Step Out of Your Genealogy Comfort Zone

Getting pretty good at genealogy? Try working with a new set of records.

I tend to write this blog about what I'm doing in genealogy at the moment. It's a great system, actually. I have to play around in genealogy every day to keep the blog going.

What I'm doing right now is stretching my skills by helping other people with their family trees. I specialize in Italian ancestry. So I'm offering to:

• locate Italian vital records
• translate them, and
• piece together families for my customers.

If you've been working on your own family tree for a while, you're probably in your genealogy comfort zone. You're locating government documents from your own country, like:

• census records
• immigration and naturalization records
• vital records
• military records, and more

The documents are often very similar, so you get comfortable with them. You know where to look on a census sheet for the head of household's occupation. You know where to look on a death record for the names of the deceased's parents.

Things can get so easy they start to bore you. There's a lot more to genealogy.

Now imagine suddenly diving into a pool of different documents. They can be so…different. It can throw you off your genealogy game a bit.

All my ancestors came from neighboring towns in Italy. Each town's birth, marriage, and death records are pretty similar to one another. I know exactly how to handle my towns' documents and extract what I need from them.

But in different regions of Italy, the pre-printed forms can vary a lot. The father's name on a birth record may not be where I expected. The baby's name may be written very large (that's great!) or small and blended into the paragraph (harder to spot).

What I'm finding right away is that we can learn and adapt quickly.

I hope you'll get ambitious and start to explore a branch of your family tree you haven't touched before. You may find that documents from their country are different than what you're used to.

Don't get worried. All you need to do is get settled in. Here are the 2 main tips for dealing with dramatically different documents.

1. Learn Some of the Language

If you're going to gather documents from a new country, you need to learn a handful of words in their language. I'll be working with all Italian documents, but eventually I may need to learn the dreaded Latin.

Whenever you need to dig into foreign-language documents, you must learn the keywords.

Say you're viewing a birth record. You need to know the words for born, husband, wife, the days of the week, months of the year, and numbers. Memorize those months and numbers. FamilySearch.org offers a list of all the important keywords in a bunch of languages. See What Language Barrier?

You can do this!

You've learned so much already. Stretch yourself and see how much more you can master.

2. Recognize the Key Facts

When I'm looking at a really old Italian document, it's all hand-written. There is no pre-printed, easy-to-read form. But I don't get overwhelmed. I find a key fact and dive right in.

A very old birth record often begins with details about the volume where you can find the record. It may include the beginning and ending dates covered by that volume. I don't need all that.

The first thing I look for on an old birth record is the word comparso. That means appeared. The recorder of the document is saying so-and-so appeared before me, the mayor or town official.

The person who appeared is either the father of the new baby or the midwife. In rare cases it's the grandfather of the baby or another relative. But by and large, it's the baby's daddy. So I find comparso and read what follows. It should be a name and an age. If it's a man's name, like Antonio delGrosso, and he's about 28 years old, that sure sounds like he's the father. If he's 68 years old, I'll check to see if he's the grandfather.

Now that I found that important entry point, it's easier to decipher what's next. I expect to find:

• when the baby was born
• the mother's name
• whether she is "Antonio delGrosso's" legitimate wife
• the baby's given name.

If the birth record format for a particular town is different than my towns, I know I can adjust. I like to page through the documents, looking for a particular last name. I keep my eyes only in the part of the page where it says a name after the word comparso.

I can flip through the documents, looking at that one spot, and stop only when I see the name I want. Only then will I read the rest of the document.

If you have a multi-ethnic background, you may have dabbled in a few countries already. But I'll bet a lot of you haven't ventured outside your own country yet. Don't be afraid! You can get used to anything.

Step out of your genealogy comfort zone and expand it. It's not hard once you get settled in.

How to Find Your Connection to a Distant Relative

It may happen at any time. And when it does, you should drop everything.

One of the best things about keeping my family tree on Ancestry.com is the mailbox. At any given moment, I can get a message from a possible cousin.

It's like Christmas Day each time I get a new message. Will this person help me find a missing piece of my genealogy puzzle? I pay attention to each message and treat it seriously.

Last week I heard from a woman I was about to contact. I noticed she was a DNA match to both my dad and me. And I saw her borrowing census forms I'd saved to my family tree. We quickly established that her ancestors once lived up the block from my parents in the Bronx. And we both have roots in Colle Sannita, Italy.

Yesterday I heard from another woman who may not have taken a DNA test. But Ancestry informed her that she and I had shared ancestors. Her 3rd great grandparents were in my tree.

Look beyond the face-value relationship. There may be more to it.

The relationship is hard to wrap your head around, but her people are tied to my 2nd great aunt's husband. And he happens to be the great grandson of my double 4th great grandparents. (See 3 Ways to Find Double Ancestors in Your Family Tree.)

There are no suitable words for these crazy relationships. Let's just say her people are my people.

I dropped everything and got to work. Her 2nd great grandfather was not in my family tree. So, using her online tree for clues, I found his 1829 birth record in my collection of vital records. Then I found his son Giuseppantonio's 1854 birth record.

My new contact's family tree says Giuseppantonio married a woman born in the next town, Circello. Luckily, I have ancestors from Circello. So I have all the available Circello vital records on my computer, too.

I found his wife's 1850 birth record and saw that her mother's name was Petriella. That name has a lot of significance to me. It's my 1st cousins' last name, and it's the last name of some of our DNA matches.

Working on the family tree of a possible cousin can net you a lot more relatives.

This Petriella married in Circello in 1842. I harvested as much information from her marriage as possible, including:

• Her 1819 birth record
• Her father's 1838 death record
• Her grandfather's 1821 death record
• Her husband's 1817 birth record
• His father's 1839 death record
• His grandfather's 1790 death record
• The full set of marriage records, including:
  
  • publication of their intention to marry
  • permission to marry
  • the date they married in church.

Each time I found a new name, I glanced at my new contact's tree to see if my information agreed with hers. It did, but my document collection lets me go much further back in time.

An unexpected relationship is made clear with some color-coding.

I'll continue exploring the documents and adding facts to my family tree. My new contact saved me from hitting a dead end with this particular family. I might never have known that Giuseppe married a girl from the next town and had several children there.

Now I can keep on building that family. I can follow them across the ocean to (of course) the Bronx. And I may make even more connections to distant relatives. That's what you've got to do to find that connection.

At this moment, my family tree has 21,761 people. And that's after I cut out and stopped documenting American in-laws.

Do you want to find your connection to distant cousins? Stretch out your branches as far as possible.

If you're keeping your family tree to yourself, you're missing out on tons of opportunities.

Consistency Makes Your Family Tree More Professional

Be consistent with facts in your family tree for a professional result.

I'm surprised you've stuck with me. Some of my genealogy suggestions seem like a lot of work. And they are. But if you're building your family tree out of true interest, you'll want to do it right.

I've asked you to add details to your document images. To download entire towns full of vital records. To use spreadsheets to document and track everything.

Since I didn't get much push-back on those tedious projects, I hope you'll be open to this idea: Consistency.

In my day job, I'm a website content producer. I've always thought consistency gives any website credibility. If a website says one thing on one page, and something different on another, the company doesn't look professional.

Now imagine you're visiting someone's family tree. If they use a different address format for everyone, for example, their work looks unprofessional. Would you trust someone with a half-mowed, weed-filled, messy yard to be your landscaper? Do you trust someone with an inconsistent family tree to be your source?

Lately I've noticed 3 areas where I want to be more consistent:

• job titles
• addresses
• immigration descriptions

Let's see what I can do about it.

There are a few ways to see if you're being consistent in your family tree.

Job Titles

In Family Tree Analyzer, I can see a list of every occupation I've recorded in my family tree. If you haven't downloaded the free Family Tree Analyzer program, go there now. You're missing out.

Launch Family Tree Analyzer and open your latest GEDCOM file. Go to the Main Lists / Occupations window.

Granted, you'll have different job titles because they were like that on the source document. But, did you make any typos?

If you find an entry you don't like and want to change, double-click it to see which person(s) has this job title. Make the edit in your family tree software.

All my ancestors alive before 1898 were born in Italy. So I have a ton of Italian-language occupations in my family tree. Using Find and Replace in Family Tree Maker, I added an English translation to each Italian job title. For instance, "pastore (shepherd)".

I noticed a few translations where the Find and Replace messed me up because it was a multi-word job title. Massaro means steward or farm manager and pastore means sheep farmer. But a massaro di pecore is a sheep-farm manager. I wound up with a job title that says "massaro (steward or farm manager) di pecore (sheep farmer)".

With Family Tree Analyzer, I can spot these boo-boos and fix them in Family Tree Maker.

Addresses

I like to add the word "County" to U.S. place names. It's a personal choice, but I think "241 North Road, Poughkeepsie, Dutchess County, New York, USA" is clearer than "241 North Road, Poughkeepsie, Dutchess, New York, USA".

Whichever format you prefer, be consistent. Scan the list of locations in Family Tree Analyzer's Locations tab or the Places tab of Family Tree Maker. Does anything glaring jump out at you?

Having a blueprint for recording certain facts makes it easy to be consistent.

Immigration Descriptions

I first started building my family tree by searching the Ellis Island website. Then I bought Family Tree Maker and came up with a format for immigration descriptions. It went like this:

Arrived aboard the [ship name] [with whichever relative(s)] to join [person] at [address].

But I had to change that format after a while. You see, I started recording each person's departure date from Italy as an Emigration fact. That's the day the ship left the port of Naples. In the Emigration fact's description field in Family Tree Maker, I use this format:

Left for [port city] on the [ship name].

I like that format. But since the Emigration fact includes the ship name, I don't need to repeat it in the Immigration fact. From then on, my Immigration fact follows this format:

Arrived [with whichever relative(s)] to join [person] at [address].

Whenever I notice the old format I fix it. But it'd be great to see a list of all these facts and work to correct them. The best way I've found to review all the immigration facts is to open my GEDCOM file in a text editor.

I can search for "IMMI" and keep pressing the F3 key to see the next one and the next one. When I see one I want to change, the person's name will be a few lines up. Then I can switch to Family Tree Maker and make my edit.

Think about your own style and habits when working on your family tree. Is there anything you changed along the way? Should you go back to the older facts and make them match? I would, but I didn't win the Miss Consistency crown for nothing.

If you want to tackle any particular fact-type, opening your latest GEDCOM is a good idea. Remember to make updates to your tree, not the GEDCOM file.

I wish people wouldn't say they want to trash their family tree and start over. Don't throw away your work. Fix it. And polish it with consistency. Look how professional you are!