28 August 2020

Here's Your Family Tree Progress Report

The world is a chaotic mess, so let's focus on something positive. How's your family tree coming along? How's your progress report looking?

Well, how can we measure our progress in piecing together the names that make us who we are?

I've been measuring my progress by keeping my grandparent chart up to date. I've had a lot of success finding more 6th great grandparents lately. I've focused hard on searching for their names. Each time I find one, I open my grandparent chart. I figure out their Ahnentafel number and add the new name in the proper place.

It's a manual process, for sure. Sometimes I'll count the blank spaces and note how many names are missing for a generation.

Today I found a fast and accurate way to see which ancestors I have and how many I'm missing. Never underestimate the power of Family Tree Analyzer. It's a free program I've written about several times, and it has a ton of useful features.

Family Tree Analyzer gives you an instant progress report.
Family Tree Analyzer gives you an instant progress report.

First you need to export a new GEDCOM file from your family tree software or website. (A GEDCOM is a text file with all the facts in your family tree.) Open your GEDCOM with Family Tree Analyzer. (I just found out you can drag and drop your file onto the program window!) Then go to Reports on the top menu bar and choose How Many Directs Report. The report opens a table showing how many people you've found in each generation.

I have a total of 343 directs named in my family tree. I've got myself and my 2 sons, 2 parents, 4 grandparents, and on and on. My report goes all the way up to 2 pairs of 9th great grandparents. At first I thought something was wrong with the count of 4th great grandparents. I know I'm missing 9 of the possible 64, but this report showed 11 missing. Then I remembered my paternal grandparents were 3rd cousins. I've got repeat ancestors!

As you view your report, keep these totals in mind. Here's how many ancestors everyone has:

  • 4 grandparents
  • 8 great grandparents
  • 16 2nd great grandparents (I've found them all)
  • 32 3rd great grandparents (I've found 31)
  • 64 4th great grandparents (I've found 53)
  • 128 5th great grandparents (I've found 84)
  • 256 6th great grandparents (I've found 100)
  • 512 7th great grandparents (I've found 31)
  • 1024 8th great grandparents (I've found 7)
  • 2048 9th great grandparents (I've found 4)
  • 4096 10th great grandparents

The number of ancestors doubles each generation, and it really adds up! Click any line in the report to see a new chart with details about each person in that category. For example, I clicked the 6th great grandmother line. That showed me the names of the 50 6th great grandmothers I've identified. FIFTY!

In my case, it's easy to see which ancestral hometown is dominant in my ancestry.
In my case, it's easy to see which ancestral hometown is dominant in my ancestry.

I can see these women were born between about 1690 and the mid 1700s. That's way before the available vital records from Italy. I found their names in the marriage or death records of their children or grandchildren.

Sometimes there's no proof of an early ancestor's town of birth. I mark them as Italy. I'm sure of that. But once I get down to my 5th great grandparents, I can find proof. I know some were born in:

  • Apice
  • Baselice
  • Circello
  • Colle Sannita
  • Pescolamazza
  • Sant'Angelo a Cupolo, and
  • Santa Paolina.

Click the BirthLocation column in your Family Tree Analyzer report to sort the list. You'll see how many ancestors came from the same town. In an earlier article I counted my ancestors by town and found that a third of my ancestry comes from one town. This report makes that so easy to see.

Each time I find another direct ancestor, they go right into my grandparent chart with their Ahnentafel number.
Each time I find another direct ancestor, they go right into my grandparent chart with their Ahnentafel number.

Your progress report can help focus your attention on a particular branch. I have a roadblock on half of my blue branch (my maternal grandmother). Apart from that, I want to press on finding those 5th and 6th great grandparents.

But first, I'll finish clearing out my genealogy closet. When you focus on one project, you can make tremendous progress.

25 August 2020

Organize Your Genealogy Closet: A Challenge

I have a folder on my computer called "gen docs." When I find something that may belong in my family tree, but I'm short on time, I toss it in gen docs. The folder got so full, I added a sub-folders to categorize it all.

I always mean to go back and deal with these document images and photos. But it never happens.

That's why I'm issuing this genealogy clean-up challenge to me and to you. This week, make it a priority to deal with your own miscellaneous stash of genealogy items. They may be on your computer, in a physical file drawer, or in that Ancestry.com dustbin called the Shoebox.

Think of it like cleaning out your closet. You might sort your clothes items into:

  • Trash
  • Donate/Sell
  • Keep

It's simpler for genealogy items. They're going to be either:

  • Delete immediately or
  • Place in family tree immediately

Last week I discovered I'd duplicated part of my gen docs folder by mistake. I found a smaller version of the folder in another part of my computer. Some of the items were duplicates, and others weren't.

It's time to straighten this out!

I randomly jumped in by opening a folder called passport applications. I found a 2-page document I'd labelled as no_relation_PillaMichele1922-p1.jpg and -p2.jpg. I thought maybe now I know whether or not he's a relative.

Page 1 of the application showed me Michele's exact birth date and town. So I checked my family tree. Surprise! Michele is my 4th cousin twice removed. And his passport application is already in my family tree, along with 12 other documents. Michele was born in my grandfather's hometown in Italy and came to live in the Bronx, New York. He left quite a paper trail.

I can delete the entire passport applications folder from my gen docs collection.

I'm horrified that I never added these treasures to my family tree. Now's the time.
I'm horrified that I never added these treasures to my family tree. Now's the time.

Next I opened a census folder and found a sub-folder called "don't remember why." You know that isn't good. It means that when I categorized it all into sub-folders, I already didn't know why I had saved something.

One turned out to be a 1930 census that included my childhood dentist as a little boy. Why?? I hated that guy. He traumatized me for decades. That gets destroyed right now. The other mystery census is for an Italian family in western New York state. Their last name is vaguely familiar, but it isn't in my big family tree at all. Now it's trash.

There was another sub-folder called "Oliveri clues." The folder held a 1930 and 1940 census for a couple who may be the parents of my grandfather's cousin Lina's husband, Vincenzo Oliveri.

Sometime after I saved these files, I created an in-law rule for my family tree. I do not fully document the family of a distant in-law like this. I am interested in documenting cousin Lina's husband, Vincenzo Oliveri. But I won't go beyond his parents. And I won't do very much work on his parents.

I learned his parents' names from Vincenzo and Lina's 1919 marriage certificate. On closer inspection, these are 2 different families in 1930 and 1940. And it's unlikely they'd live in Brooklyn when their son lives in the Bronx.

Because of my in-law rule and the uncertainty, these saved documents are trash.

This is a one-of-a-kind document that was lost on my computer.
This is a one-of-a-kind document that was lost on my computer.

I'm continuing to examine saved documents and make judgment calls. My family tree has developed a lot since I saved many of these documents. My collection of Italian vital records has improved, too. I made them searchable by renaming each document image to include the name of the person in the document. That's helping me rule these gen docs in or out.

The point is to deal with these saved items right now. No more waiting. No more leaving them sitting there so long that you have no idea why you saved them.

I challenge you to spend a genealogy session or two dealing with your saved items. Take another look at the documents you stashed somewhere. If they belong in the "Place in family tree immediately" pile, do so! If they belong in the "Delete immediately" pile, then free up that space right away.

Past You definitely thought there was a reason to keep these things. Present You needs to follow through. You may find some gems in your genealogy closet.

21 August 2020

Don't Miss Out on Your Ancestors' Culture

We've all met them. The guy who spent an hour on Geni.com and claimed to be a descendant of Eric the Red. The woman who clicked into one family tree and boom! She brought her family back to the time of the Roman Forum.

If you expect it to be that quick and easy to build your family tree, you may have been mislead by TV commercials. And if a foreign language and detective work make you give up, you're missing out!

Take the time to get familiar with your ancestors' genealogy documents. You'll find cultural gems hiding between the lines. There are tools to help you with that foreign language. You will get better with practice. And along the way, you'll be learning about your ancestors' culture.

As a kid, I learned about 1940s American culture from Bugs Bunny cartoons. I learned lots of weird British phrases from Monty Python's Flying Circus. I was there for the comedy, but I was learning much more.

Now genealogy research is teaching me about my ancestors' Italian culture centuries ago.

In 2008, when I began reading Italian vital records from the 1800s, it was all new to me. I had to learn the Italian words for the months and all the numbers. The documents spell out the years and days. They don't say June 15, 1868; they say mille ottocento sessantotto, quindici di giugno.

I had to learn a handful of Italian words to get started: born and died, husband and wife, marriage, deceased, and so on.

Once I mastered those foreign words, I began to notice how they recorded some events. Like the abandoned babies. Only the midwife knew who the mother was, and the mayor could give the baby a made-up name. Sometimes a mother left her baby on someone's doorstep. It's like something out of an old movie.

My 5th great grandfather found a naked baby on his doorstep. The mayor named her Maria Giuseppa.
My 5th great grandfather found a naked baby on his doorstep. The mayor named her Maria Giuseppa.

Then I learned it was perfectly normal to remarry 2 months after your first spouse died. A widower, like my 2nd great grandfather Nicoladomenico, might marry a much younger woman and keep having children. Nicoladomenico's 2nd wife, my 2nd great grandmother, was his daughter's age. Perfectly normal.

I learned that each marriage required the presentation of certain documents:

  • the bride and groom's birth records
  • the 2 times they publicly posted their intention to marry, with no objections
  • the death records for any of their deceased parents
  • the death records for their grandfathers, if their fathers were dead

That last part—the death records of their grandfathers—is the only way to find a record of a death before 1809 when church records are not available. (1809 is when they began keeping civil records in this part of Italy.) This past week I've been taking advantage of that practice.

I needed to find the death record of my 5th great grandfather, Gioacchino Tricarico. There was no other way to learn his parents' names. I knew he died before 1809 because there was no death record for him in the civil records.

To find his death record, I needed to find a marriage record for his grandchild. But the grandchild needed to marry after their father (Gioacchino's son) had died. I searched their town's civil records to learn the names of all his grandchildren. Then I searched the marriage indexes year by year, until I found a granddaughter who married in 1855.

The Italian tradition was for the bride's (or groom's) parents to give permission for his child to marry. If their father was dead, the grandfather could give permission.

There needed to be a reason for the missing permissions. So they included the death records of the bride or groom's father and grandfather.

This may be the single best thing about Italian marriage records. In the 1855 marriage records, I found the 1808 death record of my 5th great grandfather. I learned the names of his parents, my 6th great grandparents: Tommaso Tricarico and Orsola Antonelli.

Knowing how my ancestral hometowns kept their records helps me make unusual discoveries.
Knowing how my ancestral hometowns kept their records helps me make unusual discoveries.

I've also learned from studying these documents that:

  • A bride and groom often lived in the same neighborhood. There's a good chance their families owned adjacent land, and their marriage was an alliance for the strength of both families. That stood out even more when I saw the matchy-matchy pairings of children with similar names. Francesco married Francesca. Giovanni married Giovanna. It happened too often to be a coincidence. I guess it was better than flipping a coin. And who even had a coin?
  • When a bride and groom came from different towns, they had to publicly post their intention to marry in both towns. They often married in the bride's town and lived in the groom's town. The groom was more likely to have a house or land in his town.

There are always exceptions to the rules. My 2nd great grandparents bucked the rules. Antonio from Sant'Angelo a Cupolo moved to Colomba's town when they married. I've been studying documents from her town of Santa Paolina. It seems her family was better educated, had better professions, and owned vineyards. It must have made more sense for Antonio to move to Colomba's town.

But this family kept rewriting the rules. Two of Colomba's brothers moved to the next town, Tufo. Tufo is famous for its vineyards to this day. My 2nd great grandparents followed the brothers to Tufo after their 1st baby died. They lived there long enough to have 2 sons. When one son died, the family of 3 moved back to Antonio's hometown. After having a few more kids, Antonio became my 1st ancestor to come to America.

As I went back further, I found that Colomba's mother came from another town called Apice. Colomba's parents married in Apice, but lived in Santa Paolina. This bolsters my idea that Colomba's family was more well-off than others.

So what's your rush? Do you really want a family tree that someone else put together? Someone who may have done a careless job? Or do you want to appreciate your ancestry? Do you want to know how they made a living, and why they emigrated? Do you want to try to understand their sorrow when child after child died in infancy?

Don't rush through your family tree building. Learn, experience, and savor the day-to-day culture of your ancestors. It's the history of you.