Great Grandpa Was a Bird of Passage

His repeated trips to America give me lots of clues about my great grandfather's life.

My great grandfather Francesco Iamarino made a handful of trips from Italy to the Bronx where his brother lived. He set out on his first trip in 1903. He was 25 years old with a wife and infant son (my grandfather).

Did your ancestor make more than one trip to another country?

His brother, my 2nd great uncle Giuseppe, left for America in 1900. Francesco stayed behind and married a year later. Giuseppe Iamarino stayed in the Bronx. My dad remembers living in Uncle Joe's apartment building as a child.

But my great grandfather Francesco did not stay. He was what they call a "bird of passage". That's an immigrant who left the poverty of Italy in the late 19th and early 20th centuries to earn money. They made multiple journeys across the ocean. They found work, earned money for a period of time, and went back home to their wives and children.

My other ancestors came to America to stay. But not Francesco.

His ship manifests are the only evidence I have of his time in America. He was not here for a census. He's not in a city directory. He's only on the ship manifests.

Without all his trips, I'd have nothing but birth, marriage, and death records.

Here are some of the facts I've pieced together:

• July 11, 1903. Francesco leaves his wife Libera and my 9-month-old grandfather Pietro to sail to New York.
• August 1, 1903. Francesco arrives in the New York harbor to join his brother Giuseppe at 556 Morris Avenue in the Bronx. Coincidentally, this is the same neighborhood where my mother's family lived. They'd arrived in 1899.
• February 21, 1904. Francesco's 2nd child Giovannangela is born, but it isn't clear if Francesco is in Italy at the time.
• February 24, 1909. After the birth of his 3rd child, Maria, Francesco returns to the Bronx and his brother, Giuseppe. This time he travels with 4 other men from his hometown. One is his brother Teofilo; the others are his brothers-in-law.
• 13 October 1913. Once again, Francesco returns to his brother in the Bronx.
• 10 September 1922. Francesco's 4th and final child Assunta is born. Francesco is 44 years old, but isn't quite done making those 3-week voyages across the Atlantic.
• 19 March 1929. Did Francesco know this was to be his final trip to America? This time he went to Youngstown, Ohio, to visit the son he hadn't seen in almost a decade. He meets his son's wife and new baby girl.

Multiple voyages mean more and more facts for your family tree.

Francesco's many voyages shaped him and changed him. On one of his trips, staying in the Bronx, he heard singing and stopped into a local church. It was an Evangelical Church—not the Catholic Church of his traditional Italian upbringing.

My great grandfather was so moved by what he saw, he became a convert. He saw people overcome by the spirit of God. They were wailing and crying. Back home in Italy, Francesco founded his own small church. His grandchildren and great grandchildren are still running the church today. They're the ones who told me this story and showed me their church.

Imagine how different his and his family's lives would have been if he hadn't made that particular trip to the Bronx.

Are you looking for your ancestors who didn't stay in your country? You may have a bird of passage in your tree and not even know it.

And speaking of our immigrant ancestors:

• Celebrating My Peasant Ancestors
• 6 Key Genealogy Facts on a Ship Manifest
• Where Did They Go Next?

The DNA Problem We Aren't Talking About

Everybody in the gene pool! You're all my ancestors.

Are you chasing a pair of magic ancestors who don't exist? You find a strong DNA match. You expect to find a shared set of 4th great grandparents or so. But is there a common set of great grandparents at all?

If you and your DNA match come from an endogamous culture, the answer may be "Sorry. No."

Endogamy is the practice of marrying within a specific group, over and over again. Let's say a small town has 200 families. When each child comes of age, they marry someone from one of the other 199 families in the town.

In some cultures and some geographies, intermarriage was the only choice.

Imagine keeping up that practice for centuries. The 200 families' DNA would be so blended together that they may be hard to tell apart.

The International Society of Genetic Genealogy (ISOGG) Wiki says endogamous populations include:

• Jews
• Polynesians
• Low German Mennonites
• the Amish
• Acadians
• French Canadians
• the people of Newfoundland
• many Arab countries
• people from many islands.

None of those groups include my ethnicity. But I've seen firsthand that endogamy was a necessity when you lived in a rural, isolated town in the 1700s or 1800s. In my ancestors' towns, intermarriage of families was the only choice. Sometimes a man married a woman from the next town. But most of the time, he married a woman from his own little neighborhood.

Think about their DNA segments getting all twisted together in knots. It's like that tangled-up ball of Christmas lights. You'd rather throw it out and get a new set than wrestle with it all day.

The ISOGG says that people "from endogamous populations … will typically have large numbers of matches in the DNA databases. … [Their] relationships will often be more distant than predicted."

More distant than predicted. Let that sink in. If your people practiced endogamy, their relationships may be more distant than predicted.

My parents' ancestors came from a few neighboring endogamous towns. My parents share 37 centimorgans across 4 DNA segments. That can make them many things. According to Ancestry DNA, my parents could be:

Got shared DNA? There are so many ways you may be related.

And here I've been trying to find that one magic couple. That one set of my 4th or 5th great grandparents that belong to each of my parents.

What if that couple doesn't exist? What if my parents share DNA because their entire region of Italy shares DNA?

LegacyTree tells us that people from endogamous groups often "share multiple ancestors in common with each other. They also may descend from the same ancestral couple multiple times."

DNAeXplained adds that if you match someone from an endogamous population, "it's because you share so much of the same DNA…not because a particular segment comes from one specific ancestor."

How does this change your genealogy research? If you have ancestors who married within their small town or tribe for centuries, what should you do?

I've been researching my ancestral hometowns since 2005. I saw right away that there was a ton of intermarriage. The only way to sort out my ancestors was to document the entire town. I did that for my maternal grandfather's town. Now I'm piecing together every extended family relationship from my paternal grandfather's town. The 2 towns are so close that you can see one from the other. But traveling from one to the other is hard. Even to this day.

It's official. I no longer expect to find one magic couple shared by my parents.

The Leeds Method and DNA Painter showed me that the last names of Pozzuto and Zeolla from my paternal grandfather's town have the closest DNA ties to my mother. So I'm going to continue doing what I've been doing.

These 4 shared segments can mean a long list of possible relationships.

I'm adding every Pozzuto baby to my family tree one at a time. I'm piecing together their ancestors until I can tie them to someone already in my tree. Now that random, unrelated baby is my distant relative.

I'm paying special attention to families that:

• have both the Pozzuto and Zeolla names through marriage.
• have one spouse from one of my father's towns and the other spouse from one of my mother's towns.

When that rando-baby becomes a relative, their descendants may tie me to one of my DNA matches. If that DNA match has a connection to both my parents, I've got something special.

It won't be that one magic couple. But it may be a highly condensed bucketful of the shared gene pool. The pool that has my entire Italian region as card-carrying members.

Are you seeing a lot of the same last names marrying one another in your extended family tree? Keep endogamy in mind when your search for one magic couple is feeling like anything but magic.

2 Reasons to Add Unrelated People to Your Family Tree

When you can't go from point A to point B, you can use "bridge" relatives.

I didn't used to do this. I didn't used to add anyone to my family tree until I knew their connection to me.

But there are at least 2 good reasons to add people, and build their families inside your tree—disconnected from you or anyone else.

Of course the goal is to work on their families until you find that connection. Then they're your family. Here are 2 disconnected families I'm working on right now, and why.

1. To Find a Missing Link

I recently used the Ahnentafel numbering system to create my grandparent chart. The first missing ancestor was Ahnentafel #59. That's the mother of my 2nd great grandmother, Maria Luigia Muollo. I know Maria Luigia's father was Antonio, but I don't know anything else.

The family comes from a little hamlet in Italy that has no available records before 1861. That really limits what I can discover.

But I have a lead. A Muollo family from the same Italian hamlet came to America. They settled in a tiny Pennsylvania borough with my great grandfather's nephew.

I began building the Pennsylvania branch of the Muollo family in my family tree. I labelled them in Family Tree Maker and my document tracker as having no relationship established to me. Yet.

After adding all the United States documents I could find for them, I turned to the Italian documents. I found birth records for the Italian emigrants. Those documents gave me each person's parents' names.

With these new names, I can fit together more members of the Muollo family from my ancestral hometown. I haven't found a connection to my 2nd great grandmother yet, but I'm getting closer. I'm looking forward to that moment when "No direct relationship found" turns into something else. Anything else!

Keep track of your unattached people with an image or obvious notation.

2. To Tie into Your DNA Connections

I've tried both the Leeds Method and DNA Painter to work on my biggest DNA puzzle. My parents share DNA. And we'd like to know how.

These tools showed me that 2 specific last names are key. They're both common in my paternal grandfather's hometown. These two last names, Pozzuto and Zeolla, have the highest concentration of DNA shared by both my parents.

There are a ton of people with those names in my collection of Italian documents. By putting together several of their families within my family tree, I can see how they all fit together. I can see how they connect to my DNA matches' family trees.

For example, I chose an 1858 birth record for an Angelo Pozzuto. That gave me his parents' names, Giuseppe and Maria. I put them in my tree. Then I found Giuseppe and Maria's 1851 marriage records. That where I found Maria's parents' names, and her father's parents' names.

It's well worth the effort when the disconnected branch gets connected.

Giuseppe's side of the family was better. I learned his parents' names, and all his grandparents' names. And that's where it happened. His maternal grandparents, Giorgio and Serafina, were already in my tree. They were all related to me.

Mark your unrelated people clearly.

This new branch of 11 people went from "no relationship established" to my distant cousins. I've had this kind of luck with other random Pozzuto and Zeolla babies. I'm building stronger connections to my DNA matches, and getting closer to solving the puzzle of my parents.

If you decide to build unrelated branches inside your family tree, follow these 2 tips:

• Make it clear this family is not connected to you. I give them a special profile picture in Family Tree Maker that makes it unmistakable. In my document tracker spreadsheet, I highlight their name in yellow and follow it with the words NO RELATION.
• Don't skip the sources. When you connect these people to yourself, you'll need to go back and grab the documents you found.

It's a fantastic feeling when you make that connection. Then you can remove that special profile picture and erase that yellow highlighting. And best of all, you've expanded your growing family.