Dan Niemiec

Dan Niemiec has been the genealogy columnist for Fra Noi since 2004. For the past 25 years, he has researched his genealogy back 17 generations, plus tracing descendants of his ancestors, yielding 74,000 relatives. His major focus is on civil and church records in Italy, Chicago vital records, Chicago Catholic records and most major genealogy web sites. He has given dozens of presentations to many local and some national genealogy societies on topics such as cemetery research, Catholic records, Italian records, Ellis Island and newspaper research, among others.

How to share the wealth

Well, you have spent 20 years accumulating your family tree information, photos, documents, and sundry. Now what do you do with it? Share the wealth! When you get to a good break point in your research, you should put together a disc of your scanned photos and documents and make copies and send it out to relatives, close or distant. There are a multitude of reasons why you should use the tools of computers to copy and distribute your life’s work. 1) Preservation — By having everything copied to the computer, it keeps the originals from being handled. You can …

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Finding a genealogy buddy

There are times when I wish I could do some market research about Italian genealogy. For example, I wonder just how many people are curious about their Italian roots and ask relatives for information. Then there are those who look into their own roots online. Then there are those who visit libraries and government repositories to dig a little deeper. Then there are the ones who want records from Italy to start tracing their ancestors. Finally, there are the lucky few who actually visit Italy to dig further back. Not everyone who asked cousin Dan for a copy of the …

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