Exploring Your Last Name Concentration

I recently made the comment that "I'm like the frozen concentrate of Benevento, Italy." In "Where Will Your Roots Map Take You?," I showed you how to create a map of all your ancestral locations.

Today's project focuses on your ancestral last name concentration. Granted, your name concentration depends on how much research you've done. But you may find some real surprises.

Let's look at 3 ways to discover which family names make up the biggest percentage of you. If you’d rather do it old school, you can pull the names from your family tree manually. But there's no reason you can't do option 2.

Once your ancestral last names are counted, Excel makes it easy to show your family tree composition in a colorful chart.

1. Family Tree Maker's Surname Report

After years of using Family Tree Maker (FTM), I've somehow never used the built-in Surname Report. To create yours:

• Choose yourself in your family tree and click the Publish tab.
• Under Person Reports, choose the Surname Report.
• In the Report Options column, click Selected individuals.
• You'll see your name highlighted, and you can choose the Ancestors option. But then you run into the problem of ancestors with more than one spouse. What if your ancestor isn't set as the preferred spouse? You may get step-grandparents in the list. I clicked the Filter In button because my ancestors all have a custom Ahnentafel fact. I clicked All facts, and Search where Ahnentafel Is not blank. With 401 people selected, I clicked Apply.
• Now click the boxes in the report option tab for (1) Sort surname by count, and (2) Limit counts to included individuals.

You'll see an alphabetical list of all the last names of your direct ancestors. It shows how many times each name appears in your list of direct ancestors. And I love how it shows the earliest and most recent birth year of each name in this group.

You can save this report by clicking the Share button at the top-right of FTM and choosing Export to PDF. I recommend you also choose Export to CSV so you can make some charts and graphs from the data.

2. Family Tree Analyzer's Surname Chart

You can open any GEDCOM file with Family Tree Analyzer (FTA) and sort by relationship type to find your direct ancestors. But why not give it a GEDCOM that contains only the right people?

My Family Tree Maker File has a custom field that holds the Ahnentafel number of all my direct ancestors. It also has an Ahnentafel filter so I can display only this group. You can export a GEDCOM file of only the people found in any filter you've created. I created a direct-ancestor-only GEDCOM and opened it with FTA.

With your file open in FTA:

• Click the Surnames tab and check only the Direct Ancestors box.
• Click the Show Surnames button.
• Click the top of the Individuals column to sort each surname from Z to A. (This is a numbers column, so it's really sorting from most to least.)

At the top of the report, you'll see the highest concentration of last names in your family tree. I recommend you save this information as a spreadsheet so you can do more with the data. Click the Export menu and choose Individuals to Excel. This will give you tons of facts. You may want to delete most of the columns.

Dive deeper into each of your ancestors' last names using the Family Tree Analyzer Surnames report.

3. Excel's Charting Features

The spreadsheet I saved from the FTM Surname Report works best for creating charts. It includes the all-important count for each name. The FTA Surnames Report lists each name entry separately. You'd have to do some manipulation or manual counting of each name to get enough data to make a chart.

I chose the Count column in my spreadsheet and sorted the data from Largest Count to Smallest Count. At the bottom of the list I have a lot of names that appear only once or twice among my direct ancestors. I decided to include only the names that appear 5 or more times. I selected the surname and count of each entry with 5 or more in the Count column. For me, that's a total of 29 different last names.

Click Recommended Charts on the Insert tab, and then choose All Charts. This gives you a preview of how each chart will look with your data. I chose an Area chart, and then I fiddled around with the options until I liked the results. I created a pie chart, too.

Examining Your Results

My maiden name is Iamarino, but I'm still a little surprised to see that name come out with a commanding lead. All the other names scoring double digits are surprising to me. Coming in at #2 is Pilla, which happens to be the name of my Grandpa Iamarino's mother. It's also a common name in many of my ancestral towns. But I had no idea how many of them were my direct ancestors. It's also exciting to see that my earliest known Iamarino ancestor was born in 1640. That's a remarkable find for someone with roots in Italy.

As you examine your list of last names, which ones do you think you'd like to take a step further? Why not make a poster of everything you can learn about your top surnames?

I’m lucky to have a book that explains the history of last names in Italy. It's a huge book because Italy has the highest number of last names in Europe at about 350,000. (See "The Interesting History of Italian Last Names.") There may be such a book for your ancestral places. Explore Google Books or an online library catalog for your options. If you're Italian, the book I have is available online for free. Go to https://archive.org/details/OrigineEStoriaDeiCognomiItaliani.

From this cognome or last name book, written by Ettore Rossoni, I learn that the name Iamarino:

• is very rare
• comes primarily from Colle Sannita (my grandfather's hometown)
• means the son of Giovanni (or Gianni) Marino
• is recorded in Colle Sannita as early as 1588

Does your ancestral hometown have a website? What can you learn about the history of the place that's interesting to you?

Years ago I made the surprising discovery that the patron saint of Colle Sannita is Saint George. For some reason, I chose St. George and his April 23rd feast day as a key feature in the novel I wrote as my college thesis. The title of my novel was "St. George." I mean, what are the odds?

I'm also intrigued that the Saracens occupied the town in 728 AD. My maternal grandmother's name was Sarracino. The cognome book tells me this name was once given to Arab or Islamic communities in Italy. Grandma's roots come from a town not far from Colle Sannita. They may be very ancient roots!

Pick out a few details about your ancestral town's origins. Find a nice image of the town or use the map. Put something together in Word or other software that you might turn into a book cover or a framed wall hanging.

The last names in my family tree give me so much joy. I'm always thrilled to discover a new one. Many of them pin me firmly to one place on the map, like Iamarino.

Step back from your usual research and dive into the most important names in your family tree. You may feel more pride in your heritage once you take a closer look.

And speaking of last names:

• Using Color to Understand Your Family's Last Names
• How to Keep Track of All Your Surnames
• When Did Your Ancestors First Use a Last Name?
• Where Did Your Last Name Come From?

5 Ellis Island Videos Dispel Immigration Myths

Some family history myths never seem to die. Perhaps the biggest one is "my ancestor's name was changed at Ellis Island." Despite what you see in "The Godfather" or its parody "Mafia!" (where they rename an immigrant boy Vincenzo Armani Windbreaker), it didn't happen.

Ask yourself this. When you board an airplane, does the airline know your name and home address? Yes, they do. If you board a cruise ship, does that company know who each passenger is? Absolutely yes.

In fact, they recorded everyone's details at the port of departure and gave them a basic inspection. It was in the shipping company's best interests to turn away anyone who would be rejected in New York. Why? Because the company had to pay the return fare for any rejected immigrant.

East Coast Immigration

Visit the Ellis Island Foundation online to see 5 videos that detail your ancestor's immigration experience. Here are some of the key points from these educational and informational videos.

1. The immigration process is much more difficult now that it was when your grandparents arrived. For the most part, all you had to do was arrive, have a place to go, and not have a contagious disease. The entire process happened within hours.

2. The medical inspection lasted a few seconds. The staff had an average of 6 seconds to look at an immigrant and decide if they were healthy enough. They checked for one contagious eye disease called trachoma that was a big problem at the time. To do this, they had to turn the immigrant's upper eyelid inside out to look for bumps. If the person was sick, they might stay in the building's dormitory until they recovered.

During the Ellis Island years, European immigrants went through a relatively speedy entry process.

3. Ships had a manifest with each passenger's name and information when they arrived. They turned the manifests over to the Ellis Island officials. In the Great Hall of Ellis Island, people waited in line for hours to speak to an inspector. Translators were there to assist. The inspectors asked questions to see if a passenger's answers matched what was on the ship manifest. They asked questions like, "Where are you going?"

4. About 1 in 10 immigrants also had to go before a board of special inquiry. They had to wait in the dormitory for their hearing. After answering several more questions, the majority passed and went on their way. In fact, Ellis Island denied entry to only 2% of immigrants.

Of course your ancestor came here legally. It was so easy to do.

West Coast Immigration

The Ellis Island videos mention that their immigrants came from Europe. Asian immigrants arrived at the Angel Island Immigration Station in San Francisco. My husband's Japanese ancestors arrived there. Recently I found the manifest showing his grandmother Hanako's detention at the facility.

Asian immigrants faced a longer, tougher entry process at Angel Island in San Francisco.

I found her on a page filled with woman who had 2 things in common:

1. Many had a rubber stamp next to their name that says Photograph Marriage. We all believed Hanako was a "picture bride," but she denied it. Now we have this proof as well as what seems to be the actual photograph.
2. Most of the people on the page had uncinariasis, also known as hookworm. Officials labeled these immigrants as having a "dangerous contagious disease." The people were all detained, treated, and released. Many of the contagious picture brides are also labeled L.P.C.: likely public charge. That seems odd when they had an arranged husband to meet them.

It looks as though they held Hanako for 18 days before her husband took her to her new home.

Immigration was much harder at Angel Island because of prejudice against Asians and the Chinese Exclusion Act. If there were European immigrants arriving in San Francisco, they received preferential treatment. Officials processed their papers aboard the ship so they could disembark and be on their way. This was also true of 1st and 2nd class passengers at Ellis Island.

Unlike Ellis Island, the Angel Island immigration process didn't take hours. It took weeks, months, or sometimes years.

It's important to understand the experience of your immigrant ancestors. I often think of my great grandmother Maria Rosa, who made the 3-week voyage while she was 6 months pregnant. It sounds nauseating! Or my grandfather Pietro, who arrived at age 18 after somehow getting from southern Italy to a port in France. Or my grandfather Adamo, who first arrived in 1914 as a 23-year-old, but had to return to Italy to fight in World War I for the Italian Army.

They all made long, difficult journeys, and most seemed to decide to never speak about it again. Take some time to understand the journey your ancestors made. You know you owe everything to them.

To learn about the Ellis Island immigration process, view the 5 videos at https://www.nps.gov/elis/learn/education/eie-series.htm.

To learn about the Angel Island immigration process, see the History Channel page at https://www.history.com/topics/immigration/angel-island-immigration-station.

And speaking of immigration:

• Why Did Your Ancestor Leave Home?
• How Did Immigration Laws Guide Your Ancestors?
• Who Was Your First Immigrant Ancestor?

Where Will Your Roots Map Take You?

A couple of years ago I was looking at a map I bought while on vacation in Italy. I realized all my ancestral hometowns fit into a small area of the map. My roots are extremely concentrated. They're all in one province (that's like a county in the U.S.), with one exception that's just over the border.

Here's the part that amazes me. My grandparents and one set of great grandparents met and married in America. But their roots were in neighboring towns in Italy. You may have similar stories in your family tree. Of course immigrants felt comfortable in neighborhoods where everyone spoke the same language. And they felt even more comfortable when their neighbors spoke the same dialect. Imagine how much that helped them make the transition to their newly adopted country.

Generating Your Roots Map

This week I wanted to see a visualization of not only my ancestors' towns, but all their birthplaces on the map. I turned to a program I tested 2 years ago: Microsoft's Power BI Desktop. (BI stands for Business Intelligence.) If you want to try this, see the 5 steps further down in this article. But here's how easy it is to create the map once you're in Power BI:

1. Click the Map icon (which looks like a globe) and expand the graphic to fill the workarea.
2. Drag the FactType field into the Filters column and check Birth in the list.
3. Drag the SortableLocation field and drop it in the Location section of the Visualizations column.

Those 3 steps gave me 18,947 blue dots on my world map. (That's how many people are in the GEDCOM file I'm using.) I see a ton of dots covering the New York City area and scattering over to the Midwest where Dad was born. Italy is positively overrun with blue dots.

Each datapoint in your family tree can generate more research leads.

I can use the scroll wheel on my mouse to zoom in on Italy. There I can see a huge cluster of blue dots from Naples in the west to Foggia in the east. I love this visual. This is the cradle of my civilization.

If you'd like to create this map for your roots, all the software is free. The only caveat is you must be using a Windows computer. Here's what to do:

1. Download and install the free Microsoft program at https://powerbi.microsoft.com/en-us/desktop.
2. Export a GEDCOM from your family tree program or website. You may want to filter your export to your blood relatives (your ancestors and all their descendants) or only your direct ancestors.
3. Open your GEDCOM with Family Tree Analyzer (https://ftanalyzer.com) and choose to Export Facts to Excel. (It will actually be a CSV file.)
4. Open the CSV file to see if there are any columns you don't want. I noticed start date and end date columns, and 2 columns up front, that I decided to delete. Save your changes.
5. Launch Power BI Desktop and choose to Get Data from your CSV file.

Now you're ready to create your map by following the 3 steps I outlined at the top of this article. It makes me proud to have such a tight cluster of roots. Having clusters all over the world might make your existence more of a miracle.

Following the Trail Wherever It May Lead

My Italian cluster is why I spend all my time indexing and exploring vital records from these towns. Even if someone is in my tree due to marriage only, they are me. They're all me.

I'm even expanding into other neighboring towns. I was trying to track down the family of a DNA match when I realized her ancestor's last name exists in the next town. I started scouring that town and found her ancestor's 1842 birth record. And I saw a handful of familiar last names there.

The nearby dots, towns next to your ancestral towns, hint at future family tree research.

I have more than enough towns and data to keep me exploring and discovering for the rest of my life.

Are your map clusters telling you to research a new town? Look for nearby dots on your map. Maybe your ancestor married someone from the next town. It may be time to expand your search.

How to Deal with the Worst Document Handwriting

Discovering where my 2nd great grandmother was born was a genealogy victory. No one else in my extended family knew about this town. They only knew that some ancestors came from somewhere in Avellino, Italy. I'm the one who gave it a name: Santa Paolina in the province of Avellino.

In a nutshell, here's how I discovered her hometown:

• Her eldest son's U.S. WWII draft registration card said he was born in Tufo, Avellino (find out more). I searched that town's vital records.
• The records told me his mother's family came from nearby Santa Paolina. I searched that town's vital records.
• There I found my 2nd great grandparents' 1871 marriage documents and my 2nd great grandmother's 1845 birth record. Victory!
  

Once I knew the town, I could research my family. I used the Antenati website to build several generations of her Consolazio family. (That name itself was a recent discovery.) But my 3rd great grandmother who married a Consolazio had no relatives in Santa Paolina. Where did she come from?

Her 1898 death record from Santa Paolina had the answer. She was born in another town called Apice. I don't know how Rufina, my 3rd great grandmother, met her husband when their towns are 10 miles apart. Back then, transportation involved mules or horses.

A Tough Challenge

This got me excited to explore the vital records from Apice. Then I got a look at those vital records! The town of Apice has some of the worst vital records I've ever seen. The handwriting is atrocious, and I swear the clerk routinely left letters out of names. Amazingly, I did identify Rufina's ancestors, including all 8 of her great grandparents. They are my 6th great grandparents, all born in the early 1700s.

Building my 3rd great grandmother's family tree from AWFUL documents required a helpful tool.

Chasing down all those names was a challenge, and I may have some of the last names spelled wrong. But my family tree mission is to connect as many people as possible from my ancestral hometowns. I'd like to piece together a lot more Apice families. It's the horrible handwriting that slows me down.

The other night I forced myself to go through all 112 Apice birth records for 1816, the year Rufina was born. I'd already downloaded the files to my computer, so my goal was to rename each file, making them searchable. It was torture. I had to guess at many last names. I hope that other documents, written by a better clerk, will make the family names clearer. Literally.

A Helpful Research Tool

When I first tried to tackle the Apice documents, I created a companion file as an aid. Someday this town's last names will be as familiar to me as those from my grandfathers' hometowns. But until then, my companion document is a necessity.

My document is an Excel file, which makes alphabetizing a snap. But you can use a text file or Word document, too. Here's all it contains:

• Name. I record my best guess for every last name I see. As I review more records, I check what I think I see against what I recorded in my spreadsheet.
• Alternate. It's typical to see variations in Italian names, particularly in the prefix or final letter. Giannini/Giannino, deMarco/diMarco. I make note of variations to assure myself I've seen this before.
• Cognomix results. That refers to an Italian last-name website that tells you where in Italy you'll find a particular last name. Whenever I add a name to the spreadsheet, I check this resource to see if the name exists in Apice or in towns nearby. It's reassuring to find the name still in Apice because I know I'm spelling it right. I can also consult the Italian White Pages online to see if the name is in the area.

You'll need another type of resource for names that aren't from Italy, of course. Consider censuses for your town, directories, and newspaper articles.

One last thing I did in this spreadsheet is a bit of color-coding:

• A green background in the name field means I'm pretty confident about the spelling.
• Red text in the Cognomix results field confirms the name still exists in that town today.

You can find lots of help online for deciphering bad handwriting. (Go to the FamilySearch Wiki and search for the word handwriting.) You can compare letters from the word you can't quite understand to similar shapes on the same page. Can you confirm that the first letter is a capital P? Do some of the letters match a word you can read because of its context?

But last names can be a big problem. It helps so much if you get familiar with the language. For instance, I know a last name in Italy won't start with a W or contain a K.

Don't give up when the town scribe had the worst handwriting imaginable.

Here's how you can overcome the worst handwriting in your genealogy research:

• Get familiar with last names from the place you're researching.
• Get in-language handwriting tips from FamilySearch.org.
• Use directories and other tools to see if what you think is a name is actually a name.
• Keep a log (like my spreadsheet) while reviewing documents from a particular place.

I can't go back further than my 6th great grandparents from Apice unless the town's church records go online. But I want to keep exploring the town and find links to any DNA matches. This spreadsheet is critical to my research. Will it help you, too?

Collect Important Family Places to 'Tour' Anytime

I've had 16 homes in my life. And that's not counting college dorms or the months my family lived with relatives. It's a lot to keep track of. I do have a list of the 16 addresses along with some details in my ongoing biography Word document. But I wanted something better.

I turned to Google Earth for a far more visual way of storing these addresses. Now I can "fly" from home to home: starting in the Bronx where I was born, flying out to California, then back to the east coast, ever-so-briefly to Indiana, then several more stops on the east coast.

How can you use Google Earth for genealogy? You can create several collections of places, each with a unique name. I named my first collection Houses. What if you created a collection of all the addresses you have for a certain branch of the family? I could collect all the past addresses of my Ohio cousins or my western Pennsylvania cousins.

Take a virtual visit to your family's past anytime you choose.

What I found infinitely enjoyable was collecting places from my vacations. I used my photos to help me remember and find hotels, restaurants, landmarks, and more. I was so excited to find the magical side street in Lyon, France, where I had the dinner of a lifetime. I'd forgotten the name of our hotel in Lyon, unfortunately. So I used Google Earth to roam the streets, pulling details from my memory, and I found it!

Preserving these details in this 100% visual way will be a treasure for the rest of my life. I did the same for a little town near Nice, France, and for Milano, Italy, but I have many more vacation destinations to do.

To start building your collections, you'll need a free Google account. Your collections get saved to your Google Drive. To save a place to a collection, use the magnifying glass icon to search for the address. Then choose Add to Collection. Click the Replace button (a misleading label) to change the title of the place, add a description, and even upload a photo. It can be your own photo or one you capture there in Google Earth.

I lived in California as an infant and didn't return to the west coast until 2016. I made sure to visit my old house and take a few photos. I attached the best one to this address in my collection. I also added something no one else can: a photo of the house under construction in 1959.

When you want to take a virtual tour of your saved places, open your collection. If it isn't already open, find it in Google Drive and double-click it to launch Google Earth. Once it's open in Google Earth, click the Present button.

Use family photos for landmarks and you can find those important places in Google Earth.

The globe will spin and zoom in on the first location. You can use your mouse or the onscreen +/- buttons to zoom in or out some more. There will be a big panel on the right showing an image of the place or landmark. Sometimes you can click More info in this panel to scroll through photos of the place. Close that panel to see more options. You can drag and drop the little person icon to a spot on the map and have a street-side view of what's around. That works the same as it does in Google Maps.

Back in Present mode, you can keep clicking the right arrow until you've flown to all the locations. Or you can click the Table of Contents and choose any one of your saved places to visit.

Which collections would you like to create? How about adding places from your family photo collection? Imagine adding photos of the family gathered at that location. I guarantee you're going to have a lot of fun.

You can fly from one favorite place to another using Google Earth. Here's a flight from Lyon, France, to Milano, Italy.

Using Shared Matches and Genealogy to Solve a Mystery

When shopping for a new home, you have to look past the dirty carpet to envision what the house can be. That's true in genealogy research, too. You have to look past the mistakes in other family trees to envision the truth and find the correct facts.

Focus on the Right Branch

The other day I wanted to figure out my connection to a DNA match with an Irish last name. Let's call him Danny Irish. Where does he tie into my all-Italian family tree? Based on our shared matches alone, I narrowed down our common family tree branch as follows. We should connect through:

• My maternal grandmother Mary Sarracino's line. Why? Because Mom and my maternal 1st and 2nd cousins are in our shared matches list. Going further back, we should connect through:
• Grandma's mother Maria Rosa Saviano's line. Why? Because some of my Saviano cousins are in our shared matches list. Going further back, we should connect through:
• Maria Rosa Saviano's mother Colomba Consolazio's line. Why? Because some of our shared matches connect to me only through the Consolazio branch. Going further back, we should connect through:
• Colomba Consolazio's father's maternal Ricciardelli line. Why? Because some of our shared matches connect to me only through the Ricciardelli branch. And that puts our connection in the town of Santa Paolina, Avellino, Italy.

Can you see the power of shared matches now? With no other clues, I can see that Danny Irish connects to my 4th great grandparents, Gaetano Consolazio and Colomba Ricciardelli.

Danny Irish's tiny tree has only the names of his father and his Irish grandparents. He has no maternal branch at all. AncestryDNA says he has 16% Italian DNA, so he could have an Italian great grandparent. I had to find his maternal line.

When my 3rd great uncle changed his name, none of his descendants could find his past. But I did. The key was waiting in a shared DNA match list.

Fill in Their Tree's Blanks

A search for his deceased father gave me the name of his wife Hilda, and she has an Italian last name. Based on obituaries and other clues, I'm confident Hilda is the mother of Danny Irish. I continued searching for clues about her.

I found several family trees with Hilda's father's family, but they all hit a dead end quickly. No one seemed to know anything beyond Hilda's Italian grandparents' names.

I tried to pull some research-worthy clues from these family trees. I took all their names and dates as hints, not facts. I rolled my eyes as tree after tree called Luigi's wife Felechlr. That's what's in the transcription of the 1900 U.S. census. In the words of Dr. Evil, "How about no!" Right away I guessed it was Felicella, a name I've seen in my target town of Santa Paolina.

My "break" came from a link to a Geneanet family tree that called her Felicella Marano. The name Marano is from Santa Paolina. And this tree says her mother was a Censullo. That's another Santa Paolina name.

Things started out beautifully because Felicella's supposed mother was my 2C4R. Finally, a blood relative! I used the Santa Paolina vital records to add all the children of Luigi Marano and Maria Filomena Censullo to my family tree.

Then I saw the problem. This couple married in 1874 and had 9 children between 1875 and 1894. The Geneanet tree claims that Felicella is also their daughter, born in 1859. The couple was born in 1851. It doesn't work. And there is no Felicella Marano (or any variant of her first name) in the town's vital records. The Geneanet tree also had Luigi Marano's ancestors all wrong. I know because I have his detailed marriage records.

Turning to the censuses, I realized Felicella died in New Jersey between 1900 and 1910. Without her death certificate, I'm stuck. I can't seem to find her arrival in America even though I know which children should be traveling with her.

I've been ignoring this mystery DNA match for a long time. Now I have the right tool to use to figure him out.

Use What You Know About the Branch

I noticed one family tree was mixing siblings with 2 different last names. Yet this tree said they were children of the same Luigi Marano and Maria Filomena Censullo. I searched the town's vital records for that extra last name, Dato. I found a Maria Felicia Dato (Felicella could have been her nickname) born in Santa Paolina at the right time. And what do you know? She married my 3rd great uncle, Luigi Consolazio.

I've seen only one of my families completely change their last name. Their name is too hard for an American mouth to pronounce. They switched to a bit of a soundalike, so it was a logical change. But this would be changing Consolazio to Rossi, which isn't logical to me. Still, this couple had 2 children in Santa Paolina whose births match the 1900 census. And the names of their American-born children match the names of Luigi and Felicella's parents.

I looked at my relationship calculator spreadsheet. (Get yours when you visit "How to Find Your Exact Relationship to Any Cousin.") If Danny Irish is the great grandchild of my 3rd great uncle, he's my 3C1R. AncestryDNA says we could be 3rd cousins or 3rd cousins once removed. How about that?

As for the name change, the only rays of hope are that Luigi Rossi/Rosse used the middle initial C (for Consolazio?) and he was a shoemaker (as was my Uncle Luigi back in Italy).

Then came good news. I searched for "Maria Felicia Dato" and found her coming to America in 1893! She is 35 years old, traveling with her 2 young Consolazio children. They're bound for Orange, New Jersey. A few lines up on the ship manifest is Paolina Consolazio, my 3rd great aunt and Luigi's sister. She has her 2 sons with her, making it a sure match.

Let's go back to my original estimate about where Danny Irish belongs:

• I knew from our shared matches that he was at the very least on my maternal grandmother Mary's branch.
• More shared matches pointed to her Saviano branch, and to her mother's Consolazio branch.
• Still more shared matches came from my Consolazio 3rd great grandfather's Ricciardelli branch.

That all proves to be true!

Put Shared Matches to Work for You

When you want to solve a mystery DNA match, first look at the DNA matches you both share. Can you identify any of them? Do the ones you know point to a specific branch of your family tree?

Use this method to find the best branch for your match, then get researching.

When you isolate a branch for your mystery match, hunt down their people until you can make sense of it all. If they don't have a tree that's much help, some of your shared matches may. And more trees may turn up from non-DNA testers.

Narrowing down to a specific branch will help you focus on the right people and records. "Danny Irish" is a mystery match no more.