Collect Important Family Places to 'Tour' Anytime

I've had 16 homes in my life. And that's not counting college dorms or the months my family lived with relatives. It's a lot to keep track of. I do have a list of the 16 addresses along with some details in my ongoing biography Word document. But I wanted something better.

I turned to Google Earth for a far more visual way of storing these addresses. Now I can "fly" from home to home: starting in the Bronx where I was born, flying out to California, then back to the east coast, ever-so-briefly to Indiana, then several more stops on the east coast.

How can you use Google Earth for genealogy? You can create several collections of places, each with a unique name. I named my first collection Houses. What if you created a collection of all the addresses you have for a certain branch of the family? I could collect all the past addresses of my Ohio cousins or my western Pennsylvania cousins.

Take a virtual visit to your family's past anytime you choose.

What I found infinitely enjoyable was collecting places from my vacations. I used my photos to help me remember and find hotels, restaurants, landmarks, and more. I was so excited to find the magical side street in Lyon, France, where I had the dinner of a lifetime. I'd forgotten the name of our hotel in Lyon, unfortunately. So I used Google Earth to roam the streets, pulling details from my memory, and I found it!

Preserving these details in this 100% visual way will be a treasure for the rest of my life. I did the same for a little town near Nice, France, and for Milano, Italy, but I have many more vacation destinations to do.

To start building your collections, you'll need a free Google account. Your collections get saved to your Google Drive. To save a place to a collection, use the magnifying glass icon to search for the address. Then choose Add to Collection. Click the Replace button (a misleading label) to change the title of the place, add a description, and even upload a photo. It can be your own photo or one you capture there in Google Earth.

I lived in California as an infant and didn't return to the west coast until 2016. I made sure to visit my old house and take a few photos. I attached the best one to this address in my collection. I also added something no one else can: a photo of the house under construction in 1959.

When you want to take a virtual tour of your saved places, open your collection. If it isn't already open, find it in Google Drive and double-click it to launch Google Earth. Once it's open in Google Earth, click the Present button.

Use family photos for landmarks and you can find those important places in Google Earth.

The globe will spin and zoom in on the first location. You can use your mouse or the onscreen +/- buttons to zoom in or out some more. There will be a big panel on the right showing an image of the place or landmark. Sometimes you can click More info in this panel to scroll through photos of the place. Close that panel to see more options. You can drag and drop the little person icon to a spot on the map and have a street-side view of what's around. That works the same as it does in Google Maps.

Back in Present mode, you can keep clicking the right arrow until you've flown to all the locations. Or you can click the Table of Contents and choose any one of your saved places to visit.

Which collections would you like to create? How about adding places from your family photo collection? Imagine adding photos of the family gathered at that location. I guarantee you're going to have a lot of fun.

You can fly from one favorite place to another using Google Earth. Here's a flight from Lyon, France, to Milano, Italy.

Using Shared Matches and Genealogy to Solve a Mystery

When shopping for a new home, you have to look past the dirty carpet to envision what the house can be. That's true in genealogy research, too. You have to look past the mistakes in other family trees to envision the truth and find the correct facts.

Focus on the Right Branch

The other day I wanted to figure out my connection to a DNA match with an Irish last name. Let's call him Danny Irish. Where does he tie into my all-Italian family tree? Based on our shared matches alone, I narrowed down our common family tree branch as follows. We should connect through:

• My maternal grandmother Mary Sarracino's line. Why? Because Mom and my maternal 1st and 2nd cousins are in our shared matches list. Going further back, we should connect through:
• Grandma's mother Maria Rosa Saviano's line. Why? Because some of my Saviano cousins are in our shared matches list. Going further back, we should connect through:
• Maria Rosa Saviano's mother Colomba Consolazio's line. Why? Because some of our shared matches connect to me only through the Consolazio branch. Going further back, we should connect through:
• Colomba Consolazio's father's maternal Ricciardelli line. Why? Because some of our shared matches connect to me only through the Ricciardelli branch. And that puts our connection in the town of Santa Paolina, Avellino, Italy.

Can you see the power of shared matches now? With no other clues, I can see that Danny Irish connects to my 4th great grandparents, Gaetano Consolazio and Colomba Ricciardelli.

Danny Irish's tiny tree has only the names of his father and his Irish grandparents. He has no maternal branch at all. AncestryDNA says he has 16% Italian DNA, so he could have an Italian great grandparent. I had to find his maternal line.

When my 3rd great uncle changed his name, none of his descendants could find his past. But I did. The key was waiting in a shared DNA match list.

Fill in Their Tree's Blanks

A search for his deceased father gave me the name of his wife Hilda, and she has an Italian last name. Based on obituaries and other clues, I'm confident Hilda is the mother of Danny Irish. I continued searching for clues about her.

I found several family trees with Hilda's father's family, but they all hit a dead end quickly. No one seemed to know anything beyond Hilda's Italian grandparents' names.

I tried to pull some research-worthy clues from these family trees. I took all their names and dates as hints, not facts. I rolled my eyes as tree after tree called Luigi's wife Felechlr. That's what's in the transcription of the 1900 U.S. census. In the words of Dr. Evil, "How about no!" Right away I guessed it was Felicella, a name I've seen in my target town of Santa Paolina.

My "break" came from a link to a Geneanet family tree that called her Felicella Marano. The name Marano is from Santa Paolina. And this tree says her mother was a Censullo. That's another Santa Paolina name.

Things started out beautifully because Felicella's supposed mother was my 2C4R. Finally, a blood relative! I used the Santa Paolina vital records to add all the children of Luigi Marano and Maria Filomena Censullo to my family tree.

Then I saw the problem. This couple married in 1874 and had 9 children between 1875 and 1894. The Geneanet tree claims that Felicella is also their daughter, born in 1859. The couple was born in 1851. It doesn't work. And there is no Felicella Marano (or any variant of her first name) in the town's vital records. The Geneanet tree also had Luigi Marano's ancestors all wrong. I know because I have his detailed marriage records.

Turning to the censuses, I realized Felicella died in New Jersey between 1900 and 1910. Without her death certificate, I'm stuck. I can't seem to find her arrival in America even though I know which children should be traveling with her.

I've been ignoring this mystery DNA match for a long time. Now I have the right tool to use to figure him out.

Use What You Know About the Branch

I noticed one family tree was mixing siblings with 2 different last names. Yet this tree said they were children of the same Luigi Marano and Maria Filomena Censullo. I searched the town's vital records for that extra last name, Dato. I found a Maria Felicia Dato (Felicella could have been her nickname) born in Santa Paolina at the right time. And what do you know? She married my 3rd great uncle, Luigi Consolazio.

I've seen only one of my families completely change their last name. Their name is too hard for an American mouth to pronounce. They switched to a bit of a soundalike, so it was a logical change. But this would be changing Consolazio to Rossi, which isn't logical to me. Still, this couple had 2 children in Santa Paolina whose births match the 1900 census. And the names of their American-born children match the names of Luigi and Felicella's parents.

I looked at my relationship calculator spreadsheet. (Get yours when you visit "How to Find Your Exact Relationship to Any Cousin.") If Danny Irish is the great grandchild of my 3rd great uncle, he's my 3C1R. AncestryDNA says we could be 3rd cousins or 3rd cousins once removed. How about that?

As for the name change, the only rays of hope are that Luigi Rossi/Rosse used the middle initial C (for Consolazio?) and he was a shoemaker (as was my Uncle Luigi back in Italy).

Then came good news. I searched for "Maria Felicia Dato" and found her coming to America in 1893! She is 35 years old, traveling with her 2 young Consolazio children. They're bound for Orange, New Jersey. A few lines up on the ship manifest is Paolina Consolazio, my 3rd great aunt and Luigi's sister. She has her 2 sons with her, making it a sure match.

Let's go back to my original estimate about where Danny Irish belongs:

• I knew from our shared matches that he was at the very least on my maternal grandmother Mary's branch.
• More shared matches pointed to her Saviano branch, and to her mother's Consolazio branch.
• Still more shared matches came from my Consolazio 3rd great grandfather's Ricciardelli branch.

That all proves to be true!

Put Shared Matches to Work for You

When you want to solve a mystery DNA match, first look at the DNA matches you both share. Can you identify any of them? Do the ones you know point to a specific branch of your family tree?

Use this method to find the best branch for your match, then get researching.

When you isolate a branch for your mystery match, hunt down their people until you can make sense of it all. If they don't have a tree that's much help, some of your shared matches may. And more trees may turn up from non-DNA testers.

Narrowing down to a specific branch will help you focus on the right people and records. "Danny Irish" is a mystery match no more.

Choosing and Using the Most Reliable Sources

I'm so close to finishing the source citation clean-up project I started in January. It's been massive. My tree has more than 57,000 people, so I have tons of citations. And this review doesn't include my 1,000s of Italian vital record citations. I'll get to them next.

This review involves making sure each citation has:

• facts about the source
• specifics of the citation
• a link to the record, and
• an image if available.

Also, importantly, I'm making sure citations get shared, not duplicated. For example, bad Ancestry syncs caused one census citation for a family of 8 to split into 8 source citations. It was mayhem. That ends now.

I went through my source list alphabetically. But I saved a few big ones for last. They included the:

• Social Security Death Index (SSDI)
• Social Security Applications and Claims Index
• U.S. Public Records Indexes, volumes 1 and 2
• U.S. City Directories
• Find a Grave

For my U.S. Public Records Index source citations, my goal was to delete each one where I had a better source. Why? Because too many times I've seen this source say that a person's birthday was the 1st of the month when I knew better. These were estimates. They were definitely not reliable. So, if I had a reliable source for someone's birthday, I deleted their Public Records Index citation.

When you have a handful of sources telling you the same facts, do you need them all?

The Most Reliable Sources

Most of my family lived in New York City until the last several decades. That means I have access to many of their birth, marriage, and death records online. These are big clear images of the documents themselves. They haven't been available online for long, so I'm still finding and downloading more and more.

Actual vital record images are very reliable for dates and places. I know my maternal grandmother was born on 25 Oct 1899 even though her grave marker purposely says 1900. Names are subject to spelling errors and variations, but if you keep an open mind, you can gather what you need.

If I have an image of a relative's vital record, any other source that happens to be correct is a supporting source. And some supporting sources are more respected than others. I'm putting my faith in the birth record written on the day. If the SSDI happens to have the same date, it's a nice supporting source. But if a Public Records Index happens to be right too, do I need to cite it? Not if I have the real thing. It's not a reliable source, and it adds nothing.

U.S. WWI and WWII draft registration cards are well respected sources, too. Of course your relatives born in the late 1800s may not be 100% certain about their birth date. So mistakes can happen. But if you've got a young man born in the 1920s registering for the WWII draft, I'd bet he knows his birth date and won't make a mistake.

Post-1890s ship manifests can be reliable, especially for identifying hometowns. Naturalization papers often have a lot of correct dates and places. These are both great to have when they support your most reliable sources.

Make sure you're choosing the most reliable sources for your family tree facts.

Less Reliable Sources

My own birth is on Ancestry.com as an image of a New York City index page. It's not a very clear image, so the certificate number is open to interpretation. And I didn't have a first name on day one, so how could anyone be sure Female Iamarino is me?

Last year I ordered my paternal grandmother's upstate New York birth certificate. I hope I got the certificate number right. She's listed as Female Merino instead of Lucy Iamarino, which is why I couldn't find her for so long. I'm eager to get the certificate to finally confirm her birth date. If it's really the 10th, my dad had it wrong his whole life. And my son was born on her birthday, but we never knew it! My son is 30.

When you have a bad index image or a database of facts pulled from indexes, it can't compare to seeing the original document.

The 1900 U.S. census includes the month and year of each person's birth. How nice! But that's only as reliable as the person who talked to the census taker. A census is a reliable source for home addresses, but not much else. The censuses are fantastic supporting documents unless they have a glaring error.

When I went through my U.S. Public Records Index citations, I planned to keep them only if they were my only source for a name, birth date, or death date. I whittled the citations down from 132 to 37. Most of what I kept is the only source I can find for a contemporary person's date of birth.

The two domestic sources I have left to review are U.S. City Directories and Find a Grave. I love when I find a grave marker image or an obituary on Find a Grave, but I know they're not reliable. My grandmother's grave marker says she was born in 1900 because she hated that she was born in 1899. My aunt told me she requested it that way because otherwise "my mother would kill me." And an obituary writer may not have the facts straight.

I'm sure I'll keep every Find a Grave source citation because they're often the only way to know where someone is buried. But if they disagree with a birth or death date from a reliable source, I won't attach the Find a Grave citation to that fact.

You may not want to launch a months-long review of all your citations, so here's what you can do. Each time you're working on a particular family unit, take a good look at all your citations for them. Can you find a more reliable source for key facts? Is what you have a most reliable source, a solid supporting source, or a less reliable source?