How Good Is Your Census Fact-Gathering Routine?

You've probably realized that I spend countless hours buried in Italian vital records. But sometimes I do return to more conventional genealogy documents.

Last week I had a lead on an Italian family that came to America. The lead was a woman's name—an uncommon name that would be easy enough to trace. I soon discovered it was her husband who was my relative; my 2nd cousin twice removed.

When I found this family in several U.S. censuses, I realized I was out of practice with census forms. I hadn't dealt with one in quite a while. So let's have a little refresher course on all the steps to take each time you find a new census sheet.

How to Fully Process Your Census Documents

Since I hadn't added a new census form in a while, it helped that I had an old routine to fall back on. He's the short version, but please take a look at the step-by-step process:

• Follow your routine for how you name the document, assuming that you're downloading a copy.
• Follow your routine for where you file your census documents.
• Before you leave the webpage where you found the document, annotate the image with facts. Copy the URL, the source citation, and more.
• Examine the entire page for all the facts you can add to these people in your family tree.
• Add this fact to your document tracker so you never waste time searching for this document again.

When you're familiar with which facts to find on each census, you can develop a foolproof routine.

How To Squeeze Everything Out of the Census

Each census form captured different facts about the people living in each household. Don't treat a 1900 census the same way you treat a 1940 census. There are different facts in there.

Here is a rundown on which facts the government added or removed from each U.S. census form from 1790 to 1940. And if you prefer a more visual style, see 3 Unique, Key Facts about Every U.S. Federal Census.

Were you surprised at the simplistic questions on the 2020 census? I was.

Simplify Your Genealogy Info Gathering With This Form

Download a free fill-in-the-blank PDF for U.S. census years from 1900–1940. They're great for genealogists who keep binders or folders on their different families.

How can you find your family when their name is always mangled in the census? Search for the neighbors that were nearby decade after decade.

4 Tips for Finding a Missing Census Record

Of course these tips are worthless if you can't find that missing census form. We're at the mercy of transcribers and indexers. And sometimes names are impossible to read. But if you use these 4 tips, you'll increase your chances of finding that missing family:

• Search by address
• Search for the neighbors
• Search for first names only
• If all else fails, consult someone else's family tree for leads.

Be sure to read the practical details on how to use each of these tips to help you in your search.

When I did return to the 1900s and U.S. documents, it helped that I had such a strong routine to fall back on. Now, if you'll excuse me, 1800s Italy is calling me back.

Following the Documents from Marriage to Marriage

Last time, I told you how I'm building, using, and sharing a database of my ancestral hometowns.

On Wednesday, I used it to follow an unbelievable succession of marriages in the early 1800s. By the time I got to a man and wife who managed not to die right away, it was clear how an entire town can come to be related.

As a bit of background, times were tough in the 1800s in rural Italy and elsewhere. Most marriages were arranged, and if your spouse died, you needed another spouse. You needed a man to support you. You needed a woman to raise your children.

Widows and widowers usually remarried fast. It still takes me by surprise. What follows are multiple remarriages, causing connections among a lot of families.

Each marriage yielded more in-laws, babies, and deaths.

It began with the 1810 marriage of Daniele (that's Daniel) Marinaro and Nicoletta Mutino. He was 24 years old and she was 20. After 3½ years of marriage and the birth of 1 child, both Nicoletta and her baby, Giovanni, died in September 1813.

A year later, Daniel tried again. He married 17-year-old Costanza Palmiero. She died after 6 months of marriage. (Meanwhile, I'm gathering, cropping, annotating, and adding all these documents to my family tree as I go.)

Six months later, Daniel gave family life another shot. He married Lucia Rosa Maria Cocca in September 1815. They managed to have a baby, Angelamaria, in 1819. And she didn't die right away!

Things are looking up for Daniel. Until he died in early 1821 at the age of 34. He had 3 short marriages, 2 young brides who died, 1 son who died, and 1 daughter who lived.

But this marriage chain isn't over. Daniel's widow, Lucia Rosa, married Giovannangelo diRuccia, 3 years after Daniel's death. That's a long time between marriages when a young woman has a small child to care for. Daniel and Lucia Rosa's daughter, Angelamaria Marinaro, was 24 when her mother died in 1843. I searched for her in my renamed vital records from the town. I discovered that Angelamaria married Salvatore Petriella in 1835. I'm so happy for her! She lived!

An exhaustive search is a piece of cake with my database and Everything.

Before I follow Angelamaria and her husband, I'm not through with her parents' story. When her mother Lucia Rosa died, her stepfather, Giovannangelo diRuccia, waited 5 years. Then he married Mariantonia Scrocca in 1848. Mariantonia was the widow of Gennaro Giuseppe Viola. He had died 11 years after his marriage to Mariantonia.

I still have to find any more children of these marriages, but my goodness! It took 38 years for this marriage chain not to end in a premature death. Granted, Giovannangelo and Mariantonia married only 12 years before 1860. That's the last year of available death records for the town. They may have died soon after 1860.

As I continue exploring my database, I may learn when survivors Giovannangelo and Mariantonia died. The answer may lie in their children's marriage records. I hope they lived long lives together.

And this, my friends, is the reason for—and the beauty of—my obsessive ancestral town database. It sure can lead to some long sessions of family tree building.

How to Create and Share Your Ancestral Town Database

On Sunday, after finishing a bunch of chores, I was eager to launch Family Tree Maker. I wanted to do one thing. It's something I've been preparing for the last few weeks.

My Own Vital Records Database

You see, in 2017 I downloaded all the available vital records from my ancestral hometowns. These jpg files sit on my computer, organized in folders by year and type of record (birth, marriage, death). Whenever I wanted to search for an ancestor, I could go year-by-year and look at the indexes until I found them.

But there's a much better way. I've been renaming every document image file to include the name of the main person(s) in the vital record. The original image file name of 2 facing 1809 birth records was 007853875_00497.jpg. Now it's 007853875_00497 Carmine Pasquale Zeolla di Antonio & Anna Maria Martuccio di Giovanni.jpg. The image includes the birth records for:

• Carmine Pasquale Zeolla, son of Antonio
• Anna Maria Martuccio, daughter of Giovanni

In the future, if I need to find either Carmine or Anna Maria, I can locate these documents in a snap.

There are thousands of files in my collection. I want to squeeze every single relative from them. And that'll be way easier if I can search for their names on my computer.

A perfect combination of software makes my public genealogy database possible.

Breaking Through to Another Generation

With that in mind, I've been renaming the vital record files from my great grandmother's hometown. I'd already gone quite far in building her family tree. But I knew there were more ancestors hiding in those files.

Sunday night I hoped to add a generation to her family tree. One by one, I looked at her direct ancestors in Family Tree Maker to see who was missing a death record. Only two of my 5th great grandparents were still dead ends.

I use a Windows program called Everything to search my computer for an ancestor's name. It organizes the results by folder names, so it's easy to see which results are death, birth, or marriage records—and which year they're from.

I found the death records for my two dead-end 5th great grandparents easily. That means I discovered the names of four of my 6th great grandparents. All within a few minutes!

The database I'm creating by renaming the image files is invaluable. I'd love to share it with other descendants of my towns. If they find their ancestor in a list of all my file names, they can pull the original file from the Antenati website.

My database is the best thing ever to happen to my family tree. Now I have a way to share it.

Sharing My Hard Work

To make this database sharable, I need to capture all the file names in hundreds of folders and sub-folders. After researching, I found a reputable Windows program that can do the job. It's called Karen's Directory Printer, and it comes highly recommended.

I put it to work on my grandfather's town of Colle Sannita. I set it up to create a list of each file name and the folder it comes from. Within a couple of minutes the program generated a nearly 40,000-line text file of file names. This is the first time I've had any sense of how many vital records I have for this town!

There are many marriage documents I skipped in the file renaming process. At first I renamed only the marriage documents themselves. That made the couple's names searchable. But the folders also contain marriage banns, birth, and death records for the two families. Usually I rename those extra documents when I'm working on a particular couple.

But lately I've been renaming all the files in a marriage folders. I have a long way to go, but the very old death records are wildly helpful. I've been using them to bring some branches of my family tree back to the 1600s.

What I did for now is create a text file for each of my towns containing the file name every vital record on my computer. I'll regenerate the text files after I rename lots more image files. Finally, I can share this bounty with everyone who has a stake in any of my ancestral hometowns.

I've seen lots of people upset that these Italian documents online aren't searchable. It takes hundreds of man-hours to turn an image collection into searchable text. As long as I'm spending those man-hours, I may as well share the results.

This project will keep me busy for a long time. If you're thinking about doing something similar, there are many benefits:

• If you view and rename batches of files from a town, you will get familiar with the names. This helps you overcome bad handwriting.
• Individual searches for your ancestors become very easy.
• You may find that the whole town's related through marriage.

I'll add links to my database in the Free Genealogy Resources section of this blog. I'll upload the files to my www.forthecousins.com website. And I'll mention them in Facebook groups devoted to individual towns. Maybe I can interest the Antenati site, too.

Don't keep a big important genealogy project to yourself! You've got tons of DNA relatives out there who need your work.

And speaking of document image files:

• How to Create Your Ancestral Hometown Database
• Build Your Own Genealogy Research Library
• 3 Reasons Why Transcribing Every Document Is Not Crazy