick search for her father shows me that his parents, Michele and Vincenza, are already in my family tree. Michele Ricciardelli is my 3rd cousin 3 times removed. When I add Michele's son and granddaughter to my tree, I see that my match is my 5th cousin once removed.

That was unexpected! My DNA match's 3-person family tree was all I needed to easily connected her to my extended family.

I'll add a note to my DNA match list and choose another one to explore.

Another match has the name Ricciardelli in his family tree, too. He also has another name from the same town—Stanziale. I should be able to place this young man in my family tree.

As I view his tree, I see his 3rd great grandparents are in my family tree already. But their connection to me is not close at all. Each one has an in-law relationship to my 5th great uncle. I needed more facts.

I found my match's 2nd great grandparents' marriage documents and added the facts to my family tree. While I can't find a blood relationship with this DNA match, I can see a DNA connection. His 2nd great grandmother's sister married my 5th great uncle. The descendants of both sisters would share some DNA.

Since his tree has 2 generations of private, unnamed family, I won't add him to my family tree. But I made a detailed note on Ancestry DNA about how we may share DNA.

Another Familiar Name

I want to explore one more match whose grandmother Carmela was born in Santa Paolina. Carmela and her parents are not in my family tree. I'm sure I can find their connection by searching the documents.

The Santa Paolina documents, searchable on my computer, helped me place Carmela in my tree. But once again, there is no direct relationship. I'll go ahead and add as many facts as I can about this family. Maybe future research will show a closer relationship.

I've been building my own massive vital records database. Finding my DNA matches' relatives is a slam dunk.

It looks as if my ancestors' neighbors and in-laws have descendants who have DNA-tested. And we share a small amount of DNA. Yes, I wish I had more and closer matches from my maternal side. But I can use my DNA matches to piece together extended families and see how far they've come.

Don't overlook the value of your 4th–6th cousin matches. They can extend your dead ends and open up new relationships.

How to Crunch Your DNA Numbers

I watched an excellent online course about data visualization. (Nerd!) In a nutshell, the presenter explained the pros and cons of different types of charts. Which one are easier to understand? Which answer your questions?

Naturally, I spent the whole time thinking how to use these ideas for genealogy.

My first thought was DNA results. Ethnically, my parents and I are all Italian. Their ancestors all came from a very small area of Italy. I've traced all their lines back to the late 1600s, and no one moved. Not until 1899 did we start to become American.

Our 3 DNA test results have changed over time as the database grew and algorithms improved. I would like to see how each of my parents influence my DNA, and how we all compare to one another.

An Excel spreadsheet is a very simple way to generate all kinds of charts. First I entered some basic information.

• Mom, Dad, and I are the 3 rows in the spreadsheet.
• We each have 3 DNA ethnicities, so these are the 3 columns in the spreadsheet:
  • Southern Italy
  • Greece & Albania
  • Northern Italy

For each of us, I entered our percentage of each of the 3 ethnicities.

These 4 charts show the same information. But which one best answers the question at hand?

To create a chart based on data, select all the data in your table, including the names of the rows (Mom, Dad, Me) and columns. (Click your mouse in the top left cell, A1, and drag your mouse to the bottom right cell.)

With the data selected, go to Excel's Insert menu. In the Charts section of the tool ribbon, click in the lower right corner to See All Charts. On the new window that opens, click the All Charts tab. Now you can click through lots of options to see a preview using your actual data.

When you select a type of chart, it will appear on your spreadsheet. You can click and drag that chart anywhere on the page. Once you click a chart, you can click the paintbrush icon to change the style of colors. And you can give it whatever title you choose.

Based on the online course I watched, I chose 4 types of charts with different qualities. Each one shows how my DNA compares with that of my parents.

1. In the Custom Combination chart (top left in the image above), my parents (green and blue bars) have similar DNA. The yellow line (representing me) shows that I have:

• a touch more Southern Italian DNA than either of my parents
• a good deal more Greek/Albanian DNA than either of my parents
• a good deal less Northern Italian DNA than either of my parents

This is a good chart because it clearly shows what I wanted to know: how do I compare to Mom and Dad?

2. The 100% Stacked Column chart (top right in the image above), we see a different visualization. But there's bit less clarity. You can't see from this chart that I have more Southern Italian DNA than my parents. But you can see that I have a lot more Greece/Albania, and a ton less Northern Italy.

3. The Scatter Chart with Straight Lines and Markers (lower left in the image above), is clearer than chart 2. You can see that I have:

• the most Southern Italy, but not by much
• the most Greece/Albania, by a decent amount
• the least Northern Italy, by a lot

Strangely, the ethnicities don't appear on this chart.

4. The Clustered Bar chart (lower right in the image above) . This is a better comparison of the 3 of us than charts 2 or 3. Why?

• You can see how we "stack up" to one another in each of the 3 ethnicities.
• The percentages are pretty easy to see.

Chart 1, the Custom Combination chart, is the best choice to answer my initial question. When I first created this chart, the bars were me and mom, and the line was dad. Then I realized that when you're choosing the type of chart to create, you can set who gets the line and who gets the bars.

Before I created these charts, I had to keep switching DNA results on Ancestry to get an idea how we 3 compared. It was a revelation to me that I wound up with more Southern Italy and Greek/Albanian DNA than my parents.

You can easily compare your DNA to that of one or many DNA matches. Which questions do you want to answer?

If you don't manage multiple DNA tests, don't worry. You can create charts comparing yourself to as many of your Ancestry DNA matches as you want. When I view my 1st cousin as my DNA match, I can click Ethnicity to see his percentages. How interesting! He has a lot more Northern Italy than I do, but he has no Greek/Albanian at all.

Imagine charting a group of your DNA matches' ethnicity percentages in a spreadsheet. What might you learn from charting the data? What do you want to learn?

And speaking of DNA:

• Your DNA Matches Hold Hidden Clues
• Attracting a New DNA Match
• Untangling Our Twisted Family Relationships