Why Did They Die?

In your family tree, you probably have people who died for reasons unknown to you. They weren't old, and you have no reason to think they were sickly. If you can't get a copy of their death certificate to learn the cause of death, you may want to turn to history.

A good place to start if your ancestor died in the U.S. is the List of disasters in the United States by death toll on Wikipedia. The page lists many notable disasters and may be sorted by year, type and location. It also provides links to articles explaining each disaster in detail.

As I browsed the list I found the location of Connellsville, Pennsylvania and an article about the 1903 Connellsville train wreck.

Can historic events tell you what became of your ancestor?

I know that many people from one of my ancestral Italian hometowns worked for the railroad in Connellsville, and it is quite possible that my great grandfather Francesco Iamarino worked there at that time. At the bottom of the Wikipedia article I followed a source link, and there was a list of the dead.

While carrying out my obsessively exhaustive documentation of every vital record from my grandfather Leone's hometown of Baselice between 1809 and 1860, I noticed that some years the death toll was much higher than others. For example, in this town of roughly 2,000 people, about 100 would die each year. But some years that number spiked above 200. This makes me wonder about epidemics and earthquakes.

On the BBC website I found an article titled History of deadly earthquakes. It lists earthquakes worldwide from 1906 through 2016. Using Wikipedia again I found a List of earthquakes in Italy. Long ago an Italian historian sent me a list of 41 people who died in my grandfather Iamarino's town of Colle Sannita. The list was dated 26 July 1805. On the Wikipedia page I see that there was an earthquake in Molise on 26 July 1805. On the 1805 Molise earthquake page is a list of towns, and it says that 44 people died in Colle Sannita.

Try to use local resources to learn about disasters. A transcription of a local Connellsville, Pennsylvania newspaper provided the names of the victims of the 1903 train wreck. And it was local records that produced the names of the Colle Sannita residents killed in the 1805 earthquake. For my own family, it took a trip to the New York City Municipal Archives to see the death certificate and cause of death for many of my relatives.

Given enough time, more and more things will be digitized. Given enough genealogical networking, more and more things will be shared to the benefit of us all. Be sure to investigate what natural or man-made disasters happened where your ancestors lived.

Before Grandpa Came Here, How Did He Get There?

In my last post I spoke about how diverse my DNA results are despite having roots only in Italy going back at least to the 1600s. I've also written about why our ancestors may have left their homeland.

Today I found a wonderful Map of Human Migration, courtesy of the National Geographic Society. It supports several other sources I've read about how Italy (and Europe) was long ago populated by people from the Middle East—an area National Geographic refers to as the Fertile Crescent.

Map of Human Migration

It's a useful map for so many ethnicities, and if you choose your ancient ancestors' most likely route (I chose the one pointing to Italy), it also tells you your probable haplogroups. Particular similarities in DNA strands can be inherited together, meaning that they can be passed down generation after generation. Ethnic groups can retain this DNA similarity for so long that you may have markers in common with people who are native to a particular region today.

The National Geographic site tells me that the Middle East to Europe migration path may indicate the following haplogroups: H, J, K, N, T, W, G, E. The Family Tree DNA site provides detailed explanations of each haplogroup. The letters above point to Europe and pan-Eurasia, but G and E are not defined on this page.

Be sure to explore the Map of Human Migration and see who populated your ancestor's homeland.

Making Sense of Your DNA Results

I bought my DNA test from ancestry.com about five years ago, fairly soon after they made it available, and my pie chart was a bit of a shock. I've traced my ancestors back to the late 1600s, and they always lived in southern Italy. So the 44% Middle Eastern just seemed crazy.

My original pie chart and ethnicity
estimate from ancestry.com.

As time went on and more and more people submitted their DNA, the database became more robust and greater refinements were made. So now my chart is 75% Italian/Greek, and just a bit of other things. The 44% Middle Eastern is now 7%. That's a dramatic difference. So, if you get a DNA test, keep checking back for more information.

My current pie chart from ancestry.com.

But if my ancestors were in southern Italy in the 1600s, how do I have any Middle Eastern or European Jewish DNA? Your DNA can have its origins from a thousand or more years ago, and if you think about it, the southern Italians, Europeans, and many other populations did not originate in those places thousands of years ago.

They had to come from somewhere. And what did we learn in grade school social studies? That Mesopotamia was the cradle of civilization. That everything began where the Tigris meets the Euphrates. That's modern day Iraq.

If you look at my ethnicity map and see that Italian peninsula, it doesn't seem the least bit far-fetched to think that at some point people migrated from the Middle East to the Mediterranean Sea and up into Europe. And even a little research bears this out.

In the history of things, this area isn't too spread out.

Results from Family Tree DNA

It's important to understand that your DNA can be different than your sibling's DNA because of the somewhat random way in which it's passed down. You have 16 great grandparents, but you will not inherit an equal amount of DNA markers from each of them. That explains why I've got more Italian DNA than my own mother.

I received a great tip at a genealogy seminar that I'll pass along to you.

If you had your DNA tested somewhere, you should be able to download the data. You can upload that data to Family Tree DNA and have another way to connect with people who may be your distant relatives. Naturally they gave me different, and less specific percentages! Now I'm looking Turkish again, but hey. The Italians had to come from somewhere originally.