Tour Your Ancestral Hometowns with YouTube

I haven't visited my ancestral hometowns since 2018, and I'm really starting to miss them. I'd love to walk the streets again, linger longer, and talk to more of the villagers.

Then a great idea fell into my lap. I wanted to find some information about a town I haven't visited yet. My 3rd great grandmother Rufina's hometown is Apice, and it's now a ghost town. An earthquake in the 1980s made the whole town too dangerous to live in. They call the deserted part of town Apice Vecchio (vecchio means old). Today everyone lives nearby in the very modern-looking Apice Nuovo (nuovo means new).

Among my search results were articles and videos about the ghost town. I saw a suggested video posted by another of my ancestral hometowns: Pesco Sannita.

What's this? My great grandmother's town has a YouTube channel? I watched an English-subtitled video about agriculture in my great grandmother's hometown. I'll be sure to look for the vineyards and olive tree groves on my next visit.

I watched another video about the Fiume Tammaro. I found this river (fiume) mentioned on 6 Pesco Sannita death records from the 1840s and 1850s. Young boys kept drowning there. Seeing the video, it seems too shallow and slow-moving to have taken the boys' lives. Even more surprising is that some women still wash their laundry in the river.

The town's YouTube videos include:

• beautiful fly-overs filmed by drones
• cultural events
• demonstrations by a local chef
• a look inside their restaurants, and more.

What else can I find from my ancestral hometowns? Searching for my grandfather's town of Baselice, I found:

• more drone fly-overs
• promotional videos for the town
• a description of a public works beautification project.

I'm a big fan of the drone fly-over videos (many created by Raffaele Pilla). I spotted my grandfather's house in one of them!

You can fly over, walk through, and learn the culture of your ancestral hometowns right on YouTube.

For my other grandfather's town, Colle Sannita, I found messages from the mayor and town council meetings. For my great grandparents hometown of Sant'Angelo a Cupolo, I found a fly-over video and a first-person view of a foot race through town. Even the real estate videos are great because they give me a view inside the homes. That's something I can't see while walking through my towns.

I also watched video tours of the city of Benevento. It's the center of all my ancestral hometowns, and I have 2 cousins who own restaurants there. I've been to Benevento 3 times and still haven't seen all the sights.

Search for videos from your ancestral hometowns by typing the name of the town in the YouTube search box. Be sure to use the correct in-country spelling of the town name. Pay attention to who is posting the videos you like. They may have more videos for you in their collections.

Be sure to hover over the video and click CC (closed captioning) to see subtitles. If they aren't in English, click the gear next to CC, click Subtitles, Auto-Generate, and choose your language. The translations may not have the best quality, so keep an open mind. If you can't click the CC, the video may have no spoken words.

While I was at it, I searched YouTube for my current hometown in New York. I found some interesting videos about the town's railroad history. Then I found videos about the little town of Hornellsville, NY, where my grandmother was born. If you haven't used YouTube to give your genealogy research some context, you should give it a try.

And speaking of your ancestral hometowns:

• Walking in Your Ancestors' Footsteps
• Prepare to Walk Along Your Ancestors' Streets
• Discover Your Ancestral Hometown's History

Make an Easy Ancestral Map for the Cousins

I love when I'm at a family gathering and I hear one of my cousins say, "Ask DiAnn. She knows all about our family history." At a recent get-together, 2 cousins approached me separately, asking for the same basic thing.

"We need a visual," my 1st cousin said. "Give us a map that shows which ancestors were born where."

That sent my mind racing. This sounds like a great gift idea for any genealogist to make. I'd already plotted my direct ancestors on a map. The result was a highly concentrated cluster of pinpoints in a very small section of Southern Italy. My homogeneity is like having all your ancestors come from one county in America…at least as far back as the 1600s.

It's easy to create this highly customized map to show all your cousins their ancestral roots.

While my ancestral map is exactly the same as my brother's, it's only partly the same as any of my cousins'. However, I do know that most of the aunts, uncles, and cousins who aren't my blood relatives came from the same general area. "They stayed within their tribe," as my godmother Rae put it.

Other than one town in Sicily and another up north, I can cover all my own and my cousins' ancestors in one thin horizontal slice of Italy. It begins south of Rome and ends south of Naples.

How to Create Your Family's Ancestral Map

Part One of Two: Create a list of immigrant ancestors and their hometowns. If you've already researched the immediate families of your closest cousins, you should have all these names and places handy in your family tree. Here's how to start:

• Make a list with yourself and your siblings on line 1.
• Add a line for each set of 1st cousin siblings.
• Add a line for each set of 2nd cousin siblings.

I could include some of my 3rd cousins, but the map would get very busy.

Let me explain that the people I call "the cousins" fall into 2 main groups, both somewhat small:

1. On Dad's side, I have only a brother-sister pair of 1st cousins. We've had a close relationship our whole lives. There are 2nd cousins, but since they're in Ohio, I've never known them.
2. On Mom's side, we all descend from 5 Bronx-born siblings whose parents came from Italy. It's this clan that has been a constant presence throughout my life. I have three 1st cousins and 14 2nd cousins in my generation. We're compact because no one had more than 4 kids and some had only one.

For my list, I started with myself, then listed the kids of each of Mom's 1st cousins as a group. (Trust me, this is an efficient way to do it.) I added a last line for my paternal 1st cousins. Then I spelled out the immigrant ancestors' names and towns.

Here's my list of the whole family's immigrant ancestors and their hometowns. (I shrunk the text because it's a long list.)

• Me:
  • Adamo Leone from Baselice
  • Giovanni Sarracino and Maria Rosa Saviano from Pastene
  • Pietro Iamarino from Colle Sannita
  • Maria Rosa Caruso from Pesco Sannita
  • Pasquale Iamarino from Colle Sannita
• S's kids:
  • shared Adamo Leone from Baselice
  • shared Giovanni Sarracino and Maria Rosa Saviano from Pastene
  • Nicola Petriella from Circello
  • Raffaele Cocca from Colle Sannita
  • Nicolina Barone from Circello
• E's kids:
  • shared Giovanni Sarracino and Maria Rosa Saviano from Pastene
  • Arturo Vallone from Esperia
  • Salvatore Mollica from Floridia in Sicily
  • Domenico Velotto from Barra in Naples
  • Filomena Carmina Picciocchi from Baiano
• L's kids:
  • shared Giovanni Sarracino and Maria Rosa Saviano from Pastene
  • shared Arturo Vallone from Esperia
  • Lorenzo Avallone and Maria Cristina Romagnano from Postiglione
• A's kids:
  • shared Giovanni Sarracino and Maria Rosa Saviano from Pastene
  • Egidio Eufemio and Antoinette Trevignia from Castelmezzano
• R's kids:
  • shared Giovanni Sarracino and Maria Rosa Saviano from Pastene
  • Carmine Sarracino and Maria Rosa dell'Aquila from Pastene
  • father's side from Germany and Ireland. Not in scope for this project.
• J's kids:
  • shared Giovanni Sarracino and Maria Rosa Saviano from Pastene
  • Matteo Rignanese and Angela Maria Frattaruolo from Monte Sant'Angelo
• B's kids:
  • shared Giovanni Sarracino and Maria Rosa Saviano from Pastene
  • Mario Maleri and Ida Mattioli from Pesaro
• My paternal 1st cousins:
  • shared Pietro Iamarino from Colle Sannita
  • shared Maria Rosa Caruso from Pesco Sannita
  • shared Pasquale Iamarino from Colle Sannita
  • Silvio Tagliamonte from Ponza

Whew! That's what years of research can do for you.

Part Two of Two. Begin plotting your map. You can use Google Maps for this project, but you'll probably need to have or create a free Google account to save it.

• Go to google.com/maps and clicked Saved in the left column. This should work even if you've never saved anything.
• Click Maps near the top-right, then click CREATE MAP at the bottom.
• To give your map a name, like Cousins' Roots Map, click the words Untitled Map. I also renamed the Untitled Layer to Ancestors. You could choose to create different layers for different sets of cousins.
• Consulting your list, search for an immigrant ancestor's hometown on the map.
• When you find a town, hover over its name in the left-side control panel and click the + sign that appears. This opens up a detail box. At the bottom of the box, look for and click the pencil so you can make an edit. I'm changing my saved places from just the place name to Ancestor's Name, Place Name. For instance, Pietro Iamarino, Colle Sannita. Click Save when you're done.

Go through these 4 steps to begin creating your unique ancestral family tree map.

Open up the Base map section at the bottom of the control panel. Try out different map styles to see which you like best. I chose the Light Landmass map to help my map pins and labels stand out. But I switched back to the first option when I needed to see street names or more detail.

Now click the words Uniform style in the control panel. Change Set labels from description to name. This puts your Ancestor Name, Place Name labels on the map.

When I clicked Uniform style again, I chose to Group place by name. Suddenly all my map pins had different colors, which is very nice.

Since I have multiple people from the same town, I couldn't see some of their names. Only the last one I entered in a town showed. To get around this problem, I chose different locations in town for my people who came from one town. I can click a different part of town for each person and add them there. It took me a couple of tries to make sure the names were far enough apart not to overlap one another. I also combined married couples from the same small town into one pin.

When you're happy with your map, click Share in the control panel. Be sure to click Anyone with this link can view. At the bottom you'll find a link you can copy and give to your cousins.

Click around to find different options to customize your ancestral family tree map.

See what your cousins think, but you can make the map labels simpler by using the person's name only—not their town. The map itself will tell you their town. Also, if it works for you, you could use only a last name as the label.

I like that this map is interactive. You can zoom in and out and get a good idea how close or far apart your ancestors lived. My cousins want us to take a group trip to the places where our map pins are so densely clustered.

Wouldn't it be nice to print this map to a PDF file and give it to your cousins? You can! Here's how:

• Zoom in or out on the map to make all your pins visible.
• Click the 3 vertical dots to the right of your map name in the control panel and choose Print map.
• Select PDF and click Print. Play around with how much of a zoom gives you the best results.

The resulting PDF includes all the map pins you created in a list on the left, and the map on the right. If you create a separate layer for each group of cousins, you can easily print a unique gift for each set of cousins. Have fun!

Bonus! At the last second, I discovered you're a click away from exploring your map in the intensity of Google Earth. Click the 3 vertical dots to the right of your map name in the control panel and choose View in Google Earth.

4 Must-Have Resources for Your Italian Family Tree

Once in a while you'll find a document for your family tree with a new last name or place name you can't quite read. When that happens to me, I know exactly which free websites to go to.

Here are the 4 Italian genealogy bookmarks I use to solve a mysterious last name or place name. Two can help you decipher a last name and two can help you find a place on the map.

One quick note about using these websites. You'll usually see a pop-up ad before you can proceed. To dismiss the ad, click the button that says "Chiudi" (Close).

1. Map of Italian Last Names

Use the "Cognomix" website at https://www.cognomix.it/mappe-dei-cognomi-italiani to confirm the spelling of a last name. The site's main purpose is to show you all the places in Italy where you'll find any given last name.

That's very handy when you want to see if a last name is still found in a certain town. But another important use of the site is to check the spelling of a last name. I have one ancestor who came from a different town, but raised her family and died in one of my ancestral hometowns. Her last name was hard to decipher. I found it on more than one document, but that didn't help me. It looked a little different each time.

To figure out the right spelling, I went to the Cognomix site to try out different spellings. To use the site, scroll down a bit until you see a black bar that says "Mappe dei cognomi italiani." Beneath the bar is a blank box with the heading "Cognome," Italian for surname or last name. Type a name in the box and click the "Cerca" (Search) button.

First you'll see a map of Italy showing you how many families have that name and in which regions. Click any region to see how many families have that name in different provinces. Click any province to see the number of families with that name in different towns.

But—before you click the Cerca button, see if any suggested names pop up below the box where you're typing. If there are no suggestions, you're likely to find no results when you click Cerca. And you may find a better suggestion.

Can't read that Italian last name? Bookmark these free websites and solve the problem.

I used Cognomix to figure out the ancestor whose name was new to me. The first writing of her name looked like Gajdia. (Note that sometimes in Italian words you'll see a j instead of an i.) When I type Gajdia in the Cognomix box, there are no suggestions. When I change it to Gaidia, there are still no suggestions. But one time, her name looked like Gasdia. When I type that into the box, Gasdia comes up as a suggestion. Now I can click Cerca to see where the name Gasdia comes from. I expect her to come from a town very close to where she lived after her marriage.

I discovered this uncommon name comes mostly from the Campania and Campobasso regions. That works for my family. By clicking a region and then a province, I can narrow down her likely place of birth. There's a good chance she came from either the city of Campobasso or the town of Fragneto Monforte.

My ancestor was born too early to find in vital records. If she'd been born later, I could try to track her records down in one of these two towns.

2. The Italian White Pages

The Pagine Bianche at https://www.paginebianche.it shows you exactly where to find a last name in Italy today. Look for a search area front and center on the website. Click the "Privati" button to search for a person by name (the default is to search for businesses). Then put the last name you want in the box that says "Nome, Cognome." In the second box, you can enter the town or province you want or make it blank (the default seems to be Roma).

If you get no results for a name, you may be spelling it wrong. When I put in Gasdia, I get 16 listings. One is in Campobasso and one is in Fragneto l'Abate, which borders Fragneto Monforte.

You can use the Italian White Pages to see if anyone with your last name still lives in your ancestral hometown. I find 3 people with my maiden name still living in my grandfather's hometown. I know exactly who they are. But there's another man with my maiden name in a neighboring town who I'd like to meet.

3. List of Italian Cities

The website at http://en.comuni-italiani.it/alfa is very important to my family tree research. Let's say I'm looking at marriage records from one of my ancestral hometowns. I see that the groom comes from another town, but I can't quite read the name of it. I think it starts with Mont and ends in an o.

The List of Italian Cities page divides all the country's towns into 98 groups (if I counted right). You do need to make an educated guess about the first letter of the town name. Then you can click the right group to get started.

I'll click the MONT–MONZ group to look for towns that begin with Mont and end in o. Once you click the group, scan the alphabetical list of town names to see if any seem like a possibility. You can click each possibility to see where it is on the map. That may help you rule out some towns because they're too far away.

Can't understand that Italian town name? Bookmark these free websites and find that place on the map.

When you find a town that seems like the right one, compare its spelling to the original handwriting. Do you feel confident in your choice?

This website has come through for me time and time again.

4. The Parishes in Italy

If I have a baptism record for someone from another town, I like to add the address of the church to my family tree. But what if I can't quite read the church name?

That's when you need the list of Italian parishes at https://italia.indettaglio.it/eng/parrocchie/parrocchie.html. The main page of the website divides the country into regions. Click a region to find a search form with 3 categories:

• Province
• Town
• Village

Use the most specific of the 3 that you can. For instance, I'd like to find the parish name for a town in the Avellino province called Santa Paolina. I can choose Santa Paolina from the Town list and click the Search button.

The results page tells me that Santa Paolina Vergine is the parish for this town. It evens tells me how many people belong to the parish. And it gives me the address, Piazza Novembre IV, that I can use in my family tree for baptisms and marriages. If I enter that address in Bing Maps or Google Maps, I can see the church for myself!

You may want to create a folder of bookmarks just for Italian genealogy, as I've done. That way they're handy when you need them. As you work on your family tree, turn to these 4 tools to help you figure out a hard-to-read last name or place name.