16 May 2023

Who Did You Inherit Your Traits From?

Can you inherit your bright-eyed optimism from your ancestors? Popular shows like "Finding Your Roots" and "Who Do You Think You Are?" tell stories about celebrities learning their ancestor shared their personality traits. But are you really a musician because your 3rd great grandfather was?

Science says you can inherit a personality trait *if* there's a physical component to it. You can inherit perfect pitch because it's a physical trait—a physical ability. You can inherit your optimism because it's tied to the oxytocin receptors in your brain.

You can also inherit traits you saw your family members modelling. I tend to react to another driver cutting me off in exactly the same way as my father. I think that's more about watching him drive than inheriting a gene. But you didn't see your 3rd great grandfather modelling his musical skills.

You may be familiar with how DNA works, but have you examined which traits and features you inherited from whom?
You may be familiar with how DNA works, but have you examined which traits and features you inherited from whom?

The Science of Inheritance

I remember learning about trait inheritance in 9th grade biology class. We all have 2 genes for each physical trait, and we pass only one to each child. If dad's genes carry both the dominant brown-eyed trait and the recessive blue-eyed trait, and mom's genes carry only the recessive blue-eyed trait, what are the chances they'll have a blue-eyed child? Do the math to see there's a 50% chance.

Let's take my blue-eyed Mom as an example. Her mother had brown eyes and her father had blue eyes. But she and her 2 siblings did not get brown eyes. That means Grandma passed down the recessive gene she inherited from her blue-eyed father.

It would be nice to think that my entrepreneurial son Chris inherited his skills from his 2nd great grandfather, Giovanni. Giovanni came to America without any type of skilled trade. But somehow, he quickly became the owner of a building with 4 apartments and retail space.

This equation shows how slim the chances were for my sons to be anything but blonde-haired and blue-eyed.
This equation shows how slim the chances were for my sons to be anything but blonde-haired and blue-eyed.

In reality, Chris probably observed his father's attempts to be an entrepreneur, and my years of working as a successful independent contractor. Chris was always determined to never work for someone else. And he's stubborn enough to make it a reality.

My other son, Joe, has long been my clone. He has a strong gene for laziness that I don't have, but he's smart enough to overcome it. He prefers to work alone without asking for help, which is something my father and I share. Many times I see Joe expressing exactly my thoughts on a range of topics. I tend to think that's from his upbringing.

Inheritance in Your Family Tree

Here's an exercise that can be a fun way to raise your family's interest in genealogy. Certain physical traits are dominant while others are recessive, like the brown eyes and blue eyes mentioned above. How many of your family members inherited recessive genes? Who do you think those genes came from?

Trait Dominant Recessive
Earlobes Unattached Attached
Tongue rolling Can do it Can't do it
Dimples Have them Don't have them
Handedness Right-handed Left-handed
Hair Curly Straight
Freckles Have them Don't have them
Toe length 2nd toe longest Big toe longest
Nose width Broad Narrow
Lip width Broad Thin
Eyelashes Long Short

In my case, I inherited a lot of recessive genes and one big dominant one for my curly hair. I don't know which ancestor gave me my left-handedness, but not long ago people discouraged that trait. Ringo Starr's grandmother forced him to act like he was right-handed, but he isn't. He says that's why his style of drumming is so unique. He's playing backwards!

Where do you think your physical traits came from? How about your personality traits?

Want to learn more? See:

09 May 2023

Add Consistency to Your Source Citations

On Friday I finished an ambitious family tree project I started in January. I've been working at it nearly every day, and it was worth it. I've truly fortified my family tree. (See "Take the Time to Improve the Sources in Your Family Tree.")

I reviewed and perfected every single source citation in my enormous family tree! (If you don't have 57,125 people in your tree, you can do this in a lot less time.) The project's two goals were to:

  1. Use a consistent style for each type of source citation. I started building my family tree about 20 years ago, so the older citations had almost no detail. It took me a while to develop my style.
  2. Fix a problem that was happening behind my back. My last laptop was a nightmare. I blame it for most of my failed syncs between Family Tree Maker and Ancestry.com. Those failures were splitting and duplicating my citations. Normally I'll create a citation and share it among all the appropriate family members' facts. But the failed syncs split the citation into 10 citations for 10 family members. This bulked my tree's file size up to 5 gigabytes. It would take forever to save, to back up, to compact, and to store away.

At the end of this project, I cut my tree's file size down to a fifteenth of what it was. Instead of 5 gigabytes, it's 366 megabytes. On my new computer, my tree takes only a moment to save. And copying the file to a backup location takes a second. Plus, I know my source citations are "clean enough to eat off of."

An accident duplicated my source citations and fattened up my family tree file to 15 times its regular size. Here's how I fixed everything.
An accident duplicated my source citations and fattened up my family tree file to 15 times its regular size. Here's how I fixed everything.

How to Make Your Citations Shine

Online-only Tree. If you build and store your family tree online only, your goal is to add citations where there are none. You can't access your citations in one place or share one well-crafted citation with a family.

See if you can access an alphabetical list of everyone in your tree. On Ancestry, go to your tree and click the Tree Search button at the top right. Choose List of all people. Now check each person to see who has facts without sources. Then find the sources! Keep a running list somewhere so you always know where you left off for the day. If your family tree is a normal size, this approach will work for you.

Desktop Tree. If you build your family tree using a desktop program, you can be a lot more efficient. You should have a tab that brings all your citations together, listing them by source title. In Family Tree Maker, I can see on the Sources tab that I have 327 source titles, 87 of which are individual towns in Italy. Apart from Italy, most of my sources are census and immigration records.

I began with the censuses, from the 1851 England Census through the 1950 U.S. Federal Census. For each one, I reviewed each source citation, one at a time. First I went to the head of household in my family tree and opened the census image. Then I found the original record online. (My sources are from Ancestry mostly, with a small number from FamilySearch.) I gathered the details I needed for my source citation. I shared the citation with every appropriate fact and deleted duplicates.

For each type of source, I have a format I stick to. In general, I copy the suggested citation from Ancestry or FamilySearch. (See "Choosing and Using the Most Reliable Sources.") Then I paste the entire citation, plus several more details, into the image's details. Now the image itself tells me where it came from.

With a census or ship manifest, I add the appropriate line number(s). For a census, I spell out the:

  • enumeration district
  • supervisor's district
  • city ward
  • sheet number
  • image number online

Here's how the citation looks for a particular 1930 U.S. Federal Census:

  • Source title: 1930 U.S. Federal Census
  • Citation detail: Year: 1930; Census Place: Bronx, Bronx, New York; Page: 13B; Enumeration District: 0070; FHL microfilm: 2341200
  • Citation text: Ancestry.com. 1930 United States Federal Census [database on-line]. Provo, UT, USA: Ancestry.com Operations Inc, 2002.
  • Original data: United States of America, Bureau of the Census. Fifteenth Census of the United States, 1930. Washington, D.C.: National Archives and Records Administration, 1930. T626, 2,667 rolls.
  • Web address: https://www.ancestry.com/discoveryui-content/view/30164368:6224

And here's what I put in the image's details:

  • lines 75-81; 1930 United States Federal Census; New York > Bronx > Bronx (Districts 1-250) > District 0070; enumeration district 3-70, supervisor's district 25, assembly district 2, block I, sheet 13B; image 25 of 35
  • https://www.ancestry.com/discoveryui-content/view/30164368:6224
  • Source Citation: Year: 1930; Census Place: Bronx, Bronx, New York; Page: 13B; Enumeration District: 0070; FHL microfilm: 2341200
  • Source Information: Ancestry.com. 1930 United States Federal Census [database on-line]. Provo, UT, USA: Ancestry.com Operations Inc, 2002.
  • Original data: United States of America, Bureau of the Census. Fifteenth Census of the United States, 1930. Washington, D.C.: National Archives and Records Administration, 1930. T626, 2,667 rolls.

Note that the web address I record is not the URL of the image itself. It's the URL of the record on Ancestry. The record provides a link to the image, key details, source info, and a list of related documents for the same person.

By working on all the census citations one after another, you'll get very familiar with the format. You'll gain efficiency and consistency.

After all the census citations, I worked on a bunch of sources with small numbers of citations:

  • birth and marriage records from Derbyshire, England
  • immigration records from Hawaii and Florida
  • death records from Ohio and Pennsylvania, and so on.

I wanted to pick off smaller sources before attacking my Ellis Island ship manifests. That's a trick I always play on myself. I'd rather complete 20 source titles than get stuck in a big one, knowing all those others are waiting for me.

Work on perfecting the source citations in your family tree one type at a time. You'll gain consistency and efficiency as you add value.
Work on perfecting the source citations in your family tree one type at a time. You'll gain consistency and efficiency as you add value.

After removing duplicates, I have 246 Ellis Island citations in my family tree. I built each citation using the same, consistent format. As I explained above, I copy the suggested citation from Ancestry and add it, along with extra details, to the image.

But I still had my 87 different Italian towns' citations to fix. My Italian document images all come from the Antenati website. The website changed dramatically in 2021, leaving my citations with broken URLs. And the duplication in my tree was insane.

I worked my way through the towns saving the biggest ones for last. These were my closest ancestors' hometowns. My primary town, Colle Sannita, started with more than 7,700 citations, but I saw tons of duplicates. Now that it's all finished, I have 3,377 citations.

My citation format for the Italian vital records is designed to help you find it in the Italian archives or online. It looks like this:

From the Benevento State Archives, 1809 matrimoni, Colle Sannita, document 1, image 3 of 15 at https://antenati.cultura.gov.it/ark:/12657/an_ua1113932/5VNQENO

Here's the same format showing which variables you need to plug in:

From the PROVINCE State Archives, YEAR and DOCUMENT TYPE, TOWN, document #, image # of # at URL

Having done all this, my family tree is SO CLEAN! All my earliest sub-par work is now completely up to my high standards. And I know I'll never again go on a spree adding facts and documents without perfect citations.

I've been working full-throttle on my tree for a long time. I'm growing it by leaps and bounds as I explore the vital records from my ancestral hometowns. But that's been on pause all year for this clean-up project. Now my 57,125-person family tree will start growing like crazy again. But always with perfect source citations.

02 May 2023

Exploring Your Last Name Concentration

I recently made the comment that "I'm like the frozen concentrate of Benevento, Italy." In "Where Will Your Roots Map Take You?," I showed you how to create a map of all your ancestral locations.

Today's project focuses on your ancestral last name concentration. Granted, your name concentration depends on how much research you've done. But you may find some real surprises.

Let's look at 3 ways to discover which family names make up the biggest percentage of you. If you’d rather do it old school, you can pull the names from your family tree manually. But there's no reason you can't do option 2.

Once your ancestral last names are counted, Excel makes it easy to show your family tree composition in a colorful chart.
Once your ancestral last names are counted, Excel makes it easy to show your family tree composition in a colorful chart.

1. Family Tree Maker's Surname Report

After years of using Family Tree Maker (FTM), I've somehow never used the built-in Surname Report. To create yours:

  • Choose yourself in your family tree and click the Publish tab.
  • Under Person Reports, choose the Surname Report.
  • In the Report Options column, click Selected individuals.
  • You'll see your name highlighted, and you can choose the Ancestors option. But then you run into the problem of ancestors with more than one spouse. What if your ancestor isn't set as the preferred spouse? You may get step-grandparents in the list. I clicked the Filter In button because my ancestors all have a custom Ahnentafel fact. I clicked All facts, and Search where Ahnentafel Is not blank. With 401 people selected, I clicked Apply.
  • Now click the boxes in the report option tab for (1) Sort surname by count, and (2) Limit counts to included individuals.

You'll see an alphabetical list of all the last names of your direct ancestors. It shows how many times each name appears in your list of direct ancestors. And I love how it shows the earliest and most recent birth year of each name in this group.

You can save this report by clicking the Share button at the top-right of FTM and choosing Export to PDF. I recommend you also choose Export to CSV so you can make some charts and graphs from the data.

2. Family Tree Analyzer's Surname Chart

You can open any GEDCOM file with Family Tree Analyzer (FTA) and sort by relationship type to find your direct ancestors. But why not give it a GEDCOM that contains only the right people?

My Family Tree Maker File has a custom field that holds the Ahnentafel number of all my direct ancestors. It also has an Ahnentafel filter so I can display only this group. You can export a GEDCOM file of only the people found in any filter you've created. I created a direct-ancestor-only GEDCOM and opened it with FTA.

With your file open in FTA:

  • Click the Surnames tab and check only the Direct Ancestors box.
  • Click the Show Surnames button.
  • Click the top of the Individuals column to sort each surname from Z to A. (This is a numbers column, so it's really sorting from most to least.)

At the top of the report, you'll see the highest concentration of last names in your family tree. I recommend you save this information as a spreadsheet so you can do more with the data. Click the Export menu and choose Individuals to Excel. This will give you tons of facts. You may want to delete most of the columns.

Dive deeper into each of your ancestors' last names using the Family Tree Analyzer Surnames report.
Dive deeper into each of your ancestors' last names using the Family Tree Analyzer Surnames report.

3. Excel's Charting Features

The spreadsheet I saved from the FTM Surname Report works best for creating charts. It includes the all-important count for each name. The FTA Surnames Report lists each name entry separately. You'd have to do some manipulation or manual counting of each name to get enough data to make a chart.

I chose the Count column in my spreadsheet and sorted the data from Largest Count to Smallest Count. At the bottom of the list I have a lot of names that appear only once or twice among my direct ancestors. I decided to include only the names that appear 5 or more times. I selected the surname and count of each entry with 5 or more in the Count column. For me, that's a total of 29 different last names.

Click Recommended Charts on the Insert tab, and then choose All Charts. This gives you a preview of how each chart will look with your data. I chose an Area chart, and then I fiddled around with the options until I liked the results. I created a pie chart, too.

Examining Your Results

My maiden name is Iamarino, but I'm still a little surprised to see that name come out with a commanding lead. All the other names scoring double digits are surprising to me. Coming in at #2 is Pilla, which happens to be the name of my Grandpa Iamarino's mother. It's also a common name in many of my ancestral towns. But I had no idea how many of them were my direct ancestors. It's also exciting to see that my earliest known Iamarino ancestor was born in 1640. That's a remarkable find for someone with roots in Italy.

As you examine your list of last names, which ones do you think you'd like to take a step further? Why not make a poster of everything you can learn about your top surnames?

I’m lucky to have a book that explains the history of last names in Italy. It's a huge book because Italy has the highest number of last names in Europe at about 350,000. (See "The Interesting History of Italian Last Names.") There may be such a book for your ancestral places. Explore Google Books or an online library catalog for your options. If you're Italian, the book I have is available online for free. Go to https://archive.org/details/OrigineEStoriaDeiCognomiItaliani.

From this cognome or last name book, written by Ettore Rossoni, I learn that the name Iamarino:

  • is very rare
  • comes primarily from Colle Sannita (my grandfather's hometown)
  • means the son of Giovanni (or Gianni) Marino
  • is recorded in Colle Sannita as early as 1588

Does your ancestral hometown have a website? What can you learn about the history of the place that's interesting to you?

Years ago I made the surprising discovery that the patron saint of Colle Sannita is Saint George. For some reason, I chose St. George and his April 23rd feast day as a key feature in the novel I wrote as my college thesis. The title of my novel was "St. George." I mean, what are the odds?

I'm also intrigued that the Saracens occupied the town in 728 AD. My maternal grandmother's name was Sarracino. The cognome book tells me this name was once given to Arab or Islamic communities in Italy. Grandma's roots come from a town not far from Colle Sannita. They may be very ancient roots!

Pick out a few details about your ancestral town's origins. Find a nice image of the town or use the map. Put something together in Word or other software that you might turn into a book cover or a framed wall hanging.

The last names in my family tree give me so much joy. I'm always thrilled to discover a new one. Many of them pin me firmly to one place on the map, like Iamarino.

Step back from your usual research and dive into the most important names in your family tree. You may feel more pride in your heritage once you take a closer look.