Pursuing Our Roots

There are normal, obvious places we can go, to improve our genealogy skills and to find information to advance our research. We have the many websitess that I talk about all the time, and you don’t even have to leave your house! Those same sites may have additional data if you travel to a FamilySearch Center. (formerly known as a Family History Center. Don’t ask me why they changed the name!) You can try to find other researchers on FamilySearch in the Tree who are working on your town(s) or families. You can try to find researchers on social media …

It has been years since I had a daily newspaper delivered to my house. I stopped it because A) I would have a week’s worth of papers that hadn’t been read, which made the entire exercise futile; B) I don’t care what happens in the Chicago City Council, since I don’t live in Chicago; and C) I find out most news on social media as it happens, rather than wait until the next day. My dad thought he was scooping the news organizations and Facebook when he would call me to tell me about the latest event. I had a …

Not everybody wants to spend 30 years trying to take their family tree back to Adam and Eve. Or Vito and Nunzia. After spending 30 plus years doing this, I understand how they feel. I feel the same way about taking up a musical instrument. I’ll never be good enough or have time to learn enough to be any good at it, so why put all that time and energy into it. I know plenty of people who simply don’t care about family that they never met, or about their ancestral history. Despite how close-knit Italian families typically are, I …

There are two events that take place every ten years. The first one is that I get the chance to finally take a nap! The other is the United States Federal Census. The Census is used to measure how many people are in each area of the country, and then to divvy up the federal funds to do the most good. The Constitution requires it, and a census has been done every ten years since 1790. U.S. Census records contain many pieces of data that help us, and there are many problems. We can find out the country of birth …

What’s in a name? More than you know, actually. More than I know. Today’s journey shows us that names are not consistent, even though we would hope they are. I hope I am able to explain how you should make decisions regarding names, even when they aren’t 100% perfect. Here are the traditional rules for naming children: Rule 1: First son is named for his father’s father. Rule 2: First daughter is named for her father’s mother. Rule 3: Second son is almost always named for mother’s father, except when there are two grandfathers with the same first name. They …

Probably all of us miss our relatives who have passed away. Many of us wish they were still here for many reasons. They might keep the “Italian culture” more the old way, with Sunday dinners and family being closer than they are today. Many of us just miss the people and would like to speak to them one more time, to let them know what happened since they left. And genealogists want to ask them a BUNCH of questions! I was reminded of this the last time I saw the movie “5000 Miles From Home.” If you do not own …

The theme for most of my columns this year has been “some of this is great, and some of this is bad and needs very thorough review.” This month is no exception! After attending a conference in McHenry recently, I was asked about my experience with “THE Family Tree. … Not “My Family Tree,” but “THE Family Tree.” Well, my favorite website, familysearch.org, has been asking everyone to contribute their research to something called “THE Family Tree.” I will be the first to admit that I do not know all that much about how “the” family tree functions. I have …

I was almost 11 years old when I first saw the announcement of the election of a new Pope. I didn’t know of any of the Cardinals except Cardinal Cody of Chicago, so the announcement of Cardinal Albino Luciani of Venice was not a surprise or shock. The media did not pick him, so they were shocked and surprised. The real surprise and shock came 33 days later when my father tried to get me up to go to school and I didn’t want to get up, and he told me that the Pope had died and I probably swore …

Big news! Some of it great, some of it…not so good. When I was at the Rootstech conference in Salt Lake City in 2024, Familysearch was making a big deal about using “AI” technology to transcribe genealogy documents into searchable data. They gave us a taste by indexing words from wills and probate records which are typed on a typewriter rather than handwritten. My genealogy colleagues who need wills and probate records were all excited, and rightly so. My Italian genealogy colleagues were expectedly disappointed. I’ll try to explain this for people who are not tech nerds like me. The …

I have a lot of very distant cousins. They are so distant that I never met them, yet they are in my family tree. I have closer cousins that I do not hear from, and there are people who have left our family due to divorce. Roughly once a year, I search to see if any of these people have passed away, so I can update my tree, and visit the grave or crypt if possible. Among all the sources we use, the death notice (sometimes called “obituary”) is a common resource and relatively inexpensive. Today, more notices are posted …