How I Stumbled on a Clue to Bust a Brick Wall

Last week I was trying to find a particular birth record on the New York City Municipal Archives' website (see Day 5 of 7 Days to a Better Family Tree). I didn't have the certificate number, so I did a broad search for births in the Bronx within a span of years.

The certificates in my search results didn't show names—only numbers. I had to open each one to see if it was the birth record I needed. One record struck me as a possible misspelling of my own last name, Iamarino. The baby's name, written twice on the document, looks like Danette or Dometta Amarino. The parents are Francesco Amarino and Maria Iacobacia.

That combination of names rang a bell. My 3rd great uncle Francesco (Saverio) Iamarino married (Anna) Maria Iacobaccio. They emigrated to New York. My dad remembers two of their U.S.-born children as his "aunts" Lina and Filly, as well as Filly's sons.

But baby "Danette," born in the Bronx in 1898, was not someone I'd ever heard mentioned. Was she really my 1st cousin 3 times removed, or was this combination of parents' names a coincidence?

I was about to delete her downloaded birth record. But then I took another look at her potential father in my family tree. I had only his 1855 Italian birth record and his 1937 New York death certificate.

Found by accident, downloaded on a hunch, this birth certificate helped break down a brick wall in my family tree.

I needed to find some censuses for this family. My search on Ancestry delivered the family in 1900, 1915, and 1920. I found "Aunt" Lina on the 1900 census using what I always imagined was her real name: Nicolina.

But there was a surprise on the 1900 census. Nicolina had a 2-year-old sister named Antonetta.

Hold on a minute! I said that name aloud the way a Southern Italian immigrant might pronounce it: Ondonet. (See Look Past the Misspellings to Find Your Ancestors.) The 1898 birth certificate I found by accident was baby Antonetta, misunderstood by the clerk as Danette or Dometta. She was my cousin after all.

The New York State census for 1915 further supported "Danette" being my cousin. This year the family included both "aunts" Lina and Filly. And also my newly discovered "aunt" Antonetta. But there was another surprise. The family added a son in 1903 named John. My dad and I had never heard of him, either.

The 1920 census held yet another surprise. Lina is missing, having married in 1919. Antonette and John are there, and they wrote Filly's name as Filomino. This tells me her real name was Filomena, as I'd always suspected. Later in life she Americanized it to Phyllis.

But the surprise was the family's location. They're not in the Bronx, even though the head of the household would die there 17 years later. They're in North Brunswick, New Jersey.

You might think I would dismiss this as being the wrong family. But I knew there was a connection to New Brunswick, which borders North Brunswick. I have a few 1930s photographs of my dad and his family standing beside a car in front of the New Brunswick City Yards.

It was a collection of old photos in front of the "New Brunswick City Yards" that told me I was on the right track.

I wish I could find this building! But New Brunswick has been rebuilt over the years, thanks to Rutgers University and factory closings. I searched for historic photos of the area with no luck.

The connection to North Brunswick interested me because I lived there in 1985–1986. I discovered they lived in the village of Adams Station. I actually worked in that village and lived a mile up the road.

I really needed to find the family in the 1930 census, but I couldn't find them by name. So I searched the census records by location only. North Brunswick, New Jersey, had only 2 districts in 1930, so I could browse them page by page.

They conducted the 1930 census in April—2 months after my 3rd great uncle's wife died. Will her family still be there? Aunt Filly was with her husband in New Brunswick. Aunt Lina was with her husband in the Bronx. Their brother John may have married that year. I had 74 pages of census to go through. With 20 pages left to go, I found them!

Just as I was losing hope, I spotted the name Marino. There was Frank, a 77-year-old widow, his 25-year-old son John, and John's new wife Rosie. This census had no street names or house numbers. It was simply the Adams section of North Brunswick.

I went on to find John, the son of my 3rd great uncle, in the 1940 and 1950 censuses. Although he was in a different house each time, he was always two-and-a-half miles from where I lived 13 years after his death.

I've spent hours gathering this family's records and putting tons of facts into my family tree. I've taken this family in unexpected directions. And it was all because a name on a random birth certificate seemed to me like it should be my family.

If you have a hunch about a slightly "off" genealogy find, follow your instincts. Do the research and prove that the person is either in or out of your family tree.

A Theory of Relativity to Drive You Crazy

Have you seen the meme of Albert Einstein drawing his family tree on a blackboard? He says to himself, "So that would make my second cousin once removed the great aunt of my first cousin twice removed…no, wait, that can't be right."

You know what? He's actually onto something. If you follow the rules, and ignore your known connection to someone, things can get weird.

My father's parents had the same unusual last name—Iamarino. We never gave it much thought. But once I got interested in genealogy, I wanted to know if they had a connection. It turns out my grandparents, Pietro and Lucy Iamarino, were 3rd cousins.

The dotted line around one instance of Francesco and Cristina tells me they're in my family tree twice.

Pietro and Lucy's shared 2nd great grandparents appear twice in my ancestor chart. They appear on Grandpa Pietro's line and on Grandma Lucy's line.

If we apply relationship rules to my family, Grandpa Pietro's 3rd cousin (Grandma Lucy) is my 3rd cousin twice removed (3C2R). My 3C2R's son (Dad) is my 4C1R. And I'm my own 5th cousin!

A Scientific Experiment to Prove the Theory

To test out this idea, I searched my family tree for another one of Grandpa Pietro's 3rd cousins. I chose a different set of his 2nd great grandparents. Then I clicked my way down 5 generations to one of their 2nd great grandchildren, Domenico.

Family Tree Maker correctly tells me Domenico is my 3C2R and his daughter is my 4C1R. So, if you put aside that fact that Grandpa Pietro married his 3rd cousin Grandma Lucy, Lucy would be my 3C2R. And her son (Dad) would be my 4C1R. Dad's children (like me) would be my 5th cousin. And my kids would be my 5C1Rs!

And that's when Albert Einstein's mind was blown. Don't you think "I am my own 5th cousin" should be my new email signature?

Cousins marrying cousins adds a new level of mind-blowing relationships to a family tree.

Applying the Lesson to DNA Matches

Aside from the fact that it's funny, I bring this up for a more practical reason. We see that different interpretations of a relationship can co-exist. Doesn't this help make sense of some DNA relationships?

I'm looking at one DNA match in my list. Ancestry DNA says she's most likely my 4th–6th cousin. But I know where she fits in my family tree, and she's my 3C2R. There's another, closer relative in my list. I know she is my 3rd cousin, but again, Ancestry DNA says she's most likely my 4th–6th cousin.

We know DNA passes down randomly from generation to generation. Even full siblings can have very different mixtures of their shared ancestors' DNA. Each of your DNA matches has a laundry list of possible relationships to you.

Look beyond the labels your DNA website uses to the groupings they use. Ancestry DNA groups your matches as:

• Parent/Child (both my parents tested, so I see them in this group)
• Close Family (this group includes my 1st and 2nd cousins, plus Dad's 1st cousin and her children)
• Extended Family (these range from Mom's 2nd cousin to Dad's 3rd cousin, and even a 5C1R with multiple connections to me)
• Distant Family (this is where I see the 3C and 3C2R I mentioned above, plus every other relationship under the sun)

Many people in your family tree can have multiple relationships to you. What really matters to you is where they fit in the tree. Don't get hung up on the labels.

Do you have ancestors who married a cousin? What does that make you to yourself?

And speaking of crazy relationships:

• Untangling Our Twisted Family Relationships
• Why DNA Matches Appear Closer Than They Are
• The DNA Problem We Aren't Talking About

Another Way to Find Errors in Your Family Tree

I've added so many people to my family tree this year! I synchronized my Family Tree Maker (FTM) file with Ancestry on Sunday morning. It said I'd added 310 people the day before. That's a new record! I decided it was time for a thorough error check.

FTM has a built-in error report, and I wanted to compare it to that of Family Tree Analyzer. The differences surprised me. The second listing I saw on my FTM error report was for Harold Gibbons. He had a duplicate birth fact that Family Tree Analyzer didn't see.

When I took a look at Harold Gibbons in my tree, I saw both 22 Sep 1899 and 26 Sep 1899 listed as his birth date. One date came from an index of New York City births. The other came from a World War I draft registration card.

The birth index said Harold's 1899 Manhattan birth certificate number was 37387. The NYC Municipal Archives has digitized their vital records, and they're available online. So I checked to see when Harold, my cousin Rod's uncle, was really born.

This report gives a different account of the errors—or possible errors—in your family tree.

When I saw his birth record, his name showed my first problem. The certificate says Harold T. Gibbons. (Why didn't they spell out his middle name?) The WWI draft registration card I'd saved for him says Harold Patrick Gibbons.

I checked the parents on the birth certificate to see if they were a match. Yes: John Gibbons and Lillian Lanigan are the parents I expected to find. The certificate shows the date of birth as 26 Sep 1899—that agrees with the NYC birth index, but not the WWI draft card.

Now I knew that draft card belonged to another man. Ironically, I had researched the wrong Harold's place of work. I even included a photograph of the building and a description of the business.

I deleted the draft card, building photo, and the facts for the wrong Harold. Now the right Harold's birth certificate is there to document his date and place of birth.

And that was only the first item I checked from the error report.

How to Create Your Error Report

If you use Family Tree Maker:

• Click the Publish tab at the top of the program.
• Click Person Reports in the left column and choose Data Errors Report.
• Click Create Report, then click Cancel to make some enhancements:
  • Choose to include All individuals.
  • Click the first button under Data Errors Report Options to open the Errors to Include dialog box. I chose to deselect two choices:
    • Spouses have the same last name (so what?)
    • Marriage date missing (that's because the document is not available)
• Close the dialog box, click Generate Report, and wait.

Be patient if you have a big family tree. Go have some tea and cookies.

Family Tree Maker has a built-in error report that may surprised you with its findings.

My report showed a ton of duplicate marriage bann errors, but that isn't an error. I always record two marriage banns for marriages in Italy. That's their marriage process. I wanted to remove these entries from my report. I needed a spreadsheet. I clicked the Share button in the top right corner of Family Tree Maker and chose to Export to CSV file.

Open your CSV file with any spreadsheet software and sort it by error type. Then delete any lines with errors you know you don't need to fix. Then jump in and start checking errors. Delete each line you review/fix, and whittle down the number of errors to check.

If your list is really long, don't get upset. Some items will be non-errors. For example, I see I have a bunch of possible duplicate names. Some documents list a person by different names, and we want to note that. I expect to keep those.

I'm actually happy to see a group of errors that look like this:

Possible duplicate event: Name
Possible duplicate event: Sex
Possible duplicate event: Death
Possible duplicate event: Birth

These duplicates happened in 2019 when my FTM file suffered a disaster. I fix these duplicates whenever I see them, but now, finally, I can get rid of them all.

Use the error report in your family tree software and find mistakes you never knew were there.