How to Deal with the Worst Document Handwriting

Discovering where my 2nd great grandmother was born was a genealogy victory. No one else in my extended family knew about this town. They only knew that some ancestors came from somewhere in Avellino, Italy. I'm the one who gave it a name: Santa Paolina in the province of Avellino.

In a nutshell, here's how I discovered her hometown:

• Her eldest son's U.S. WWII draft registration card said he was born in Tufo, Avellino (find out more). I searched that town's vital records.
• The records told me his mother's family came from nearby Santa Paolina. I searched that town's vital records.
• There I found my 2nd great grandparents' 1871 marriage documents and my 2nd great grandmother's 1845 birth record. Victory!
  

Once I knew the town, I could research my family. I used the Antenati website to build several generations of her Consolazio family. (That name itself was a recent discovery.) But my 3rd great grandmother who married a Consolazio had no relatives in Santa Paolina. Where did she come from?

Her 1898 death record from Santa Paolina had the answer. She was born in another town called Apice. I don't know how Rufina, my 3rd great grandmother, met her husband when their towns are 10 miles apart. Back then, transportation involved mules or horses.

A Tough Challenge

This got me excited to explore the vital records from Apice. Then I got a look at those vital records! The town of Apice has some of the worst vital records I've ever seen. The handwriting is atrocious, and I swear the clerk routinely left letters out of names. Amazingly, I did identify Rufina's ancestors, including all 8 of her great grandparents. They are my 6th great grandparents, all born in the early 1700s.

Building my 3rd great grandmother's family tree from AWFUL documents required a helpful tool.

Chasing down all those names was a challenge, and I may have some of the last names spelled wrong. But my family tree mission is to connect as many people as possible from my ancestral hometowns. I'd like to piece together a lot more Apice families. It's the horrible handwriting that slows me down.

The other night I forced myself to go through all 112 Apice birth records for 1816, the year Rufina was born. I'd already downloaded the files to my computer, so my goal was to rename each file, making them searchable. It was torture. I had to guess at many last names. I hope that other documents, written by a better clerk, will make the family names clearer. Literally.

A Helpful Research Tool

When I first tried to tackle the Apice documents, I created a companion file as an aid. Someday this town's last names will be as familiar to me as those from my grandfathers' hometowns. But until then, my companion document is a necessity.

My document is an Excel file, which makes alphabetizing a snap. But you can use a text file or Word document, too. Here's all it contains:

• Name. I record my best guess for every last name I see. As I review more records, I check what I think I see against what I recorded in my spreadsheet.
• Alternate. It's typical to see variations in Italian names, particularly in the prefix or final letter. Giannini/Giannino, deMarco/diMarco. I make note of variations to assure myself I've seen this before.
• Cognomix results. That refers to an Italian last-name website that tells you where in Italy you'll find a particular last name. Whenever I add a name to the spreadsheet, I check this resource to see if the name exists in Apice or in towns nearby. It's reassuring to find the name still in Apice because I know I'm spelling it right. I can also consult the Italian White Pages online to see if the name is in the area.

You'll need another type of resource for names that aren't from Italy, of course. Consider censuses for your town, directories, and newspaper articles.

One last thing I did in this spreadsheet is a bit of color-coding:

• A green background in the name field means I'm pretty confident about the spelling.
• Red text in the Cognomix results field confirms the name still exists in that town today.

You can find lots of help online for deciphering bad handwriting. (Go to the FamilySearch Wiki and search for the word handwriting.) You can compare letters from the word you can't quite understand to similar shapes on the same page. Can you confirm that the first letter is a capital P? Do some of the letters match a word you can read because of its context?

But last names can be a big problem. It helps so much if you get familiar with the language. For instance, I know a last name in Italy won't start with a W or contain a K.

Don't give up when the town scribe had the worst handwriting imaginable.

Here's how you can overcome the worst handwriting in your genealogy research:

• Get familiar with last names from the place you're researching.
• Get in-language handwriting tips from FamilySearch.org.
• Use directories and other tools to see if what you think is a name is actually a name.
• Keep a log (like my spreadsheet) while reviewing documents from a particular place.

I can't go back further than my 6th great grandparents from Apice unless the town's church records go online. But I want to keep exploring the town and find links to any DNA matches. This spreadsheet is critical to my research. Will it help you, too?

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.