Why Your Half 4th Cousin Once Removed Matters

I've just finished the second of my most ambitious genealogy research projects. I created inventories of available vital records from my ancestral hometowns. Then I reviewed each document, placing about 95% of the people into my family tree.

First I did my Grandpa Iamarino's town of Colle Sannita. Now I've wrapped up my Grandpa Leone's neighboring town of Baselice. I've shared 5 inventory spreadsheets on my www.forthecousins.com website. And I'll have another town ready soon (Circello).

The reason 95% of the people from the documents can fit in my family tree is that the towns are remote. They were even more isolated before automobiles. Everyone in town was likely to marry a neighbor. The 5% of people I can't fit into my tree are:

• out-of-towners or
• members of noble families who married other aristocrats.

Why Spend All That Time?

The benefits of this time-consuming project include:

• Gaining familiarity with all the last names in town.
• Overcoming bad handwriting because of that familiarity.
• Finding connections to DNA matches because their people are in your tree.
• Knowing exactly who everyone in town was and their relationship to you.

The first step in such a project is making your inventory. View the town's documents online (find Italian vital records on Antenati or FamilySearch). Then make a brief entry in a spreadsheet for each image. My preferred format is: document number name of subject "di" father's name. ("Di" is Italian for of, and that's how these documents denote the father's name: di Giovanni, di Antonio, etc.)

An example is: 82 Adamo Leone di Giovanni & 83 Antonia Maria Colucci di Leonardo. That's a single document image showing 2 birth records. Document #82 is my grandfather's 1891 birth record. He is the subject of the document and his father is Giovanni. Also in the image is document #83 for Antonia Maria Colucci, daughter of Leonardo.

No matter how distant the relationship, there's value to every connection in your ancestral hometown.

The towns of Colle Sannita and Baselice each had under 3,000 inhabitants in he 1800s. The vital records have added at least 30,000 people to my family tree. I have a complete inventory for the town of Pesco Sannita ready and waiting for my review. I'll go through the same process with Pesco as I did for Colle and Baselice:

• View each vital record to see if the subject, their parents, or their spouse are already in my family tree.
• When I can find where this person fits, add the facts from the document, including dates, places, and the names of family members.
• If I can't find a place for this person in my tree, I highlight that line in the spreadsheet in yellow. It's very possible that their connection will show up after I review more documents. I'll make a second pass through the spreadsheet later to see if they can fit.

I've listed the benefits of this project and explained my process. But you may still be wondering why it's worth such a huge commitment of time. Three reasons spring to mind:

1. Connection. Familiarity with the people from my hometowns gives me a strong connection to these places. They aren't merely the quaint and beautiful towns I've visited a few times. They are me! I love knowing how deep my roots go in each town.
2. Knowledge. Often I see people on Facebook asking how they can learn more about their ancestors' day-to-day lives. If you come from a remote town and you're not descended from nobility, you're not going to find their journal tucked away in some archive. They were likely illiterate and living a life of hard work. You may find some general writings about life in that area at a certain time. A history of your ancestral town may provide those types of clues. Otherwise, all you can learn about your ancestor is that they came from this family, married this person, had this job, had these children, and died. Those family names and dates are what you can discover in the town's vital records.
3. DNA Matches. Because I've studied my ancestral hometowns' documents, I can quickly recognize my entry point into a DNA match's family tree. If you're only looking at a match's tree for your last name, you're missing out on that entry point.

The title of this article mentions a half 4th cousin once removed. I chose someone from my family tree randomly. This cousin is a descendant of my 4th great grandfather Gennaro Pilla and his second wife. Gennaro had 2 children with my 4th great grandmother, and 5 children with his 2nd wife. That's 5 threads I'd have missed if I paid attention only to my direct line. And this particular half 4C1R led me to his son, my half 5th cousin John, who introduced me to a ton of relatives in Canada. I met lots of people with my maiden name on that trip to Canada. That's a rarity.

I love being able to encompass entire towns with my family tree. If you're staying on the straight-and-narrow, gathering information about your direct ancestors only, you're missing out on so many connections!

Finding and Fixing an Awkward Typo in Your Family Tree

I spent too many months fixing errors in my family tree to tolerate any more. I knew my previous lemon of a computer was the main source of the errors. Tons of duplicate source citations were born of failed syncs between Family Tree Maker and Ancestry.com. (See "Take the Time to Improve the Sources in Your Family Tree.")

Recently, I keep seeing another type of error. I'll notice a person with a male name marked as a female. I wondered if it was a typo I kept making. When I add a new name, my fingers are so fast on the keyboard that I sometimes press F for female before I realize it. I've caught myself doing it, and then I can fix it before moving on.

How many of these typos are in my huge family tree? How many men did I mark female? How many women did I mark male? How can I find them all?

Don't read anything snarky or political into this subject matter because it isn't there. There's one very important reason to make sure you've used the right gender. If you wind up with a wife labeled male, the couple's children will get her last name. Is that how names work in your culture?

The less important reason for fixing this error is you don't want to look like you don't know what you're doing. If you're recording history, you've got to strive for accuracy. I record each person by the name on their birth certificate, even if they went by another name in life. So I'm going to record their sex, too.

Looking for an Easy Way to Spot the Error

Since I use Family Tree Maker to build my tree, I wondered if a filter might help. I created a filter of all people in the tree with a sex of female. That cut my 66,000-person family tree list of names about in half. But that's too many names to scroll through and spot the out-of-place names.

I thought of Family Tree Analyzer because I knew I could sort the data like a spreadsheet. I opened my latest GEDCOM file and went to the Main Lists / Individuals tab. I sorted the Forenames column from A to Z (an important first step). Then I filtered the Sex column to display only F for female.

Is this type of error hiding in your family tree?

If you only keep your family tree online and do your work there, download a GEDCOM from the website. Open the file on your computer with Family Tree Analyzer, and make all the corrections one by one.

My list was still long, of course, but it didn't take too long to scan. With the first names in alphabetical order, I could scroll quickly past everyone named Maria, for instance. I acted on 4 types of first names:

1. Clearly male names. If you have lots of names based in another language, understand the rules of that language. Most of my Italian first names ending in the letter a will be female, but there are exceptions. Nicola, Mattia, Andrea, Giambattista, Zaccaria, etc.
2. Possibly male names. Among my Italian ancestors, the first name Felice could belong to either a male or a female. In English, think of a name like Dana.
3. Typos that stood out in the alphabetical list. I saw Antona instead of Antonia.
4. A last name as a first name. A name like Viola may be a first name, but in my tree it's also a last name. I need to see this person's full name. Italian names are often written last-name-first on vital records, so I may have absentmindedly entered a name backwards.

Of all the females, there were 92 I needed to review in my family tree and a much smaller number to change to male. When I finished, I changed my filter in Family Tree Analyzer to display only people with an M in the sex column. I scanned the long list for any female names, questionable names, or typos. I didn't count them, but there were at least 10 I changed to male.

If you're working on your family tree, a wrong-sex error is very visible when you find one. The person's name may be in a field of pink instead of blue, or they're on the left side when you expected them to be on the right.

I don't know how each of these errors happened. Now that it's top-of-mind, I'm hopeful I won't keep making the wrong choice out of muscle memory.

This Number is Crucial to Your DNA Match Research

Another day, another look at my mom's DNA match list. This time I wanted to find the first still-unknown person in her list worth researching. A video by DNA expert Diahan Southard encouraged me to research a match who shared a long segment of DNA with Mom. That means looking past the total number of shared cM to see the longest "segment" of shared cM.

You can find the longest segment length by clicking the amount of shared cM to see more details. This is true on most if not all DNA websites.

Increase Your Odds of Success

I began this exercise by looking only at matches who showed a family tree. A quick look at a few trees told me who they were. "Oh, that's my 3rd cousin through Immacolata Leone. Noted."

The match I chose to research has my great grandmother's maiden name in her family tree. Saviano. I'm always interested in finding another Saviano. And they've been hard to find.

This match shares with Mom a longest segment of 27 cM. Diahan Southard didn't specify a longest-segment range worth researching, but her example showed 32 cM. So 27 cM is pretty close.

Do the Research Yourself

First I had to figure out my connection to her ancestor, Giuseppe Saviano. This match supplied an exact birth and death date for him in her family tree, but no locations. I knew the dates would be a big help.

A search on Ancestry told me Giuseppe came to America and lived in Cleveland, Ohio. I know lots of relatives who wound up in Cleveland, including my father. I found Giuseppe in someone else's Ancestry tree. He had the right dates, Cleveland as his place of death, and San Nicola, Salerno, Italy, as his place of birth.

My absolute first thought was, "I wonder if he was really born in San Nicola Manfredi." (That's in Benevento, not Salerno.) Why would I think that? Because that town borders the town where my Saviano ancestors were born. I know there was a decent cross-over between the two towns. And I have all the San Nicola Manfredi vital records at my disposal. I've found many familiar last names in the San Nicola Manfredi vital records.

So, was Giuseppe Saviano actually born in San Nicola Manfredi on 1 Jan 1889? Check the documents—yes! Here he is. And Giuseppe's U.S. World War II draft registration card confirms he was born in San Nicola Manfredi on 1 Jan 1889.

Researching a DNA match led me to 5 more children of my 3rd great uncle. They were born in another town.

But the true brick-wall busting moment came from the other facts on that birth record. Giuseppe's parents were Giovanni Saviano and Giuseppa Sarracino. I know that couple! They're in my family tree!

In my tree I saw Giovanni was my 3rd great uncle. He's one of only two siblings I've found for my 2nd great grandfather, Antonio Saviano. They come from a hamlet called Pastene in a town called Sant'Angelo a Cupolo. The town was part of the Papal States, so they didn't keep civil records before 1861. Don't get me started on that. I could cry at the dead ends that causes me.

I'd already found 6 children for Giovanni and Giuseppa. They were all born in Pastene or in greater Sant'Angelo a Cupolo. One of their daughters came to America in 1898 with my 2GG Antonio Saviano and his family. She died in 1901. But I don't know anything else about the other children.

Expand Your Search Area

Thanks to this DNA match and a hunch, I now know Giovanni Saviano and Giuseppa Sarracino moved to neighboring San Nicola Manfredi. Or maybe the borderline moved and they stayed put. Either way, they had 2 more sons in San Nicola Manfredi in 1889 and 1890. I went through the birth records year-by-year looking for more. What I found tells me that Giuseppa died and Giovanni remarried and had 3 more children.

I wish the last 3 were born at the same address as the previous 2, but they weren't. I do know this Giovanni Saviano is the only one around who's having children during these years. And, like his brother (my 2GG), his occupation changes all the time:

• 1875–1880: farmer
• 1882–1885: merchant
• 1889: shopkeeper
• 1890–1896: industrialist
• 1898: farmer again
• 1901: shopkeeper again

The best thing about this discovery is that I've found Saviano cousins with roots in Ohio.

Lessons Learned

What lessons have I learned from this research?

1. Don't frustrate yourself with DNA matches who show no family tree. Unless their shared matches have a story to tell, you may get nowhere.
2. You may not find your connection to a DNA match with a short "longest segment." I don't know where the cutoff is, but you've got a better chance of success if their longest segment is about 30 cM or more.
3. When your DNA match's family tree has sparse details, research their ancestor yourself. You may be more interested in genealogy research than they are. Or they may prefer to limit how much information they put out there.
4. Spend time with online maps. Know the names of the towns surrounding your ancestor's town. Take a peek at records for neighboring towns to see if any last names are familiar to you.

I'm thrilled to make some kind of progress on my mother's dead-end branch. While I can't see vital records from their town before 1861, I may find traces of my family in neighboring towns.

Overlooked Website Finds Immigrant Ancestors

I'll bet we all do it. We save notes or bookmarks to remind us of a genealogy find we need to explore. And then we forget all about it. I found a web address and single sentence on line 420 of my constantly updated text file named Notebook.txt. It says this:

http://www.ciseionline.it/portomondo
Search for family names; based on dates and ship names, piece together families.

This free-access Italian website belongs to CISEI, an organization that translates to the International Center for Italian Emigration Studies. The site provides a simple search form that lets you find Italian relatives who emigrated to:

• Brazil
• The United States
• Argentina
• Canada
• Australia

And you can search all 5 locations at once.

The key benefits of this site, which does not show you the actual ship manifests, are:

• Italians compiled much of the information. They're less likely to mangle the spelling of an Italian name.
• You'll get each key detail from a manifest typed out clearly and with great care.
• You'll get details about the ship, a photo*, migration statistics, and links to more information.
  * The photo may not be the actual ship, but it will say so.
• You'll see a map of the long migration path across the ocean.
• It's free!

Search 5 countries at once on this free website to see where your cousins disappeared to.

Start Your Search with a Name

Remember, you can copy the site's URL into Google Translate and click the result to see the site in your language.

To use the search form:

• Enter a last name in the first box. This is mandatory. Wild characters like * and ? do not work. Incomplete names do not work.
• Enter a first name if you choose. This can be helpful if you would otherwise get too many results.
• Choose a destination country, or keep the Everyone/Tutti selection, to search all available ports at once.
• Click the button to submit your search.

To test this search engine, I searched for a record I know very well. It's my 2nd great grandfather's 1898 trip back to America with his whole family. He'd been to New York 2 or 3 times before this, and the last time, he left his eldest son in the Bronx to await the whole family.

When you find the result you want, click the icon in the column on the right. You'll see a full transcript of this line from the ship manifest. I was happy to see that the results were all correct. I already knew the ship name (California). I knew my relatives were heading to 149th Street in the Bronx, New York. I knew they were joining the eldest son in the family, Simplicio Saviano.

A second search for only the last name Saviano let me find the rest of the family. I already saw that the arrival date was 8 June 1898 (written here as 08/06/1898), so they were easy to spot.

With a few more clicks, I found:

• 13 people named Saviano who emigrated to Brazil
• 6 who went to Argentina
• 8 who went to Australia
• 122 who came to the USA.

I can check my family tree and vital records to try to identify cousins in these lists.

The immigration path looks daunting, doesn't it? Find out more about your ancestor's journey.

Be on the Lookout

The main page tells you which years this database includes for which ports. There's such a variety that I won't list them here. But if you don't find your person, check to see if the database covers their year of arrival.

I didn't find my great grandparents' arrival in July 1899, and the website says it should be there. I didn't find either of my grandfathers' arrivals, either. Still, I'm excited by what I can learn from this very concentrated database of emigrants. I'm especially interested in family members who went to Australia, Argentina, and Brazil. They could help tie up some loose ends.

I noticed a few name abbreviations that tell me that's how the manifest shows the name. For instance, I found one Francesco Iamarino listed as "FCO." complete with the period at the end. Another Francesco is "FRANCO" on his manifest. Yet another, this one a Francesco Saverio, is "FRANO.SAVO." These people will be harder to find, so you should leave the first name blank on the search form and try again.

Once you've done a search or two, you shouldn't need Google Translate to get the facts you want. Some headings on the pages are images, so Google can't translate them for you. But, with the Google Translate app on your phone, you can aim your phone at the screen to see a translation. (If you're doing the search on your phone, you may need to borrow a second phone!)

Hurray! Another genealogy project! How late can you stay up tonight?

And speaking of immigration:

• 5 Ellis Island Videos Dispel Immigration Myths
• Who Was Your First Immigrant Ancestor?
• 6 Key Genealogy Facts on a Ship Manifest

Visualization Tool Highlights a Family Tree Surprise

During RootsTech 2021 I typed and saved this note: Go to learnforeverlearn.com/ancestors to visualize endogamy. I know I tried it in 2021. Yet this time, it had a dramatic revelation for me.

All you do is go to the website linked above and upload a GEDCOM file exported from your family tree. You'll see the results in seconds. If your tree has pedigree collapse—ancestors with more than one direct ancestral relationship to you—you'll see pairs of lines that don't go straight up. They'll be horizontal or diagonal. (See The DNA Problem We Aren't Talking About.)

The website will show each direct ancestor in your family tree as a pink or blue dot. (Pink for maternal, blue for paternal.) Hover over any dot to see:

• The ancestor's name and lifespan
• Their birthplace
• How much DNA they contributed to you (by percentage)
• Their relationship(s) to you—the root person of the family tree.

When I hover over the pink dot at the apex of one of my horizontal lines, I see Cristina Iapozzuto. Under relationship it says she's my 4th great grandmother "twice." And I knew this. Cristina Iapozzuto married Francesco Iamarino. Two of their sons were Giuseppantonio and Pasquale. Giuseppantonio's great grandson is my paternal grandfather, Pietro Iamarino. Pasquale's great granddaughter is my paternal grandmother, Lucy Iamarino. I learned in 2007 that Pietro and Lucy were 3rd cousins. I'll forever wonder why no one in my family knew this—especially when they had the same last name.

Wait a minute. I have TWO sets of double ancestors? This free tool doesn't lie.

Since Cristina Iapozzuto and Francesco Iamarino are my 4th great grandparents twice, they each have two different Ahnentafel numbers. Ahnentafel is a numbering system that gives a unique number to each of your direct ancestors. (See A Roadmap for Your Genealogy Research.) If they're double ancestors, they get 2 different Ahnentafel numbers. So Cristina gets Ahnentafel #65 and #81. I list my double ancestors twice in my Ahnentafel spreadsheet, once for each number. I use a special color of orange to highlight them.

An Unexpected Double Relationship

But the second example of endogamy in my family tree had escaped me until now. Salvatore Piacquadio (born 1716) and Donata diRuccia (born 1718) are my 6th great grandparents AND my 7th great grandparents. Their son Giorgio is my 6th great grandfather, an ancestor of my grandmother Lucy Iamarino. Their son Pietro is my 5th great grandfather, also an ancestor of my grandmother Lucy Iamarino.

My huge family tree has tons of multiple relationships. That's thanks to countless marriages within small towns. (See The Method to My Genealogy Madness.) Because it's so big, I'd overlooked the uniqueness of this particular family unit.

Family Tree Maker knew they were my double ancestors. But it took another tool to make me see it.

The signs were there in my Family Tree Maker file, but I'd missed them. The easiest sign to spot required only one thing: I needed to lay eyes on this family. If I had, I'd have seen that 2 of Salvatore and Donata's children had the yellow arrow that says they're my direct ancestor. But I didn't see it. That's why this online endogamy tool is such a gift. A free gift.

If your family tree has a good number of generations, I urge you to try this online endogamy tool. The tool has many functions. You can read about them at http://familytreeviz.blogspot.com/2015/09/features-of-family-tree-visualization.html.

Digging Into a DNA Match's Family Tree

A while ago I uploaded my AncestryDNA test results to Geneanet.org for free. I like their website because I can upload a complete replacement tree after I do a lot of work on it on my computer. (See "A Major Family Tree Change to Fix an Ongoing Problem .")

The good thing about having my DNA test on that site is access to European DNA matches I may not find on Ancestry. I don't have any close matches yet, but one match, Giovanni, has a family tree that reeled me in right away. I recognized the last names as coming from Circello, Italy. That's the hometown of my 3rd great grandfather Francesco.

I've been spending time making a searchable database of Circello vital records. They records are all available on the Antenati website. (See "How to Use the Online Italian Genealogy Archives.") On Saturday I randomly noticed a man in my tree from my paternal grandfather's hometown. I saw that he married a Circello girl named Pasquala Gigante in the 1890s, so I decided to build her family. And I got very far. I added all 8 of her great grandparents and 6 of her 2nd great grandparents.

Finally I had a strong reason to use my vital records database for the town of Circello.

Pasquala has no blood relationship to me yet. And her husband is the cousin of the husband of a cousin. I would love to find a true connection between Pasquala's Circello family and my own.

Find Your Entry Point

When I saw Giovanni's family tree on Geneanet, filled with Circello names, I had to investigate. Could I find a way for his tree to connect to mine? As I clicked around his tree, expanding different family units, my mouth fell open. There was the very same family I'd built into my tree earlier that day! The woman whose family I added to my tree, Pasquala Gigante, is my DNA match's great grandaunt.

Giovanni's family tree is very impressive. It goes back so far that I can tell he knows how to get the most out of Italian vital records. (See "The Italian Genealogy Goldmine: 'Wedding Packets'.") I can use his tree as a guide while I view the town's vital records to confirm names and dates. I'll start by adding Pasquala Gigante's siblings. I'll find spouses and children, and put lots of families together using the vital records.

After hours of piecing together Circello families, I still don't know why Giovanni is my DNA match. This is common with people whose ancestors spent several hundred years in a small town. Once again, I believe our shared DNA comes from the soil itself, and not a specific shared ancestor. (See "What Good Are Distant DNA Matches?")

With 3 key points, you can expand your family tree and tie into that of your DNA match.

How to Get Started

Even though I haven't solved this ancestor jigsaw puzzle, I enjoy the daylights out of this type of project. And you can, too. Here are the basics for diving into your DNA match's family tree:

1. Concentrate on DNA matches with a multi-generation family tree. There's no use wasting time on someone with a 1-person family tree. And they're out there.
2. Search every branch for familiar last names and places. If their hometown is one of your ancestral hometowns, you need to explore some vital records.
3. Find a solid starting point. I was lucky to spot someone I'd added to my own tree hours earlier. Be sure to choose a person with lots of data points: a birth date, spouse's name, parents' names, children's names. Those extra facts will help you make a positive ID.

You may find, as I did, that your DNA match has connections to your family tree even if there's no direct relation to you.