Your Family Tree Checkup/Tune-up List

We've all heard our fellow genealogy fans say it. "I wish I'd written down sources when I first started my family tree." By now I hope we're all being more thoughtful about our family research as we do it.

When I find a new document for my family tree, I follow all the steps to make sure nothing slips through the cracks:

• Crop or enhance the image if needed.
• Save it using my preferred file-naming convention (LastnameFirstnameEventYear).
• Add a title and source information to the image's file properties.
• Drag it into my family tree and add the source citation to the new facts.
• Put it in my to-be-filed folder so I can make my weekly backup copies before putting it in its proper folder.

But sometimes we can get too busy or distracted to do a perfect job. That's why we all need a checkup/tune-up list for our family tree.

Keep your family tree healthy with regular checkup/tune-up tasks.

Top Tune-up Tasks

Here are several items to review in your tree right now to see where you were going too fast for your own good.

In your desktop software:

• DATES. Sort your index of individuals by birth date. Scroll to the bottom to see who's completely missing a year or an estimated year (see When to Use Estimates in Your Family Tree).
• PLACES. View your list of places to see if anything looks wrong. Sometimes I press Ctrl+v to paste in a town, but I paste something else that I forgot I copied.
• MEDIA. Check your media files for any uncategorized items. If you aren't using categories, they're a big help as your tree grows.
• SOURCES. See if your list of source titles has unlinked citations at the bottom of the list. This week I found a very surprising 77 unlinked citations. I have to view them one at a time to figure out what happened. In some cases I need to attach the right source to a fact. In other cases, I need to delete the empty citation.
• NAMES. The other day I found a man in my family tree named Innnocenzo with 3 Ns. If your list of people isn't too long, scan it for obvious typos.

Make it a routine to spot-check these aspects of your family tree.

In your online tree:

• NAMES and DATES. Find the "list of all names" feature. On Ancestry.com you'll find it in the Tree Search panel. You may not be able to sort the list, but you can scan it for missing births, missing names, and typos. I found an "unknown" at the top of my list, but when I viewed the person in my desktop family tree, he had a name. It turns out I'd accidentally marked his name Private in Family Tree Maker. The only way I could have discovered this is with the online list of all names.
• GEDCOM. Export the latest GEDCOM file for your tree so you can use Family Tree Analyzer to give it a proper review. FTA has wonderful error-finding features (see How to Work Out Errors in Your Family Tree).

In your folders:

• LOOSE FILES. Everyone has their preferred way to store digital family tree files (see 3 Rules for Naming Digital Genealogy Documents). Some people store items by family name, and others use elaborate color-coding. My method is to have a folder for each major type of document, including:
  • census
  • certificates (vital records)
  • draft cards
  • immigration
  • naturalization, etc.
  Do you have any items waiting for you to file them away? I check my to-be-filed folder each Sunday morning before I do my computer backup.
  
  If you're a paper person, how's that pile of documents on your desk doing?

Use Safeguards

I moved to a new computer a couple of weeks ago and made some changes. I have access to 1 Terabyte of cloud storage on Microsoft OneDrive. All the files I keep on the cloud are also on my hard drive, and they synchronize automatically.

It gives me peace of mind to know all my family tree files uploaded to the cloud all the time. That means my old computer, which I plan to take along when I travel, will always have access to the latest files.

For more safety, I copy my newest files to two external hard drives each Sunday morning (see Quick and Easy Family Tree Backup Routine). It's a ritual.

Upgrade your backup plan to protect your family tree research.

Why go to all this trouble? Well, have you ever spent a marathon day adding new info to your family tree? Like a bunch of 1950 census pages? I have those marathon days at least 5 days a week. How would you like to lose your most productive day of genealogy research?

I hope you care enough about the tremendous work of art you're creating to give it all the attention it needs. It may sound like a pain in the neck, but when you make it a routine, it feels natural. And you'll see it's worth all the effort.

How to See Your Cousin Connections More Clearly

My 1st cousin Nick tested with AncestryDNA and appears in my match list as my 1st cousin. He's in my mother's match list as her nephew—exactly as expected. My mother and Nick's mother are sisters.

But Nick found someone very unexpected in his DNA match list. My dad! Hearing this, I checked Dad's match list. There was my maternal cousin Nick, listed as Dad's 5th–8th cousin.

How on earth is my maternal-side cousin connected to my dad other than by marriage? I know Nick's paternal grandmother Carmela came from the same town as my paternal grandfather. There must be some connection in the town of Colle Sannita.

This has been a mystery for a few years now. I've done extensive research on Nick's paternal family tree. But I never found a blood relationship to my dad. I couldn't catch a break in solving this mystery.

Until now.

Two weeks ago, the NYC Municipal Archives put their vital records collection online (see 'How to Make Your Own Genealogy Correspondence Database' for the link). The majority of my relatives in America lived in New York City. So I had plenty of documents to gather.

As I worked through my NYC relatives, one document held a big surprise for me. It was the 1927 death record of Raffaele Cocca. Raffaele is Nick's great grandfather—the father of his paternal grandmother Carmela.

This newly available NYC death record rewrote my cousin's ancestry.

The surprise on this death record was Raffaele's mother's name. I expected it to be Carmina, but it was Bellangela. We know death records can be unreliable because the informant may not know the right details. But I had to investigate.

I have all available vital records from Colle Sannita on my computer. I renamed the files to make them searchable (see 'Make Your Digital Genealogy Documents Searchable') by a person's name. Did I have a Bellangela Cocca in my records? I did, and she was the only person with this name. I had her marriage documents.

My mistake was instantly clear. It all came down to one wrong choice I made a long time ago. I had given Nick's grandmother Carmela the wrong father! Carmela's father (Nick's great grandfather) was not Giovanni Raffaele Cocca. He was Raffaele Luigi Cocca. That's who died in the Bronx in 1927. That's who was the son of Bellangela Cocca.

This correction completely altered the ancestry of Nick's grandmother Carmela. Could I find that mysterious DNA connection between Nick and Dad now?

Using the Relationship Calculator

One of my favorite features of Family Tree Maker is the Relationship Calculator tool. FTM shows the relationship of every person to the root person beneath their name. But sometimes there's more than one relationship. The Relationship Calculator spells out all possible relationships.

I used the calculator to see who had more than one relationship. I started with Nick and myself, but it showed only the expected 1st cousin relationship. Next I compared Nick's father to my father. Gasp! There were 2 relationships. It showed their brother-in-law relationship. But there was a 2nd, more complicated relationship.

FTM's Relationship Calculator, and especially the Relationship Chart, are crucial for understanding complex relationships.

Granted, this doesn't sound like the relationship I was hoping to find. Nick's father is the 1st cousin 3 times removed (1C3R) of the wife of my father's 3rd great uncle. Clear as mud.

When you see a crazy relationship like that, you need a visual. Click the "View Relationship Chart" button in the Relationship Calculator. The chart helped me follow the path from Dad to my uncle. It showed me that:

• My father's 3rd great uncle was Onofrio diPaola, born in 1807.
• Onofrio's wife was Donata Viola, born in 1815.
• Donata's aunt, Carmina Serafina Marinaro, was the grandmother of Raffaele Luigi Cocca who died in 1927.

This still sounds like more of an in-law connection and not a blood relationship. But when I look at Onofrio and Donata in my family tree, things come into focus.

Onofrio is my 4th great uncle. And we've seen his wife Donata's relationship to Raffaele Luigi Cocca. That means Onofrio and Donata's children are cousins to Dad and me, and cousins to Nick and his father.

They illustrate the shared DNA that put Dad on Nick's match list. But they are not the answer.

Using Color-Coding to Visualize Connections

To visualize these family connections, I turned to Family Tree Maker's color-coding feature (see 'Using Color to Understand Your Family's Last Names'). I've been using colors to highlight my direct ancestors for a long time. I use four colors to tell me which of my grandparents is someone's descendant. I know that yellow=Pietro, magenta=Lucy, green=Adamo, and cyan=Mary.

I added a 5th color, orange, to Nick's father's (my uncle's) direct ancestors. Then I filtered my tree's index to show only my direct ancestors. I wanted to see if any of them now show orange. They do not.

Next, I made my way up to my uncle's earliest known ancestors from Colle Sannita. I color-coded all their descendants dark blue. No one—not a single one—was one of my direct ancestors.

What I did find was two blue or orange color-coded people who married a cousin of mine. One of these people was Donata Viola whose relationship I explained above. The other is Nick's 2nd great grandfather Giuseppe. His 1st wife was my 2C5R. But her children have no direct connection to my cousin Nick.

Then I noticed an unusual case: Maria Teresa Iacobaccio. She is a direct descendant of the same Marinaro ancestor as Donata Viola. She carries only the blue color-code, so she is not Nick's ancestor, but she is his 2C5R. Maria Teresa married the son of Nick's 4th great grandfather. All 6 of their children have the blue color-code, so they all have a connection to Nick's ancestors.

Here's the unusual part. Of Maria Teresa's 8 great grandparents:

• 6 are my 7th great grandparents
• 2 are Nick's 6th great grandparents

Without the color-coding, I may not have found this.

Some extra color-coding in FTM is the only way I was able to find the unusual case of Maria Teresa.

Maria Teresa is not THE missing link between Nick and Dad because she isn't either one's ancestor. But she is a textbook case of how a long family history in one town can turn our DNA into a stew (see 'The DNA Problem We Aren't Talking About').

Drawing a Conclusion and Making a Plan

I've wondered for years what sort of relationship Nick and Dad have. The answer is: distant. They are, after all, a 5th–8th cousin match. They share only 11 cM, or less than 1% of their DNA. So it always made sense that if they shared a common ancestor, that person might be from the 1600s or earlier. Without access to church records, I can't document that type of relationship.

But I can document relatives who might pass along some of the common ancestor's DNA. With deep roots in one town, countless Colle Sannita descendants share some amount of DNA. Families in that southern Italian town intermarried for centuries. One person in my family tree had 36 different relationships to Nick's grandmother. Every single one of them was an in-law connection.

The unusual case of Maria Teresa Iacobaccio is the best I can do for now—but I'm not finished trying. I've been working on my genealogy masterpiece to connect EVERYONE from Colle Sannita in one family tree (see 'Why My Family Tree is Exploding in Size'). I may find fresh facts that point to a closer relationship between Nick and Dad.

With new color-coding in place, the next unusual connection won't get lost in the shuffle. Can this type of highlighting help you spot hidden relationships?

How to Make Your Own Genealogy Correspondence Database

One of my genealogy dreams came true on March 16, 2022. The New York City Municipal Archives put all their vital records online for free! I've visited the archives 3 times to view my family documents. I had to pay a small fee for a hard copy of the most important ones.

For years I've been making note of the document numbers for dozens of New York City records that were not online. Look for the numbers when you see the NYC vital records indexes in your Ancestry.com search results. Using those numbers, I've downloaded 88 vital records so far.

A New Family Tree Research Tool

And that brings me to today's topic. I downloaded documents for relatives who I knew were part of a conversation I'd had with someone in the past. It may have been someone who emailed me or who contacted me on Ancestry. But who was it? How can I share this important document with them?

I knew it was time for yet another spreadsheet!

Two years ago, Ancestry was rolling out an update to its messaging system. People who already had the new system didn't like it. So I began copying my earliest conversations into a Word document. The idea was to make all my conversations easily searchable. I hadn't finished copying when the new messaging format arrived.

This database is a simple way to find out who wrote to you about which branch of the family tree.

This time I'll make things simpler. Instead of copying entire conversations, I'll categorize the messages in a spreadsheet. I'm calling mine "genealogy-correspondence.xlsx." My spreadsheet has 6 column headings:

• Surname—the main last name(s) we were discussing
• Town—this helps me keep our possible connection straight
• Correspondent—their name, email address
• Date—when the conversation began
• Facts—important facts to help identify who we're talking about
• Platform—where the conversation took place

Building and Using the Database

Whenever I launch a new genealogy practice like this, I don't let the size of the task overwhelm me. I'll start by adding my most recent Ancestry conversations. Then I'll look for ones I need—like the person who wrote to me about a cousin who died when her stove caught fire. (I have her death certificate now.) Then I'll add more and more whenever I have time.

The beauty of this database is you won't lose track of old connections that your family tree needs today. I'm sure as you review your messages, you'll find forgotten connections you made long ago.

When I found this death record, I knew I had to share it with the person who remembers this story. But who was that?

Can you remember all the genealogy conversations you've had with potential relatives? I can't! I know you'll rediscover a lot of forgotten clues as you build your database.

And the best thing about this spreadsheet is you can sort by any column and search for every mention of a name or place. The next time you find something that makes you wonder who else should know about it, check your correspondence database.

My focus with this genealogy blog is on applying business practices to genealogy. That type of discipline pays off for me every single day. This is bound to be one more tool that will be indispensable to us all.

And speaking of genealogy tools:

• This Genealogy Research Log Boosts Your Efficiency
• Keep These Genealogy Resources Always Within Reach
• What's in Your Genealogy Toolbox?