How to Make Your Family Tree Fireproof!

My family didn't pass down any paperwork. There were no birth certificates. No marriage certificates. No citizenship papers.

That's why I'm amazed at the photos other genealogists post of their slumped-over piles of color-coded folders. Their stacks of plastic bins filled with documents. Their rows of acid-free archive-quality storage boxes.

Whatever paper genealogy documents you have, digitize them!

I have one fat folder of paper documents related to my family tree. It rests comfortably in my two-drawer file cabinet along with every other piece of paperwork associated with my life.

Wag your finger at me if you must, but I'm here to urge you to digitize your family history! Our goal as family historians is to preserve and share every fact and document of our ancestors' lives.

That requires making their birth certificates, death certificates, and precious photographs:

• fireproof
• accessible
• safe from obsolescence

This seems like an overwhelming task to many family tree researchers. But isn't every aspect of building a family tree overwhelming? For goodness sake, you have 64 great great great great grandparents alone!

Like any other genealogical task, you have to set your goals, divide, and conquer. Choose a branch and dive in with these tasks:

• Scanning: A good scanner is not expensive. But if your budget is tight, consider borrowing one for a few days. Or get a free scanner app for your phone.
• Saving: Your family tree software should have the option of exporting your work as a GEDCOM file. A GEDCOM is a highly compatible format that any family tree software can open and use. Save your work as a GEDCOM regularly.
• Storing: Remember 3½-inch floppy disks? Computers can't read them anymore. A CD drive isn't even standard equipment on many new laptop computers. So practice redundancy:
  
  • Burn your digital files to a CD or DVD.
  • Copy them to an external hard drive.
  • Store them on one of the many clouds available to you: GoogleDocs, Dropbox, OneDrive.
  • Use FamilySearch.org, Ancestry.com, or another genealogy website to hold your family tree and its document files.

As genealogists, we love living in the past. We treasure each scrap of evidence of our ancestors' lives.

But we've got to plan for the future and the longevity of our hard work.

When it comes to one specific ancestor, like your maternal grandmother, you only want one. But when it comes to preserving her documents and photographs, redundancy, redundancy, redundancy!

You may also enjoy:

• Finding the Story Behind an Intriguing Family Photo
• Mapping Your Ancestors Can Answer Questions
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What If Your Ancestor Isn't Where You Expected at All?

They're not there!

Are you my hometown, Santa Paolina?

I thought it was all coming together. I thought I'd have some answers about my great great grandparents, Antonio Saviano and Colomba Consolazio. But sometimes your ancestors are not where you absolutely expected to find them.

Follow me for a moment on this genealogical path.

Recently I charted out exactly which of my direct-line ancestors I've identified. I color-coded them to show the direct ancestors of each of my four grandparents.

My progress was incredibly satisfying, but it held a startling truth. The branch whose descendants I grew up with—my maternal grandmother's branch—is the one where I've made the least progress.

I know my great grandparents, Giovanni and Maria Rosa, and each of their parents' names. But I'm troubled by the lack of progress with Maria Rosa's parents, Antonio and Colomba.

They each died in New York City. I've seen their death certificates at the New York City Municipal Archives. (They're online now!) Their parents' names were hard to read, and the source of the names was someone who never met these people.

From my earliest days in this genealogy hobby I had conflicting information about where Antonio and Colomba came from. My 96-year-old great aunt (their granddaughter) was still as sharp as a tack when she told me they were from Avellino. It was a simple fact she'd heard from her mother Maria Rosa time and time again.

OK, but Avellino is a city and a province. So where were they from?

Then I found the family's 1898 ship manifest when they sailed from Naples to New York, and it said something else. It said they were from Sant'Angelo a Cupolo. That's in the Benevento province, bordering Avellino.

Now what?

Their New York City marriage records say that Antonio and Colomba's daughters were born in Sant'Angelo a Cupolo. That places the family in Benevento, not Avellino.

Then I found a World War II draft registration card for Antonio and Colomba's eldest son, Semplicio. He was born in Tufo.

Woo hoo! Tufo is in Avellino!

I ordered microfilm of Tufo birth, marriage and death records from FamilySearch.org and found Semplicio's 1877 birth record. Surprisingly, I also found an 1875 birth record for another son named Raffaele. There was a younger Raffaele, so this son must have died as a child. I don't think my great aunt knew about him.

Antonio was already 33 when the first Raffaele was born. Based on my extensive research of this area at the time, I believe there must have been previous children. But the Tufo records had nothing else.

No other children of Antonio and Colomba were born in Tufo, and they were not married in Tufo.

Again, now what?

Luckily, Colomba has an uncommon maiden name of Consolazio. I scoured the Tufo records and found two men, Gaetano Consolazio and Sabato Consolazio, whose children were born in Tufo around the same time as my Raffaele and Semplicio.

My great great grandmother's brother provided the missing link.

Gaetano Consolazio's marriage document seems to hold the key to unlock this entire family's background. He was married in Tufo, but he was born in Santa Paolina—only three miles from Tufo! His marriage record also confirms his and Colomba's parents' names, which were absolutely wrong on her 1920 death record.

In 1877, the document says, 60-year-old Fiorinto Consolazio and his wife Rufina Zullo were living in Santa Paolina, Avellino.

Where does that leave us?

Colomba's brother Gaetano was born in Santa Paolina. Their parents lived in Santa Paolina. That gives me a strong reason to believe Colomba was born there. She probably married Antonio there. She may have had an earlier child there. Antonio and his siblings may have been born there, too.

I've ordered the Santa Paolina microfilm. This was my last chance to order film as the Family History Center microfilm program ends on August 31, 2017. And there's no guarantee these records will ever be digitized and put online.

So now I wait. Fingers crossed, I may soon be adding several more ancestors to my chart and datapoints to my family tree.

Oh boy, I hope they're there!

You may also enjoy these practical case studies:

• Case Study on 'Where Did Grandpa Come From?'
• Case Study on 'What if There's No There There?'
• Case Study on 'O Brother Where Art Thou?'

It's Time to Revisit & Improve Your Earliest Family Tree Research

It's not your best work.

No offense, but the well-meaning work you did when you first began your family tree needs your attention.

Ellis Island's website was my first resource.

When I first began playing around with genealogy, the only resource I had was the free Ellis Island website. There I found my two grandfathers' ship manifests when they came from Italy to New York.

Then I searched for any immigrants named Iamarino or Leone from the same towns as my grandfathers. I jotted down their details in a leftover school notebook. When all those pages of notes became unmanageable, I bought an early version of Family Tree Maker and began building my family tree.

"Start with what you know." That's the advice every expert gives to a beginning genealogist. So you enter details about your immediate family. You spread out to the great aunts and uncles you knew as a child.

Then your family finds out you want to be the family historian. They give you details and tell you old stories. You add names and wedding dates and soon you're adding in the third cousins you never met.

If you've been learning and improving your techniques as you go, the assumptions and downright errors you made in your earliest days of family tree research might make you want to cringe.

Don't worry. But don't ignore your newbie mistakes, either.

Make a plan to revisit and evaluate what you did when you began your family tree. Here's how.

1. Find Supporting Documents for What You Know

• Start with your closest relative born before 1940. That might be yourself, your parent, or your grandparent. This person should be recorded in the 1940 U.S. Federal Census.
• Look at the information you put in your family tree because you just know it. You've always known it. It might be your mom's maiden name or the address of the house your grandfather lived in.
• Now find this person in the census and see which facts you can verify with this official record.
• Broaden your search beyond the census to include vital records: birth, marriage and death records. See how many facts you can support with hard evidence.

You may find that you had some facts wrong. Or, if your facts were good, now you have the evidence to back it up.

2. Look for Obvious Errors

• Use your family tree software to examine a family listing—parents and all their children—for a family that's very close to you.
• Choose a family with children born before 1940 so you'll be able to find documents for them. For example, you might start with your maternal grandparents' nuclear family.
• Look closely at the birth dates you've given to every family member. Is the mother too young or too old to have had any of those children? Are any of the children's birth dates too close together?
• Now find this family in every different census year that applies. Do the reported ages in the censuses support your information? Can the censuses help you resolve any errors you think you've spotted?

Over time, you may have added details to individual family members without looking at the bigger family picture for errors.

3. Weed Out Your Mistakes

• Examine one family grouping at a time and work your way systematically through the parts of your tree that are closest to you. You could begin by focusing only on your direct line ancestors: your father's father's family, your father's mother's family, your mother's father's family, your mother's mother's family. Then move to your great aunt's and great uncle's families.
• Check the details you've entered for each person in each of these family units. Doesn't anything seem like it no longer fits?
  
  For example, I found a Social Security Death Index (SSDI) record for a woman with the same name as my grandmother's first cousin. That record gave me an exact birth date and death date that I attached to this cousin. It was only when I found official Italian birth records for three of her brothers that I realized she couldn't possibly have been born on the date I found on the SSDI record. That record didn't belong to her.
  

  

  Can you spot the obvious error in this family view?

  
  To fix this error, I removed the erroneous dates. Then I found a record that wasn't available until recently. Her Social Security benefits application record gave me my cousin's actual death date and place. It gave me her age at death, which matched my newly estimated birth year for her.
• When you find what you think are more accurate facts, search for as many pieces of evidence as you can.
  
  For example, let's say your great uncle's given name is different than what you always called him. If you find his original name in one census, try to find it in other census years, naturalization papers, a ship manifest, or wherever you can.

Finally, document your sources for each bit of new, better information you find. Future you will thank you. And the next family historian will thank you, too.

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• How I Gained 2 More Generations in 1 Day
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