How to Create Your Ancestral Hometown Database

What genealogy fan wouldn't be thrilled to find their ancestor's hometown records online?

That moment came for me when I learned about the Italian website, Antenati. Antenati has birth, marriage and death records for my handful of ancestral towns in Italy. Other genealogists are finding their ancestor's records on FamilySearch.org.

A free computer program called GetLinks (no longer works with Antenati) makes it easy to download these digitized records from both FamilySearch.org and the Antenati site. It's written in Portuguese, but don't let that worry you. I've written several times about using these records and the program. See:

• How to Use the Online Italian Genealogy Archives
• Collect Whole Set!
• Where Have You Been All My Life?
• Step-by-Step Discovery of My 5th Great Grandparents
• Finding the Siblings Your Ancestor Never Mentioned

If you've downloaded documents from your ancestral hometown, you may have hundreds or thousands of images on your computer.

Now what?

Once you download all the records from your town, imagine how many of your relatives are in these folders!

If you're looking only at each year's index and finding what you know you need, you're missing the boat. And that boat is overloaded with your ancestors!

My recommendation: Make a spreadsheet database of every important fact in each document.

My database-in-progress for several towns' birth, marriage and death records.

What's the point? With a spreadsheet of facts, you can sort an entire town's birth records by last name. If you sort by last name and father's name, you will see all the children born to your ancestor.

There will no doubt be ancestors in your spreadsheet that you never knew existed.

Here are 5 steps to creating your ancestral hometown database from your downloaded files:

1. Examine the records for the fields you want to capture. For example, birth records may contain the baby's name and birth date; father's name, age and occupation; mother's name and age; the address where the baby was born or where the father lived (not always the same); and the baby's baptism date. Death records will contain different facts, and so will marriage records.
2. Create columns in your spreadsheet to hold all the facts. I keep birth, death and marriage records on different sheets in my Excel file so they can have different column headings.
   
   TIP: The best way to be able to sort your records by date is to keep the year, month and day in separate columns.
3. Enter information from the documents into your spreadsheet. This takes time, but I found shortcuts as I did this last night.
   
   • I went through one year's birth records, entering only the baby's name into the spreadsheet. I put the baby's last name in one column and first name in another. (I record parents' names as last-name-first to help with sorting.)
   • On my second pass through the records, I entered the birth and baptism dates.
   • On my third pass, I entered the mother and father's information.
   Why is this better? I was always looking in one specific spot on the page for the information I wanted. It felt faster than going one document at a time, picking out facts from all over the page.
4. Sort the data by any column to uncover hidden facts. You may find an unknown sibling. You may find that a man had several wives over the years. You may find several siblings for your ancestor who died young.
   
   See Dr. Daniel Soper's YouTube channel for tips on using Excel. Many tips will apply to other spreadsheet software.
5. Share your database! Years ago I documented the facts from the vital records for my grandfather's hometown. I gathered these facts while sitting at a microfilm viewer in a Family History Center (for years!), so I used a simple text file. You can't sort a text file, but at least you can search it. I shared this file, as well as a GEDCOM for the whole town, with other descendants of that town.
   
   Your spreadsheet can be a valuable resource to other family tree researchers. Once you're done, I encourage you to share it everywhere you can think of.

I documented two years of records while watching the Yankees slaughter the Orioles last night. I expect to get much further tonight because of the shortcuts I found.

When you have your database, find an appropriate Facebook group or other place, and put the data out there. Genealogy is a collaborative sport!

Today I Demolished My Family Tree's Only Brick Wall

You know that guardedly ecstatic feeling when you think you're looking at the answer to your biggest family tree mystery?

Should you shout EUREKA! or keep reading the document you've found to make sure you've got it right?

This happened to me a few times today, and I was giggling with joy!

I had his death photo. Now I have his birth and marriage records!

Recently, I filled out my chart of direct ancestors, color-coding the names to correspond to each of my four grandparents. That's when I realized I hadn't gotten further than my third great grandparents on my maternal grandmother's branch. And those names were from an unreliable source.

I needed to find Italian documents for my grandmother's grandparents: Antonio Saviano and Colomba Consolazio. Only then could I be sure of their parents' names. And maybe I'd learn their grandparents' names.

My great great grandfather Antonio Saviano presented me with another problem besides his ancestors' names. I didn't know where he was born, and he seemed to move a few times before coming to America. I haven't found any other Italian family in my tree that moved more than once in 1800s Italy.

The Saviano and Consolazio origins were my only brick wall.

How I Broke Through…Slowly

First I found Antonio and most of his family on an 1898 ship manifest coming to New York. They stated they were from Sant'Angelo a Cupolo. That's a little town in the province of Benevento. But I'd always heard they were from Avellino.

Next I found the World War II draft registration card for Antonio and Colomba's son, Semplicio Saviano. It said he was born in Tufo, Avellino, Italy. Great! Now I was onto something.

Then I ordered microfilm of Tufo vital records to view at my nearest Family History Center. I found that Antonio Saviano and Colomba Consolazio had a son before Semplicio named Raffaele.

I looked in the Tufo microfilms for Antonio and Colomba's births and marriage. But they weren't there!

Thanks to Colomba's brother's marriage records, I discovered that the Consolazio family came from the neighboring town of Santa Paolina.

So, with only days left to order microfilm, I ordered four reels from Santa Paolina, Avellino, Italy. Today I went to see them.

I immediately set out to find Antonio Saviano's 1843 birth record. It wasn't there, and I was disappointed. but I continued looking.

And then it happened.

I wasn't sure at first, so I kept quiet. But there I was, looking at Colomba Consolazio's birth record. My great great grandmother was not born on the date I saw on her death record. She was born three years earlier, and her name was Vittoria Colomba Consolazio.

There was an extra paragraph in the center of the birth record. It stated that Vittoria Colomba Consolazio married Antonio Luigi Saviano on 1 June 1871 in Santa Paolina!

I rewound that reel of film faster than I thought possible. I had to get to the 1871 marriage records ASAP.

And the bricks came tumbling down.

When I found the marriage banns and marriage record, I had an answer I never expected. Antonio Luigi Saviano was born on 7 July 1843 in Pastene.

Pastene is a small section of Sant'Angelo a Cupolo in Benevento! That's where the family was living before they came to America. That's where my great grandmother and her younger siblings were born.

So Antonio was born in Pastene, moved to Santa Paolina to marry Vittoria Colomba, had one baby who died at four days of age, moved to Tufo to have two more children, and moved back to Pastene to complete his family.

I learned Antonio's parents' names were not what I saw on his death certificate. They were Raffaele Saviano and Grazia Ucci. Grazia died before 1871. I learned Antonio's birth date and his town of birth.

I learned Vittoria Colomba's real name, real birth date, and her parents' full names. These facts were almost entirely wrong on her death certificate. Her father was Sembricio Fiorentino Consolazio, son of Gaetano who was the son of Saverio. Sembricio's mother was Colomba Ricciardella.

Finally, I learned about Vittoria Colomba's mother. On her death record, her mother was Rafina Zinzaro. In the Tufo documents, she was Rufina Zullo.

But on an 1818 birth record I discovered Rafina Zinzaro / Rufina Zullo was born Rubina Maria Consullo (sometimes written as Conzullo). Her parents were Simone Consullo and Domenica Iacobellis.

During my visit today I jotted down the facts for every Consolazio I could find, and I will go back to finish that work. Suddenly my family is much bigger thanks to the Consolazio ancestors that had been hiding behind that brick wall.

Now it's time to scour the Pastene and Sant'Angelo a Cupolo records I downloaded to get the facts on every Saviano and Ucci.

Can I shout EUREKA now? EUREKA!!!!

You may also enjoy:

• Why You Need Your Ancestors Draft Registration Cards
• How to Use the Online Italian Genealogy Archives
• 5 Steps to Grow Your Italian Family Tree

Find Your Happy Place in Your Favorite Genealogy Tasks

One of my favorite parts of my day job—those hours when I'm not doing genealogy research—is tackling projects I can do alone.

You say you need 300 web pages edited because of a new product name? No problem. You say you need a bunch of high-resolution images optimized for the web using Photoshop? No problem.

I enjoy handling organizational projects and projects where I need to find the best solution to a specific problem.

Looking at that description of the types of work I enjoy, it's blatantly obvious I was meant to be a family tree researcher.

A photo like this is all the inspiration I need to work on my family tree.

As I'm thinking about it, there are a handful of big projects I need to complete for my family tree. How many of these can you relate to?

• Enhancing the citations for the documents in my family tree.
  
• Capturing the facts from the tons of Italian birth, marriage and death records I've downloaded.
  
• Adding images of these documents to my tree.
• Find the missing census forms for people in my tree.
• Requesting the birth and death records I'm missing.

It is ironic that I've written about this idea before. I've encouraged you to Divide and Conquer Your Family Tree Research Tasks. I've tried to inspire you to Organize Your Genealogy Research By Choosing Your Style. I've urged you to Work in Batches to Strengthen Your Family Tree.

But I haven't always been able to live up to these goals.

Life gets in the way of genealogy, and that's fine. Maybe we need to be a bit less demanding of ourselves.

If I didn't have that day job, I might spent at least four or five hours a day on genealogy. But for now, I'm going to divide those tasks above into manageable chunks. I'll knock them off, bit by bit, and gain the same satisfaction I get from my job.

If you're reading this blog, you must feel a devotion to genealogy as I do. Remember this:

• We've all got a lot of individual genealogy tasks to tackle.
• When we put all the pieces together and do our research well, we rejoice in the result.

So here's my recommendation to you—and to me. Figure out what's needed to get your family tree in tip-top shape. Decide which family tree tasks you enjoy the most.

Then kill two birds with one stone: Fortify your family tree while making yourself a happy, joyous genealogist.