Are Ancestry Pro Tools Worth the Money?

Here's how the new features of Ancestry Pro Tools stack up. Are they worth the price?

When I heard you can sign up for Ancestry Pro Tools for one month and then quit, I knew I had to try out their new features. My main interest is to see how my DNA matches match to one another. This can help you understand which of matches share a common ancestor with each other. That can help you see where they fit in your family tree.

The other Pro Tools give you desktop-like tools for your online-only family tree.

What's Included in Pro Tools?

• Charts & Reports. Family Tree Maker (FTM) provides the same reports as Pro Tools. I'm sure other family tree software programs do, too. A computer-based family tree program is better than building your tree online in so many ways.
• Tree Mapper. This feature has a cool visual representation and several types of filters. But I can do this in the Places tab of FTM. Or you can get really fancy and use this free program.
• Smart Filters. If you use MyTreeTags™ on Ancestry, this is a nice way to see everyone with a particular tag. But I don't use the tags. I didn't see any filters that offer me something I'd like to do but can't do in FTM.
• Tree Checker. This tool's main finding about my tree is that tons of people have no documentation. Yeah, tell me about it! I've been creating source citations for weeks. It also thinks I have 7,040 possible duplicates. I don't. We've all seen towns where everyone has the same name. As I scroll through this list of people, it's plain to see they all have different birth dates. This feature isn't helping me. It can also find many types of errors, and that may seem like a big help. But we already have Family Tree Analyzer to do that for us.
• Tree Insights. These factoids are not something I can generate within FTM, but I've used Family Tree Analyzer to do so. I can't say it's useful. This tool is showing me:
  • the top 5 surnames in my tree
  • the 5 longest-living people in my tree (they're only that old because I can't find out when they died)
  • the 5 couples with the most children
  • the 5 youngest brides or grooms
• Fan Chart Settings. I like the look of the Fan Chart in Ancestry much more than the one in FTM. But the Pro Tools add-ons to the existing Ancestry Fan Chart don't do anything very useful:
  • You can choose the number of generations to display (4, 5, 6, or 7). I have more generations than that.
  • You can show Family Lines, which gives a different color to each of your 4 grandparents' ancestors. I think the non-Pro version does that.
  • If you choose the Hints setting, it uses varying shades of green to show you who has a lot of hints and who has few or none. The Photos setting and Sources setting does the same thing. A range of colors show you the haves and have-nots.
  But check out the more-detailed fan chart I created a long time ago using Charting Companion software.

For me, none of those tools are worth a recurring cost. That brings me back to the reason I jumped on a $7 sale for one month of Ancestry Pro Tools: Enhanced Shared Matches.

For years I've wanted to know why my parents share some DNA with one another. I had to see what Enhanced Shared Matches could do for me. (Note: Each of my parents took an AncestryDNA test, and I manage their kits.)

After a long and frustrating day of comparing Mom and Dad's DNA matches, I came up empty. My problem is the family's IBS segments—that's Identical By State. All my ancestors came from the same small geographical area. These small bits of shared DNA are more from the land itself than blood relationships.

My parents' shared DNA matches need to be my focus. As I worked through them, I hit so many with dead ends in their tree that I couldn't resolve. Do those dead ends hold the magic key?

I don't want to lose the extra insights from Enhanced Shared Matches, but I don't want to pay for it again. What to do? Make a new spreadsheet, of course!

Step 1. Document their Shared Matches

Looking at Dad's shared matches with Mom, I find a list of 21 people, but I'll exclude myself and make it 20 people.

I'll start a new spreadsheet with Dad in column A and Mom in column C. In column B, I'll enter the name of each shared match. I can also add what I know about them, if I've figured out their relationship to me.

Capture and analyze the insights of Enhanced Shared Matches in a spreadsheet while you can.

In each cell of the spreadsheet:

• I'll list the number of shared cMs and Ancestry's predicted relationship.
• I'll note which side of Dad and Mom's families they're on: Maternal, Paternal, Both Sides, or Unassigned. I have to view Mom and Dad's match lists separately for this.

The first big surprise is that I see a lot more shared matches when I view Mom's DNA test. What the heck? I started with Dad's match list because he has more matches than Mom or me. Nine shared matches from Dad's list are not in Mom's list at all.

It makes sense that this is a built-in 20 cM cut off. The 9 people in Dad's list only have fewer than 20 cMs shared with him. The 30 or so people in Mom's list only have fewer than 20 cMs shared with her. I should concentrate on the 11 shared matches with whom both Mom and Dad share 20 or more cMs. The low-cM shared matches must be Identical By State.

These people with the smaller amounts of shared DNA escaped me in the past. I don't know if the Enhanced Shared Matches Pro Tool is the reason I'm seeing them now.

Step 2. Document Highest Shared Matches of the Top 11 People

In the same Excel workbook, I'll document the shared matches of my parents' top 11 shared matches. I'll view Dad and Mom's tests one at a time and note who each person shares with them. I'll add the number of cMs, predicted relationships, and side of family as before. To increase my chances of success, I'll add only the strongest shared matches of the 11 people. They have to share 139 cMs or more. (I chose that number after consulting the Shared centiMorgan Project.) That way, these matches should be no more distant to my subject people than 4th cousins. Plus, I'll skip any matches if they share less than 20 cM with my parents.

A 15% discount for readers of Fortify Your Family Tree!

My goal is to find the best common connections. After documenting the first person's shared matches, I found something interesting. He's a close match to another one of the 11 top matches. Now I have 2 people from the same family who match both my parents. Is this the break I needed?

In the end, I'm left with 5 people who share DNA with both my parents and have close matches in the original list. I've already fit 2 of them into my family tree, and I find no connection to Mom's family. Plus, the one who shares 116 cM with Dad is actually more distant than expected. He's Dad's 4th cousin on one side and 5th cousin on the other.

While my parents' shared matches are tantalizing, every clue is pointing toward their being Identical By State. The most amazing thing is how their IBS families came together in a one-block stretch of Morris Avenue in the Bronx, New York.

Before I finish this month of Ancestry Pro Tools, I'm going to keep going through my DNA matches to learn what I can using the enhanced tools. It's a huge help when you can see that this match is the mother of that match. But I don't plan to renew my Pro Tools subscription.

Important Stories Wait for You in Military Records

Even if your people didn't serve, you may discover family treasures in these military record collections.

My ancestors were not in America to fight in the Revolutionary War or the Civil War. My grandfather Leone was the right age to fight in World War I. But as an Italian citizen, he had to go back to Italy to fight for them.

Despite this, I've found great treasures in military records. Are you missing any of these types of records for your family tree?

The Genealogical Benefits of Draft Cards

Grandpa Leone was too old when the U.S. authorities registered him for World War II. There was little chance he'd get the call. His World War II draft card shows the wrong birth date and the wrong place of birth. But I know it's him because the card shows he lives with my grandmother in the house where my mother was born. And he's a shoemaker, which was always his trade.

Grandpa Iamarino was part of the "Young Men's draft," but at 39 years of age, he was unlikely to get the call, too. His draft registration card provided me with the middle name I never knew belonged to my grandmother: Gloria. His card confirms his address as the place where my Dad grew up. It also provides the name and address of his employer at the time. This was a company name I hadn't seen before, but when I looked it up, I found it was a costume jewelry company. That, I know, was Grandpa's occupation in New York. This precise job information can add a whole new chapter to your family story. See "Using Documents to Imagine Your Ancestor's Job."

Search for draft registration cards for all the men in your family tree who lived in the USA and were born between:

• 6 Jun 1886 and 5 Jun 1897 (World War I draft registration)
• 11 Sep 1872 and 12 Sep 1900 (World War II first through third registrations)
• 28 Apr 1877 and 16 Feb 1897 (World War II fourth registration)
• 17 Feb 1897 and 31 Dec 1921 (World War II young men's draft registration)

One World War II draft card gave me the name of a hometown lost to time. I tracked down my uncle's birth record in this town in Italy, and it led to treasure. I discovered the hometowns of my 2nd great grandmother and 2nd great grandfather. It was a massive finding. See "Why and How to Harvest Draft Card Facts."

Flight Record Details My Uncle's World War II Death

I used a free trial on Fold3.com to search for anything about my Uncle Johnny's fatal airplane crash in World War II. All we knew about my mother's only brother was that his plane crashed and he died while serving in the war.

His flight record tells me:

• He was part of the 463rd Bomb Group, 773rd Bomb Squadron. He flew out of the same Italian airbase used by the Tuskegee Airmen.
• His B-17G bomber was last seen at 9:48 a.m. on 7 July 1944 at map coordinates that point to Lovászpatona, Hungary.
• The names and home addresses of the 10-man flight crew. The report designates all the men as KIA, killed in action.
• They were on a bombing run targeting Blechhammar, Germany, now part of Poland. This was the location of chemical plants at the time.
• Two Army Air Corps gunners gave eyewitness descriptions of the aircraft's last moments. While Mom heard 5 of the men bailed out of the plane, these eyewitnesses say no parachutes opened.

If you have a relative who served or died in the military, you may find a detailed description of the events, too.

Fallen Soldier Monuments Tie Up Loose Ends

My grandfathers' hometowns in Italy have memorials to their fallen soldiers from World War I and II. I took extensive photographs of the names on these monuments.

I have many cases where a young man from these towns disappeared from the vital records. Now I can use these monuments to see which of them died in the war.

You can find many of these names in online databases. To search for your loose ends, see "Finding Fallen Soldiers in Your Family Tree."

Foreign Military Records Tell the Rest of the Story

I knew my Grandpa Leone had been a prisoner of war in the Italian Army. But apart from hearing that he ate rats to stay alive, I knew no details.

In 2017, the 100th anniversary of World War I, I did some research into the Italian Army's war efforts. (See "POW: My Grandfather's World War I Experience.") The enemy took 250,000 Italian soldiers prisoner during the Battle of Caporetto. That's horrifying! I thought my grandfather could be among those 250,000 men. I read that the Germans held these prisoners in Mauthausen and Milowitz. At least 100,000 died of starvation or tuberculosis.

One year later I went to Italy and found the answers I needed. Thanks to an online resource, I knew the register and record number of my grandfather's military record. So I went to the provincial archives in Benevento and saw the record for myself.

Wow, I was right! He fought in the Battle of Caporetto and wound up at Mauthausen. I learned he spent a solid year as a POW. He spent another two years at home recovering. Thankfully for me, he became healthy again and came to America where he met my grandmother.

If a soldier from the Benevento province died in World War II, his record is available online. I've used many of these records to fill in the blanks for these men. See how I gained access to my grandfather's military record in "Taking a Do-It-Yourself Genealogy Vacation, Part 1."

My article on "Free Italian Military Records for WWI and WWII" has been getting tons of views lately. If you haven't read it, I invite you to see what it may hold for you.

Don't overlook the treasures military records may hold—even if your family did not serve.

Semi-Automated Process for Downloading Antenati Images

Done in batches, this process lets you download as many Antenati vital record images as you want.

Remember the good old days when you could download an entire town's vital records from Antenati? I'm glad I grabbed all my main ancestral hometowns while I had the chance. But there are still more vital record collections I'd love to have at my fingertips.

Both the Italian Antenati website and FamilySearch block the use of mass-download programs. They may be trying to avoid taxing their web servers. But it could be in their contract with the localities that they prevent these activities. There's nothing we users can do about it.

While mass downloads are gone, we can do…let's call them "group downloads." I've heard from enough readers to know that the desire to collect these groups of files is there. That's why I want to share my semi-automated process for downloading Antenati files.

Granted, if the register book you want has tons of pages, this will be an ordeal. It may scare you away, or you may decide to tackle it over the course of a few days. But, if the book you want is small enough, you'll absolutely want to do this.

Some of my ancestors came from an Italian town with a handful of frazioni. A frazione is like a hamlet—a semi-independent part of a town. Think of a large city like Brooklyn, New York. It's many residential sections each have their own identity. There's Bushwick, Bedford-Stuyvesant, and Liberty Park. These sections are a lot like frazioni in Italy.

Some of the people in my family tree have birth records I'm missing because they came from a frazione of the town. I want to gather the records from the frazioni I'm missing.

Montorso is a frazione with 5 birth registers available on Antenati (1862–1866). In later years, they stored their vital records with the larger town. That's how some people born in Montorso made it into my family tree. The Montorso registers are very small, so I'm going to download all the files.

The 1866 birth register has 6 images, but only 3 contain birth records. The others are the book cover, title page, and a blank page at the end of the book. I want images 3, 4, and 5.

Let's Get Started

Here's the process, and it's the only way to get to the high-resolution images:

1. Go to each image you want to download and copy its URL to a text file on your computer. The URL changes the instant you click a new page, even if the image doesn't render right away.
   • In this case, the URLs are:
     • https://antenati.cultura.gov.it/ark:/12657/an_ua2286280/02R93aK
     • https://antenati.cultura.gov.it/ark:/12657/an_ua2286280/5gGRdap
     • https://antenati.cultura.gov.it/ark:/12657/an_ua2286280/LPa47oY
2. The last 7 characters of each URL on Antenati, the part after the last /, is a code that's unique to that image. Your goal: Put that code in the following template, replacing the word TARGET: https://iiif-antenati.san.beniculturali.it/iiif/2/TARGET/full/full/0/default.jpg
   
   The result is this:
   • https://iiif-antenati.san.beniculturali.it/iiif/2/02R93aK/full/full/0/default.jpg
   • https://iiif-antenati.san.beniculturali.it/iiif/2/5gGRdap/full/full/0/default.jpg
   • https://iiif-antenati.san.beniculturali.it/iiif/2/LPa47oY/full/full/0/default.jpg
3. Click each new link (or paste it into a web browser), give it a moment to display, then right-click and save the image to your computer.

When you create a longer list of image URLs from the same register book, you can complete this task with a more automated process:

• In your text editor, Find & Replace everything before the unique 7-character code with https://iiif-antenati.san.beniculturali.it/iiif/2/ (that's the first part of the template URL). You can do this to the entire list at once because each URL has the same beginning.
  
• Paste /full/full/0/default.jpg at the end of each line in your list (that's the end of the template URL). Take a look at the image at the top of this article to see the before and after text files.
  

There's no download button on Antenati, but here's a download process you can use over and over.

I use a free Windows text editor called Notepad++ (get it at https://notepad-plus-plus.org). As a retired website manager, I used to work in HTML code every day. I still HTML-code these blog articles and my own website. Notepad++ has always saved me tons of time and ensured my accuracy.

A big Notepad++ benefit for this project is that any URL in a text file is a clickable link. When you make a list of URLs, it's easy to click through them, go to the browser page, and right-click to save the file. Be sure to give each file you download a different name:

• First, create a folder for the town. In this case, Montorso.
• Then make a sub-folder for the year and type of document, such as 1866 births.
• When you right-click the high-resolution images in your web browser, save them as 1.jpg, 2.jpg, 3.jpg. This keeps the files in the proper order for you.

Yes, this is tedious for a large town and nearly unthinkable for a big city. But if the town's vital records are important to your research, you'll be happy you went to the trouble. Be sure to take breaks or your mousing arm will get sore!

When I prepared to download the 1865 birth records for Montorso, I saw that the register has 21 images. But looking at the thumbnail images, I found that I needed to download only 12 of them. The rest were cover pages and blank pages. Keep an eye out for duplicate images, too. When this happens, you can decide which one is better and skip the other.

When you have a whole collection at your fingertips, you'll make new discoveries. Like, your 2nd great grandmother and her first cousin were born the same day. Or your great grandmother was a twin and you didn't know it! (That happened to me.)

If you have Italian ancestry and you're not using the Antenati website, you probably haven't gotten very far. Find out exactly how the use the Antenati with these articles:

• How to Use the Online Italian Genealogy Archives
• How to Make the Best of the New Antenati Website

2 Keys to Tackling a Big Family Tree Project

Parallel genealogy tasks get you to the goal while keeping things interesting.

Five weeks. That's how long I've been grinding away on one huge family tree project. I wrote about my missing source citations project 5 weeks ago and have been working on it ever since.

How did I get into this mess of missing citations? I forged ahead with my goal of connecting everyone from my ancestral hometowns. I skipped the citations because all the vital record images are on my computer. And I spent time renaming the images to make them searchable.

Since I can find any document again in a snap, I postponed citations in favor of family building. But I went too far.

Using Family Tree Analyzer, I generated a list of 70,000 people with zero source citations. OMG! My entire tree has 80,867 people and 70,000 of them have no citations?

I designed a process that let's me make measurable progress each day. First I made a change to the spreadsheet I created with Family Tree Analyzer. I sorted it by 2 fields:

• Relation to Root. This lets me work on closest relatives first. I have tons of people with very distant relationships to me.
• Surname. This groups siblings together so I can work on an entire family without moving around in my family tree a lot. That saves time. I search for one name and work through the whole family.

But I still have more than 69,000 people left to address! After 5 weeks!!

The sheer volume is why I had to put two things in place to make me efficient and keep my sanity.

Efficiency

I'm very good about adding citations the moment I find documentation on Ancestry.com. It's the tons and tons of Italian vital records I've let slide. About 99% of these documents come from the Antenati Portale. Their missing citations will all follow the same pattern.

That means I can use a single template and make a few edits for each fact. I'm a big believer in templates. Think of a source citation template as a stencil. A stencil makes it easy to repeat a perfect pattern or make uniform letters time after time.

This is my template for Italian vital records:

From the PROVINCE State Archives, YEAR TYPE, TOWN, document xx, image xx of xx at URL; https://iiif-antenati.san.beniculturali.it/iiif/2/TARGET/full/full/0/default.jpg

I change the variables to match the document:

• PROVINCE becomes the province in Italy. In my family tree, the province is usually Benevento, Avellino, Campobasso, or Foggia.
• YEAR becomes the year of the book in which you can find the document.
• TYPE can be birth, death, marriage, marriage banns, and a couple of other types. I like to use the Italian words: nati, morti, matrimoni, matrimoni pubblicazione.
• TOWN is the town in Italy. They store Italian vital records by town.
• The xx's become the record number on the document, the image number and number of images in the book. For example, document 20, image 12 of 25.
• URL is the link for the exact document on the Antenati portal. (Sometimes the link goes to FamilySearch.org.)
  
• The next piece, https://iiif-antenati.san.beniculturali.it/iiif/2/TARGET/full/full/0/default.jpg, is a fabulous trick. It links to a high-resolution version of any image on Antenati. Every document URL on Antenati ends in a 7-character code—a combination of numbers and letters. If you replace the word TARGET in the URL above with that code, you can go to the high-res image and save it.

Here's an example. I edit the template and the source citation for the 1818 marriage of Antonio Maria Teresa becomes:

From the Benevento State Archives, 1818 matrimoni, Baselice, document 20, image 12 of 25 at https://antenati.cultura.gov.it/ark:/12657/an_ua757297/0AR6Jg3; https://iiif-antenati.san.beniculturali.it/iiif/2/0AR6Jg3/full/full/0/default.jpg

Go ahead and click those 2 links. You'll see the book version and high-resolution version of the marriage record.

Because I know each citation takes only a minute or two to complete, I keep pushing. One more family before I take a break from my desk. Another family before I take a sanity break.

Sanity

Some days I finish as many as 110 source citations. But it gets tedious after a few hours. That's when I need to save my sanity while still making progress.

When I start losing motivation, I switch to a parallel task. A parallel task is another goal I'm working on that adds a new name or date to my family tree. That new detail needs a source citation. And while I'm there, I check their immediate family. I make sure they all get their source citations.

One parallel task is finding the birth record of an out-of-towner who married into my family tree. I sort everyone in my family tree by birth date and hunt down those with an incomplete birth date. I've been having great success, so it's a gratifying project.

Another parallel task is adding cousins from a town I haven't explored fully. The other day I brought one ancestor's family forward a few generations. Then I found one of these cousin's granddaughters in my DNA matches. Now I know this cousin came to America. And my brother used to live in his hometown.

This combination of efficiency and sanity are how I tackle even the most tedious tasks. It's been my mental trick since I was a kid. I may follow an unusual pattern, but I get the job done.

Do you have an ambitious family tree project to tackle? How can you chop it up, mix it up, and keep things interesting as you make progress?

Which Numbers Help Solve a DNA Match?

Trying to solve a mystery DNA match? An extensive family tree is more important than the centiMorgans (cMs) you share. Often it's only when you place a match in your family tree that you see your true relationship.

When you look at the different values assigned to your DNA matches, which number matters most? My answer isn't what you'd expect.

When I want to figure out a new DNA match, I consult the Shared cM Project tool created by Blaine T. Bettinger. You can find it on the DNA Painter website. The tool can suggest your likely relationship to a DNA match based on the number of cMs you share. The chart itself tells you:

• the average number of cMs you might share with a type of relative
• a likely range of cMs you can expect to see for each type of relative.

My family tree has tons of cousins with more than one relationship to me. Our roots are so deep in one little town that we're related to everyone who lived there. I want to see how all the intermarriage in my little towns might affect my DNA numbers.

Seeing How Your DNA Matches Score

For this exercise, I copied Bettinger's Shared cM chart into a spreadsheet so I can add cM values for my DNA matches. (This copy is available for you to download.) For each match that I added to the chart (in red ink), I included the hometown(s) of our shared ancestors. The town name showed that I have a higher number of shared cMs with cousins connected to Pastene, Italy.

One reason for this higher amount of DNA may be the small size of this hamlet. It's basically one street! Families were intermarrying there for hundreds of years. My great grandparents Giovanni and Maria Rosa came from Pastene. Some of their descendants and their siblings' descendants have tested with AncestryDNA.

I must say I expected to see lots of DNA matches with cMs that went far above the range in the Shared cM Project tool. Since I have multiple relationships with so many people, I thought the cMs would stack up higher. In reality, I found only one match who went above the cM range—a 6th cousin twice removed.

This DNA match (A.S.) shares 58 cM with me when the average for our relationship is 13 cM and the range is 0 to 45 cM. Here's why our shared cMs are high. A.S. and I share:

• my 5th great grandparents Innocenzo and Anna (that's the 6C2R relationship)
• my double 6th great grandparents Giuseppe and Maria (that makes A.S. my 7C1R)
• my 7th great grandparents Pasquale and Maria (that makes A.S. my 8C1R)
• my 7th great grandfather Giancamillo (that makes A.S. my 8C2R)

It seems shared cMs alone can't predict complex relationships every time.

This chart shows a higher concentration of shared DNA coming from one of my ancestral hometowns. What will yours show?

Exploring Another Variable

"Unweighted shared DNA" is a factor when you have deep roots in the same place or ethnicity.

If you have an AncestryDNA account, you can view this value for any DNA match in your list. Click the blue, linked description beneath their relationship label. For instance, for my 3rd cousin, I see "82 cM | 1% shared DNA."

Looking at my DNA match A.S., I see that we:

• share 58 cM across 3 segments
• have a longest segment of 30 cM
• have 60 cM of unweighted shared DNA—2 cM more than the 58 cM of shared DNA.

You may be as curious about the unweighted shared DNA as I am. Here's AncestryDNA's definition:

Unweighted shared DNA is the total amount of identical DNA two people share, including DNA that is shared for reasons other than a recent common ancestor, such as being from the same ethnicity or community. Because of that, unweighted shared DNA will almost always be larger than shared DNA for distant relationships that share 90 cM or less.

So that's why so many DNA matches appear to be closer than they are. I knew there was some extra DNA just from having deep roots in the same soil, but this puts a value on it.

To test this out, I looked at the DNA breakdown for lots of my identified DNA matches. In general, the unweighted shared DNA for my 3rd cousins or closer was exactly the same as their shared DNA. Many of my more-distant cousins had from 1 to 5 cM more unweighted shared DNA than shared DNA. But some of the distant cousins didn't have any extra unweighted shared DNA at all.

Searching for the Magic Number

Unweighted shared DNA isn't enough to help us understand our relationship to a DNA match. So I looked at the third value: longest segment length. DNA experts say you should be able to identify a match with a longest segment of 50 cM or more. But I have only 40 matches with numbers that high.

Here's a small sampling of the under-50 shared cM DNA matches I've identified and placed in my family tree. These are not people I know or grew up with. Most have a very small family tree online. But thanks to my family tree, I found their grandparents or great grandparents.

• 5C1R, 48 cM, longest segment 10 cM
• 9C, 27 cM, longest segment 12 cM
• 5C2R, 41 cM, longest segment 13 cM
• 7C, 30 cM, longest segment 14 cM
• 6C, 26 cM, longest segment 15 cM
• 3C1R, 39 cM, longest segment 16 cM
• 5C1R, 24 cM, longest segment 18 cM
• 5C, 26 cM, longest segment 20 cM

Notice we share from 24–48 cM, and our longest shared segments range from 10–20 cM. AncestryDNA categorizes these matches as 4th–6th cousins or 5th–8th cousins. I was able to get so much more specific despite those short longest segments.

Well would you look at that? Here I am, yet again, hyping the value of a gigantic family tree. I like to crack new DNA matches to see what happened after the Italian vital records end. Who came to America? Who went to Canada, England, or Australia? Do people with roots in my Italian towns live near me today?

In the end, the best way to crack DNA matches is with your extensive, full-blown family tree.

And speaking of cracking DNA matches:

• Genealogy Skills Make You a Keen Detective
• 4 Best Ways to Learn from Your DNA Matches
• 4 Practical Methods for Identifying a DNA Match
• Follow Up on Genealogy Clues and Leads

A 15% discount for readers of Fortify Your Family Tree!

5 Reasons to Search Beyond Your Direct Ancestors

When you find your ancestor's birth record, don't overlook the other gems in those vital records.

Sometimes I dream I'm searching through old Italian vital records. I spend so much time knee-deep in vital records that it's only natural I would dream about them. The countless hours spent with these records have removed the foreign-language barrier completely.

You should explore all the vital records available from your ancestral hometowns, too. Here are 5 reasons why you should search for more than your direct ancestors in those records. Click each of the 5 titles to get the full story.

1. Don't Miss Out on Your Ancestors' Culture

I cringed when I learned my 2nd great grandmother Caterina was 23 years younger than her husband. Then I did a bit more digging. I found out Caterina was my 2nd great grandfather's second wife. And she was the same age as Nicola's eldest child from his 1st marriage!

Spending more time with this town's vital records, I realized a few things that hold true in all my towns:

• A widow or widower usually remarried in a hurry. Sometimes as soon as 2 months after their spouse died.
• A man's second wife was more likely to be much younger than him.
• When a bride and groom came from different towns, they usually married in her town and lived in his town.
• Each town registered a few abandoned babies each year. Someone might find a baby on a doorstep or on the side of the road. There was a special church window where you could leave a baby and no one would see you. These babies may have been born out of wedlock, but sometimes a woman chose to keep her baby.
• It was the mayor's job to name these foundlings. Their last name might:
  • show the baby's status (Esposito, Abbandonato, etc.)
  • refer to a local place name, like that of a river
  • reflect their physical characteristic (Russo for a red-cheeked baby)
  • or it may be a last name already found in the town.

I didn't fully understand these abandoned babies until I read a lot of their birth records. At first I thought my 60-year-old 5th great grandfather had another baby in 1809. Actually, he was about to step outside his home when he found the baby girl on his doorstep. That exact detail is noted on the birth record.

2. Discovering Life and Death Trends in Your Ancestral Hometown

I discovered a sad fact about my great grandmother Maria Rosa's hometown. Vital records showed a higher than usual infant mortality rate. How did I know it was higher than usual? Because I'd already reviewed the records from neighboring towns. A typical mid-1800s family in this town had 10 babies, but only 2 lived to adulthood.

That bit of information made it obvious why Maria Rosa and her siblings came to America. They all made a better life for themselves in New York, Ohio, and Pennsylvania.

3. What Do the Records Say About Your Ancestor's Town?

My 2nd great grandmother Colomba's hometown records told a very different story. While reviewing vital records, I realized that most marriage records included one out-of-towner. Colomba's husband (my 2nd great grandfather) came from a neighboring town to marry her. Colomba's own mother came from yet another town.

This led me to a second discovery. In my other ancestral hometowns, most men were farmers or laborers. But in Colomba's hometown, most men were merchants, notaries, and doctors. While this town is notable for its vineyards, it seemed to attract a more educated population.

So why did my 2nd great grandparents leave? It's possible Colomba's brothers inherited the family's land and property. Or her husband had his own ambitions.

4. Why All Siblings Are Critical to Your Family Tree

If you know when and where your 2nd great grandparents were born, you need to find all their siblings. Those siblings and their descendants will help you connect to many of your DNA matches.

I've found that one sibling's vital record can hold more clues than the others. No matter where your ancestor came from, vital records will vary depending on the year.

In some of my ancestral hometowns, birth records from 1866 to 1874 hold extra hints. For each of the baby's parents, you can find their full name, age, and their father's first name. That extra detail can help take your family tree back another generation.

5. Searching for Family in a New Town Takes Practice

I'm so familiar with the last names in my ancestral hometowns that I can see past the worst handwriting. But when I discovered my 3rd great grandmother in a new-to-me town, it was like starting from scratch.

This town's early records (starting in 1809) feature incredibly bad handwriting. I had to do a few things to feel confident about how to spell these new names. I started a spreadsheet to keep track of the last names I was seeing, then, for each name in the list I:

• Checked the Cognomix website for last name distribution in Italy. I made note of whether the name is still found in the town. If not, I noted the closest town that still has that name.
• Used a green highlight to show which names have high confidence in their spelling.
• Noted any alternative spellings. For example, sometimes a family uses the name Capua, but other times it's written as Capoa.

When I review this town's vital records, I check my spreadsheet to figure out what I'm looking at. Does that say Casassa? Oh, no, it's Casazza, and that's already in my list. Only by reviewing all the documents can I get comfortable with these new last names in my family tree.

Each of your ancestor's life stories depends in part on their family members. If you want to know your family history, be sure to broaden your search to the whole family and then some.