When you’re at home researching your genealogy, or at a library or FamilySearch center, it doesn’t matter what the weather is like. You’re indoors!

When you want to visit someone at a cemetery, to say a prayer or to get some genealogy information about them, you’re mostly outside. In good ol’ Chicagoland, you have to plan your cemetery trips around the weather. Too much rain leads to soggy wet muddy ground. Too many leaves in the fall leads to flat stones covered and you can’t see them. Too much cold wind leads to freezing. Too much summer heat leads to perspiration.

Therefore, I watch the weather carefully and when the rain goes away and the temperature hits the magic “not-too-cold” and “not-too-hot” range, I make sure I am ready to go visit some cemeteries that weekend. And I try to be ready with a list of graves and crypts to visit and maps to help me find them with a minimum amount of aimless wandering.

Since most of our Italian ancestors and relatives grew up Catholic, let’s talk about finding their final resting places. There is no law that they can’t be buried or entombed in a non-Catholic cemetery, but the Chicago Archdiocese gives us several ways to find the locations ourselves. Non-Catholic cemeteries have a varying degree of helpfulness because they have no central lookup place, which means you have to go to the office and ask them to look for a location for you. Take it from me, most of them don’t like when you ask for five locations all at once. But you do not have to go to a Catholic Cemetery office and ask for locations – you can find as many as you need without annoying the office staff.

Keep in mind that when I say “Catholic Cemetery” records, I am referring to those contained in Cook and Lake County in the Archdiocese of Chicago. Those relatives of yours buried in Catholic Cemeteries in DuPage, McHenry, Will or Kane counties are not part of this, because they are in other dioceses.

(For the record, the diocese of Rockford, containing Kane, McHenry and everything west to the state line, has a cemetery lookup system at https://rockfordcemeteries.org/locate-a-loved-one/)

You can find Cook and Lake Catholic Cemetery records one of four ways.

1) You can go to a larger cemetery and look up locations in the touch screen kiosk.

2) You can look up from your home computer by getting a link from https://www.catholiccemeterieschicago.org/ and look them up for 15 minutes (I’ll explain later.) Methods 1 and 2 are current up to that week.

3) You can search for pre-1980s deaths on familysearch and see the interment card with the location on it, but no map.

4) There’s always www.findagrave.com or www.billiongraves.com but not everyone is in it.

Method #1 above basically means that any larger cemetery, where most of us would probably have relatives (All Saints, Queen of Heaven, Maryhill, Resurrection, St. Joseph, St. Michael in Palatine) has a kiosk. Mount Carmel has no office, so you have to go to Queen of Heaven across the street. St. Mary in Evergreen Park also has no office so theirs has to be looked up at St. Casimir. Most of the Lake County smaller cemeteries can be looked up at Ascencion in Libertyville.

The good news is that each kiosk has the locations of ALL Cook and Lake County Catholic cemeteries. You do not have to travel from one cemetery to the other to look up locations. So go to the closest larger cemetery and check ahead to make sure the office is open. If your kiosk has a printer (many do not) you can press the print button on the touch-screen to get a printed map. (Most mausoleum locations will not have a map but the location will print on the page.) You can also take a picture of the kiosk screen with your cell phone. Maps do not show up on the screen on the kiosk. You have to print them. The block and lot numbers on these maps are quite small. But the maps may have a QR code to get you a computer overhead map with a red dot where the grave is located.

Method #2: I won’t go through the entire procedure here but you go to the Catholic Cemeteries web site above, click the link to request access to the lookup site. They send you an email with a button to access the site. You cannot get to the site again using the same link. They do this to prevent people from trying to download the entire site using “bots” etc.

Once you click the email link, you get 15 minutes (again to stop the bots) to look up whatever you need. If you run low on time, it may ask if you want to extend another 15 minutes.

You will get a screen showing the location and an overhead map. Get a screen-shot of the name and location first. (Hold the Windows key and the ALT key and press PRT-SCN. These screens will end up in your Captures folder.)

Now click the map to make the map fill your screen. Zoom the map in or out to get it the way you want it, then screen-shot it. So you’ll have both the name and location, followed by the map showing where they are within the section.

A tip from someone who didn’t think of it the first time (that would be me) you should name the screenshot files to reflect whose map it is. The screenshot of the map won’t contain the person’s name or the location. You’ll end up with a beautiful color map for someone you forgot.

The key here is A) make a list of everyone you want to look up and have it next to you before you start, so you can make the best use of the 15 minute time limit. B) If you are a slow typist, or you don’t like having a clock ticking down to zero that puts pressure on you, then you’re better off using method 1. There is no time limit on the kiosk except the impatient person behind you waiting to use it. (I am very patient when someone is trying to use the kiosk. I usually help them out.)

Method #3 involves my favorite web site, www.familysearch.org. You should log in, then click “Search” “Records”.

On the right, type in the first and last names. Under “Add life event” you can click “Death” and type the year of death, or a range of years if you’re not sure. Near the bottom, click “Type” and check the box next to “Death”. Then click “Search”.

One important search tip: Don’t enter parents’ names in this search. None of the cemetery locations link people to their parents, so you might not see the cemetery records in the results.

You’ll see results on the left. There will be death certificates, obituaries, FindaGrave results etc. You want to find “Illinois, Archdiocese of Chicago Cemetery Records” under the name on the left. These will have the interment cards with the locations. (No maps though)

FYI many of your relatives buried at Mount Carmel in Hillside will show up more than once. This is because they microfilmed the interment cards, but also lot holder logs and burial logs. So don’t be surprised if you see something that does not look like an interment card.

Method #4 is throwing a dart but you just might hit a dartboard.

Good news:

• You might find people who were cremated and not inurned at a cemetery at all. At least you’ll know not to look for them again.
• You might find people who were buried or inurned at a non-Catholic cemetery, or at a cemetery in a nearby Illinois county, or even in another state.
• There might be a GPS location to use within the cemetery to find that grave.
• If someone posted a photo of the marker, you can either choose to call it a day and not visit, or you can know what the marker looks like, if you decide to pay a personal visit.
• No 15-minute time limits.

Bad news:

• Not everyone is in findagrave or billiongraves. Someone has to go through the trouble to create a memorial record.
• Not everyone who is in findagrave has a grave or crypt location on the memorial record. But you’ll get a cemetery name, or confirmation that there is no public final resting place.

Findagrave and Billiongraves are not specific to Chicago or Italians but it is another option when the other ones don’t work for you. Many findagrave records are indexed on FamilySearch so you can jump direct from FamilySearch right to FindaGrave.

Findagrave is encouraging people to post the obituary in the text section, so you might find an obit even if you do not have access to the newspaper it was posted in. However, it is not mandatory to post the grave location or to post a photo of the marker.

Billiongraves is more concerned about the GPS coordinates of the grave. You have to have a login to see the GPS coordinates. The phone app is used to take pictures at a cemetery and it records the GPS. The app also helps you find the grave once you search Billiongraves and pick out the one you want.

You can use one or all four methods to make a list of graves and crypts to visit. Once you have a list of cemeteries and locations, all you need is nice weather!

Today I would like to talk about citizenship.

A hot button topic to be sure, but for genealogists, the documents filed for citizenship can be a great source of information about our relatives and can tell some parts of their story when they are no longer here to tell it themselves.

Chicagoans have a number of resources on good ol’ Familysearch.org. There are also resources on Ancestry.com if you’re a subscriber or if you’re using a library’s free subscription.

Before 1929, a person could file for citizenship in several different courts. These are:

Cook County Circuit Court

Cook County Superior Court

United States District Court, Northern District

There are a few other courts that cover Chicagoland but they are minimal.

After 1929, all citizenship applications went through the US District Court.

How do you find out which court to check? It is very important to know the court and it is very easy to find. FamilySearch gives us two large indexes that overlap. There is a Soundex index that covers 1840-1950, which includes all three courts mentioned above. It also contains some smaller courts covering southern Wisconsin and eastern Iowa and some counties in Illinois south of Cook. The second index covers 1926-1979 but only covers the “Eastern Division” of the Northern District and does not include all those other counties.

You should “Search” “Records” from the FamilySearch home page and limit your search to record Type “Immigration and Naturalization”. Unfortunately, this record type includes passenger lists and this can give you too many search results. Those results may have a sub-heading “Immigration” or “Naturalization” but it’s not always right. There may be search results that say “Immigration – Illinois”….. Unless you fly into O’Hare, or float in through Lake Michigan, how can you immigrate to Illinois? When you get too many results, you may have to hold CTRL and press “F” to search the web page, and type “Petition” or “Naturalization” in order to find the kind of result you want.

If you find a result in the two overlapping indexes I mentioned above, you will see a 3×5 card on the image. They look similar but you need the right information from them. Keep in mind that if you’re looking for your relatives in other cities, some of the info below will apply but the index cards are specific to that city or court system.

The older cards (1840-1950)

This card gives enough information to identify that this is your relative. You get the name, address, birth date (unfortunately the card does not list the town of origin.) and even two witnesses, who may be relatives too.

The key information is the “Certificate no. (or vol. and page)” which contains a number with a “P” next to it. “P” means “Petition” and this is the critical number to find the right one. Next to that is the “Title and location of court” which is the second critical piece of information to help you find the right documents.

The later cards (1926-1979)

These cards have different information. The name and address are there but now they only give you the age instead of the birth date. The court is almost always “U.S. District Court at Chicago Illinois” and the petition number is shown below. The date of naturalization is often stamped on the card, which you need to use to subtract the age to help you decide if you have the correct Vito Rocco Abbinante.

You may find the same person in both card indexes if they became a citizen in the years that overlap.

Use the catalog on www.familysearch.org to find the documents. Do “Search”, “catalog”. Then click “Keywords”. If your court is U.S. District Chicago, use this link to get to all the petitions:

https://www.familysearch.org/en/search/collection/2212212

If the court is the Circuit Court of Cook County Illinois, use this link:

https://www.familysearch.org/en/search/catalog/koha:233427

If the court is Superior Court of Cook County Illinois, use this link:

https://www.familysearch.org/en/search/catalog/koha:40549

Within any of those links, go through the films listed looking for a petition number range that contains your P-number.

When you find the film/folder with the petition you need, you will typically find three documents but sometimes more. The “Big Three” are:

-Certificate of Arrival

-Declaration of Intention

-Petition for Naturalization

If you find other pages, they might be “Oath of Allegiance” which was used during or just after wartime. There may also be pages describing that the person’s naturalization was rejected or cancelled, usually due to them returning to Italy. “Repatriation” is the word you’ll see on those pages, but they are not found frequently.

What do we find in the “Big Three”?

The Certificate of Arrival is a small paper that lists:

-The name the person used when they came to America

oThis could be a maiden name for a woman who was not yet married when she came to America, and would be different from the married name they now use while applying for citizenship

-The port of entry, frequently New York but sometimes Boston or others

-The date the ship arrived

-The name of the ship

Sadly this is not a copy of the actual passenger list, but it gives you everything you need to know in order to hunt down a copy.

Next, the Declaration of Intention is the “first papers” they filed to tell the government that they would like to be a citizen of the United States. There is some identifying information such as birth date and birth place. Maybe the name of their spouse. Older copies are handwritten, which makes it tough to read. Later copies are typed, and sometimes you get a photo of the person. A lot of us may not have a photo of our person at that time in their life, so this is an extra side benefit.

{{{{{ Nitti Gaetano 1870 dec of intent with photo }}}}}

If you go through census records and find your person’s citizenship status and it says “PA”, this does not mean they were from Pennsylvania….it means they filed their first PApers. In many cases, they actually didn’t, but they told the census taker that they did. I’m guessing that many of our immigrant ancestors were scared of this government person coming to their home every ten years to ask them who lived there. Maybe they went through that in the old country and nothing good ever came of that visit. Now here it is again but in America and they don’t know if this is someone who might deport one or more members of the family. So they said “We filed our papers, we’re legit.” All I’m saying is that you shouldn’t blindly trust the census as a report of the immigration status.

The final step in the process of becoming a citizen was the Petition for Naturalization. Not everyone completed this step. There are a variety of reasons. Some of them changed their mind about staying in America. (Italy had more immigrants return from America back to Italy than any European nation. Perhaps 30-50%.) Some only intended to work here long enough to make enough money to live comfortably in Italy. Some were persuaded that the streets were “paved with gold” but when they arrived and settled here, they found the streets were actually paved with…..well, we had a lot more horses back then.

The Petition for Naturalization has more family detail (though no photos).

The petition gives us a wealth of information. However, buyer beware. This data was supplied by the emigrant themselves and may not be 100% accurate.

-Name

-Birth date

-Birth place (these can be spelled horribly wrong – nobody checked)

-Address

-Spouse’s name

-Spouse’s birth date and birth place (see above)

-Marriage date and place

-List of living children, birth dates, birth place(s) and where they reside at the time of the application. These children may be receiving citizenship along with their parent. So if you cannot find your grandfather’s citizenship in all these resources, they might have been “grandfathered” in when your great-grandfather became a citizenship.

-Witnesses and addresses.

The second page is usually the signature, or their mark “X”. It also contains the date of naturalization, and sometimes the person renouncing the King of Italy or whoever the monarch was for the country they are staying away from.

You will also see a certificate number but unfortunately, they never filmed the certificates.

Keep in mind that before 1922, usually when the husband became a citizen, the wife also became a citizen. They call it “derivative” citizenship. After 1922, the wife had to apply on their own.

If you do not find your immigrant ancestor at all, there are some possible reasons for it.

1.They did not think they would stay in America, so they never applied.

2.They died too young and never got around to it.

3.They could have lived in another city and did their paperwork there instead of Chicago.

4.I have noticed some people who never became citizens but those people had sons serving in World War II. With the stars in the window, everyone knew this family gave plenty to their adopted homeland.

Let me know how your search went! E-mail me at d.niemiec@comcast.net and please put “Citizenship” in the subject.

Our friends at FamilySearch have come up with something new.

This new search method looks like it’s temporary, but I plan to get what I can from it while it’s around.

On the search menu, there is a relatively new item called “Full Text”. (See screenshot above.)

You may recall that I mentioned this was in beta testing a couple of years ago, and they ran a bunch of Illinois Wills through it.  A lot of people who were looking for relatives as beneficiaries were excited that they didn’t have to drive to the archive and read books page by page.

I was forced into trying this because of FamilySearch and the AI indexing that I have discussed in recent columns.  FamilySearch ran the Bari Italy films/folders through AI but only 1809-1900.  Since the records from 1901-1929 were filmed at a different archive, they were left out, even though the records are the same format and could have easily been run through the same AI programs.

I have found thousands of new records from the AI indexing, but everything stops cold in 1901.  Yes I can go through the images the old fashioned way, and eventually I will.  But I wanted to try the full text search method first.  I noticed very recently that many of the films in the 1901-1929 Bari now have a new little emoji.

If you’re in the catalog and you find a film/folder you want to search, you might see the magnifying glass, which means these have been indexed.  There is no way to know if they were AI indexed or human indexed.  If they do not have the magnifying glass, they might have the new emoji which is “full text searchable”.  (If they have neither, you have to look at the images the old-fashioned way.)

What does “full text searchable” really mean?  As with most of what I report, good and bad news.

The full text search goes through every image in a film/folder and converts the hand-written words into text.  This is the same technology used in the AI indexes.  Impressive.

What full text search does NOT do is to convert what words it reads into what it means.  It just throws all the words that it can interpret into text.  I’ll show you an example.

Here is a page of text that goes with this image.  I’ll zoom into one of the three records on this image.

On the left margin of this record is the record number and the name, with surname first and give name second.  Numero 19  Selvaggi Pasquale.  You can see this in the text on the right.

So let’s see the text in the main area of this record.  Here is some of the image first.

And here is the text that matches it.

Here’s more of the image.

And the rest of the text.

The best way I can compare AI/Human indexing with Full Text indexing is this:  When I search the AI/Human index, I can limit my search to:

• a specific town or province,
• a year or range of years
• first name
• last name
• father’s first name
• other’s first and/or last name
• type of record

When I search “full text”, I am searching for a needle, and each image is a haystack!

Let’s look at the search screen.

First we have keywords, then name, then place, then range of years, then image group numbers (forget those for now.)  I have to say that my first few days of searches of Italian records have proven the following.  (This is my personal evaluation and maybe I’m wrong.)

• The name of the person is not indexed in the Name search field.
•The Place is not indexed
• The year range is not indexed.

From what I have learned, you need to just put all the words in the Keyword search.

How should you do this?  To find all the records of a family, we need to search for both parents.  If we add the town, we won’t find children born in a different town to the same parents.

Let’s search for all the children of this couple: Paolo Lombardi and Rosa Guerra.  They were married in 1900, so all their children should be born after the full-text starts.

If I search for Lombardi or Guerra in the “Name” field, I won’t find what I need.

They are from Triggiano, but if I put Triggiano in the Place field, I won’t find what I need.

Same goes for the year.  You get the idea.

Instead I will use Keywords to search:

My search was wonderful – I got 49 million results!!!

So I added “Triggiano” to the search, and I got another 100,000!

Well, I don’t want to read 49 million pages.  Why did so many pages come up?  Because any image that contains ANY of the words I searched will end up in the results.  Any Italian record with Paolo in it.  Any Italian record with Lombardi in it.  You get the idea.

I really don’t want any page with ANY of those words.  I only want pages with ALL of those words on the same page.  To do that, you need to type a plus sign in front of the word.  This means that the only pages that show up will have all the words.

Let’s try the search the new way:

Much better – only 40!

This is how you will see the results.

I don’t want to go through all 40 records in this column, but suffice to say you need to use the pluses and the keyword search to try to track down your relatives in Italy.

Remember that even with only 40 results, you get each image that has any combination of those names.  So a page with a Rosa Lombardi and Paolo Guerra, Paolo someone-else and Rosa whoever.  Rosa Di Paolo.  No guarantee that these are the family I want.  You can see in the image above the various words with yellow and how they look.

On the left, you can apply a filter to only see birth records for now.  Click “Record Type” and select “Vital records, Birth records.  Make sure the other boxes are not checked, then click “Apply”.

Now we only have eight results!  Much better.

When you click on any of these results, it will take you to the image, which for births has three different people on an image.  (Marriages have 2, deaths have 4).  Do not worry about the header at the top of each result.  It might have a different town.  Click on it anyway.

First result, Nicola Lombardi, born Oct 20 1908 Triggiano, parents Rosa Guerra and Paolo Lombardi.  Ka-ching!

Second result.  Paolo Nitti, Margherita Trulli and Vito Ferri.  No Lombardis

Third Result. Maria Lombardi born Aug 28 1902 Triggiano, parents Paolo Lombardi and Rosa Guerra.  Ka-ching!

Fourth result.  Adele Maria Lombardi, parents Giuseppe Lombardi and Maria Domenica Pontrelli.  Wrong parents.  The other two aren’t Lombardis either.

Fifth result. Antonio Lombardi born Jan 1 1919 Triggiano, correct parents – ka-ching

Sixth result.  Costantina Lombardi with the wrong parents.  Other two are not Lombardis

Seventh result. Giuseppe Lombardi born Nov 2 1916 Triggiano, correct parents – ka-ching

Lastly eighth. Maria Teresa Lombardi, correct parents.  Born June 11 1910 in Bari, not Triggiano.  Ka-ching and you might have never looked in Citta di Bari if this search didn’t send you there.

Out of 8 results, we know we have five children born to this couple, between 1902 and 1919.  We obviously do not have every child, but we have a bunch and we now can search other records manually to find others.

Actually, by putting “+Triggiano” in the keyword search, we might have excluded other towns from the search.  The only reason it found the record on #8 was because Maria got married in Triggiano and that is noted on her birth.

Also don’t forget to use “Edit Search” to adjust your search settings.  It’s on the left panel.

I am still learning how to get the most from this tool.  Ultimately, I hope the records that are Full Text can be converted to AI indexed so you only have to use one method.

If you get too many results, add more words with the plus sign.  Or try putting the mother’s name in quotes like this  +”last first”  example +“Guerra Rosa”  Most of the time, the mother’s name is on the records this way and that will only show where the names are together like this.  Then try +”Rosa Guerra”

Any questions, or suggestions, send them to Dan at d.niemiec@comcast.net and please put “Fra Noi” in the subject.

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 who might be more experienced. You can visit living relatives and learn about relatives who are no longer with us. You can visit the cemetery to find dates on the gravestones. You can join genealogy groups in the area and attend meetings to find out the latest techniques and methods. All of these are typically local and within driving distance.

Not everyone will be willing to hop an airplane or ride a Metra for eight hours to add to their skill set, but for those of you who have run out of ideas, or if you just want to learn other genealogical things that you don’t think you need, there are large national conferences that draw thousands of attendees and hundreds of vendors hawking genealogical websites, books, maps and many other items you never thought of.

You might have attended a small conference with several local speakers, a box lunch, and people you know. If you have ever been to a huge business conference at McCormick Place, for example, imagine that, but with nothing but genealogy vendors and speakers. It’s a much bigger scale and can be overwhelming the first time.

There used to be more national conferences in the past. 9-11 hurt that business, particularly because a national conference was all set to start the following week, and many of the speakers couldn’t fly in due to the air restrictions of that week. Covid didn’t help either. But there are some different choices of conferences and locations that are worth a little time researching whether you ought to go.

Keep in mind that some of these conferences now offer Zoom video of the presentations, and this is very convenient for those who are not able to travel during the week of the conference, or not willing or able to spend the money on the trip. You can experience some of the presentations without the hassle of travel, but you miss out on interacting with other attendees and asking in-person questions of the presenters. It’s just not the same. Also, some presenters, usually the most well-known, do not permit Zoom or video of their presentations to protect their ability to present the same content at other conferences. Unless you attend in-person, you won’t be able to see the “best of the best”.

Each conference has a specific focus, which may or may not be the type of research you are doing. For example, a conference in southern Illinois may be subtitled “Migration to California”. This does not mean that all the speakers are talking about migration, but they will work to get the people who have written books on the subject to all be at this conference, and those who can’t find their great-great-grandfather who disappeared from Peoria and never died, can attend this conference with the knowledge that the people who know most about this topic can give them some help. “The people from Peoria in the 1850s who left the area either went west to California to find gold, or maybe went to Salt Lake City to join a Mormon group there.” “Oh, I never thought of that!” However, be assured that no large-scale conference will have ONLY one topic. If they do, then maybe you want to skip that one if you have no one who migrated from Peoria to California in the 1850s.

The format of these conferences is typically the same, even if the content is very different. You will receive a booklet with a schedule (or there will be an app on your phone with the schedule on it). There will be a keynote address in a large hall, meant to be viewed by everyone. These are usually more general and not too specific on research methodology. “Our genealogy resources are growing bigger than ever!” might be a keynote topic. Frequently there is an announcement of some new websites update or some new product that will revolutionize the genealogy industry. After that, there might be five, ten or more different classrooms with different presenters and topics. The biggest hassle of the entire experience is that you have to choose which one you want to see. Use the app to decide which presentation can be viewed from home after the conference, and which other one(s) cannot, and choose accordingly so you can see both on different days/times. These conferences rarely ever have the same presenter with the same topic more than once at the conference, so you either have to go in person, or you have to watch the video later on.

There might be 2-3 sessions (with five or ten or more in different rooms) from morning until lunch. Conferences almost always have food vendors on-site, and local options for those who want to get something else to eat. Then there might be 2-3 more presentations after lunch. I will tell you here and now that you will be exhausted by having presentations all day.

Then there is day two or even day three of the same conference!

Once in a while, there will be a point in the schedule where you do not want to see any of the ten presentations going on between 10am and 11am that day. You can go visit the “Exhibit Hall” where the vendors are. It’s a giant flea market of nothing but genealogy stuff! Huge vendor booths for the major websites. There are many smaller booths of book sellers, antique map sellers, t-shirt and coffee mug sellers. (“Genealogy: Playing Hide and Seek with Dead People!”) This is not only a place to buy that genealogy t-shirt you always wanted (and at a “show discount” price) but you can go to the booth for the software you use, and talk to their people one-on-one. I have been able to get several websitess to make improvements based on my suggestions. Given how difficult it is to reach a human on a tech support phone call these days, the conference is a great way to avoid the AI phone system and talk to someone who knows what you’re talking about. There are also some of the booths that have small presentations for 10-20 people every hour, mostly to promote their products.

So now that I sold you on attending, where can you find these conferences? Each conference is either A) always in Salt Lake City, or B) in a different city every year. You can check their websites to see when their conference will be not too far from where you live, if you want to plan it that way. If the conference is in a city with a major genealogy library (SLC, Fort Wayne Indiana etc.) you can go to those libraries to do some research after the presentations are done for the day, or stay an extra day after the conference is over. It can be tempting to go the library while the conference is going on, but I do not recommend it. You paid for the conference, and you should attend everything you can to get full value. You can always go to the Allen County Public Library in Fort Wayne when there is no conference going on, if you’re going there to do research on your own.

Each conference is at a large site with a bunch of rooms, and the conference organizers try to guess how many people want to see the speaker or the topic in question. They schedule that session in a room that holds 100 people, and when you register, you need to give them a clue which sessions you think you might attend. (They do not hold you to this plan, but they use it to estimate.) When they find out they have 425 people who want to see this session in person, they might change rooms before the conference starts so they can accommodate everyone.

Are these conferences free? Maybe if you only register “on-line”. If you cannot travel to the conference, you can register for only the on-line sessions, which is still a great deal. You can see dozens of presentations on your own time, and if you’re profoundly bored, you can turn it off and the speaker will not be offended that you walked out! However, for the right to see the presentations that are only “in-person” and the exhibit hall etc, conferences can have a registration fee, but its usually well worth it.

One good place to look is www.ngsgenealogy.org. NGS is the National Genealogical Society and they draw many of the best speakers from around the US and the rest of the world. They have an annual conference just like I described above. The 2026 conference is in Fort Wayne Indiana May 27-30. It looks like the 2027 conference is in Madison Wisconsin.

Another excellent conference is RootsTech, which is held every year in Salt Lake City. www.familysearch.org/en/rootstech/registration This year is scheduled from March 5-7. RootsTech is centered on technology uses for genealogy and has become the largest genealogy conference in the US. If RootsTech has concluded by the time you read this, there will hopefully be another column about my experience there. There is a lot of overlap between NGS and RootsTech, so you can find out research techniques that have nothing to do with websitess. Some people are perfectly happy to go to a library or an archive and look at papers by hand. Nothing wrong with that. Many sources have never been published on the internet.

Please be advised that most presenters do not want you to video or audio record their presentations, so don’t count on recording them, and viewing it again later. If a presenter says that its ok to record, fine. Most are very picky about this.

You will have a syllabus (either on-line or a paper copy) with notes of what they teach. I used my phone to type notes of what I learned that was particularly important, so I remember to try when I get home.

I highly recommend that you attend 1-2 sessions that have NOTHING to do with what you are researching. Obviously I focus 99% on Italian genealogy. But I do have relatives in parts of the US that I don’t know much about. Then there are places like Germany and Wales that I have not one person born there in my entire tree. I wouldn’t miss a critical session on something I specifically need help with, but if there’s nothing else to do, go to a session on Peoria Migration to the West. No matter what else happens at the conference, you will have learned something.

If all this is too daunting, I suggest you find a local conference on a smaller scale. You can drive there. There will be 4 or 5 speakers who are very knowledgeable. You might run into your “genealogy peeps” who are also attending. It will probably cost a lot less unless they flew speakers in from across the country. And you still might learn something. There will be a few tables of genealogy societies and a couple of t-shirt and coffee mug vendors, but none of the major websites developers will be in the exhibit hall.

To find out more about these smaller conferences, go to the facebook page for local genealogy groups in the area and “Like” them even if you’re not a member and you don’t attend meetings. You will then get word about the conferences they recommend.

If you decide to go to one of the big Nationals, see if you have any researchers you know who are also going. When I went two years ago, I met up with a half-dozen fellow Illinoisans and we actually split the schedule up between us. “Dan if you go to the Scottish Research, I’ll go to the Peoria Migration, and Pat can go to the FamilySearch Wiki talk.” Then we would meet after and exchange notes on what we learned. And you’ll always have someone to eat lunch with. If the tables are “public” and you have to share with strangers, that’s a great way to meet people. I have friends from all over the country that have nothing in common with me except that we go to genealogy conferences!

Send any questions to Dan at d.niemiec@comcast.net and please put “Fra Noi” in the subject.

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 hard time breaking to him that I knew about it several days ago. But he was not a creature of social media, so he thought he knew something I didn’t know.

The one thing I thought I would miss in the paper was the death notice section. I have a huge number of distant relatives in Chicagoland and around the country, and I am not closely related enough to be directly notified when a distant relative passes away. The only way I would find out would be in the paper.

But as with just about everything else, things change and not always for the better.

Many areas of social interaction have changed in the past few years or decades, and you should keep these changes in mind when looking for old Zia Francesca. I find out about some distant relatives who pass away via Facebook. Most elderly people don’t use Facebook themselves. When they get too old to contact people the old-fashioned ways (letter, phone call, Christmas card) we lose touch sometimes. Then we get surprised when we find out the person passed three years ago. If we stay in touch on Facebook with their children or grandchildren, most likely one of them will post something about their loss. Or a few years later, they’ll post about a “Heavenly Birthday” and you didn’t know the person was gone.

What are these changes? Let’s review.

• Families lived closer to each other in “the good ol’ days.” When someone passed away, frequently all close relatives lived nearby, or even in the same building. I noticed that very few Italians were in Chicago newspaper death notices until after World War II. They rarely had to reach out to distant suburbs to let everyone know. Wakes lasted 2-3 days and people had time to travel to town if they heard about a passing.
• As people moved to the suburbs, it was harder to reach everyone, so the newspaper notice was a good way. The “so sorry I forgot to call you to tell you, but we were so busy” excuse, while perfectly valid, could be avoided by posting a notice in the major newspapers.
• When the internet became more common, you could send a “blast” e-mail to your entire address list, to avoid “I forgot you. I’m so sorry.” As a result, a bunch of strangers were notified who never met the person, but that was better than forgetting someone.
• Thanks to internet and social media becoming more common, many people did as I did and canceled their newspaper subscriptions, so costs went up, especially for posting death notices. The funeral homes started to set up websites in the 2000s to make a memorial page for the departed, which would then contain an obituary. This memorial page did a few things.
• First, you had to Google the person to find the right funeral home. How would you know, since no one reached out to tell you in the first place?
• Since the family didn’t have to pay by the word, they could write a nice biography of their loved one, which might have a lot more detail than the usual newspaper list of surviving relatives. “Pop-pop loved sailing and would take his grandsons out on the lake whenever he could.” “Nonna made the world’s best lasagna. No contest! If you want the recipe, you have to come to the wake!”
• People posted a lot of photos, hopefully. I lost a cousin in Alaska, and was able to add a bunch of photos to my collection. Frequently you could download the photo slide show that was used at the wake but would also be posted on-line.
• The funeral home memorial page frequently shows both the dates of birth and death, so you can use the date of birth to be sure you have the correct Vito Russo, and you can enter the correct date of death in your computer even though you would have to wait at least 25 years to order a copy of the death certificate. $17 to get the date exactly right!
• Even before COVID made the wake difficult to have, costs for wakes went up also, which made the three-day 3 p.m to 9pm wake replaced by the one-night-only wake, or even the “morning of the funeral” wake.
• Up to Vatican II, Catholics were forbidden to cremate. It took some time after the 1960s before the older folks were gone and their children started to be cremated. This reduced costs, helped the environment, and sometimes it eliminated the wake. Some people will wake first, then cremate, but not everyone. If they chose to cremate without a wake, they could schedule a memorial service or dinner at a later date when it wasn’t snowing so much.
• It is more difficult to visit the final resting place of someone who has been cremated. The family can choose to keep the urn at home. They can scatter the ashes in the lake or on the 18th hole of his favorite golf course. The only way to find out is to either look in the Catholic Cemetery web site (www.catholiccemeterieschicago.org) or ask the surviving family, which is not easy to do when they just lost someone.
• Again, COVID did not make this the standard, but many people have eliminated the wake altogether. Maybe a short service at the cemetery and lunch and that’s that.
• In the old days, people frequently went to the cemetery, to the exact grave site, and watched the casket lowered into the ground. I honestly cannot remember the last time I went to a funeral and saw the casket lowered. It is almost always a couple of prayers at the cemetery chapel. The death notices and memorial pages very frequently conclude with “Interment private,” which is a perfectly valid wish of the family, but it prevents the rest of us from knowing which cemetery to visit later on.
• If the family is less religious than they used to be, they might not choose to put their loved one in the usual cemeteries where the rest of the family is.

I use death notices and obituaries as a tool to construct complete families in my tree. Not every notice is complete, however.

Some people choose to only list survivors rather than the ten deceased siblings and their deceased spouses.

Not to put too fine a point on it, but sometimes the death notice or memorial page is a place people use to get careful revenge against that one sibling nobody talks to, by omitting them from the list of relatives. A former spouse who left the family? I understand that one, and sometimes the former spouse is listed if the split was amicable. (It is tough to find the later married surnames of women who divorced your relative and remarried.)

Most people do not list parents of an elderly deceased person. Those parents might have died decades earlier. My great-grand-aunt “Zi Zi Deline” who was the baby of her family, died at 89 and her funeral home “mass card” was replaced by a folded card with a full biography listing her three deceased spouses, her deceased son, and her long-deceased parents!

In order to be sure I have the right person, I like to search for both husband and wife on the same Google search. However, sometimes the wife’s maiden name is omitted, which means that when you search for “Vito Russo Anna Angiuli” and they leave off the “Angiuli” you might have the wrong Vito Russo. Some other Vito married to some other Anna. Nothing is worse than calling Anna to express your condolences and she says “oh, he’s right here” and hands Vito the phone!

If you know the names of the kids, you have a better chance of being 100% sure. Sometimes I try to search “Vito Russo Anna Johnson Theodopolous Tenerelli Schwartz” to only find Vito Russo whose daughters used those married surnames. In the modern era when divorce is more common, and people remarry or change back to the maiden surname, you might get some wrong. But if you get 3 out of 4 married surnames, you’ll probably have the right Vito. If they all divorced and changed their names, you’ll probably not find his notice.

One final tip is that if you find a notice or memorial page, please save it to your computer. There is no guarantee these pages will be out there in ten years. If the funeral home closes (that doesn’t happen often but we don’t know) or they move old memorial pages off the site, we might lose access to that great bio of Pop-Pop.

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 know friends who happen to be Italian who don’t know what town or province their ancestors came from, and they just aren’t interested.

That’s a shame.

If you don’t know how to do something, it is human nature to think that it’s incredibly difficult to do, therefore stick to the things already well known. I’m guilty of this mindset too. But the point of all this is to say that thanks to Italian records available and indexed on the internet, you don’t have to be a 30-year veteran to get your family tree back a few generations. Not everyone will get bit by the bug and keep going, but you can learn a lot in a short period of time.

I have frequently told you in these columns that you need a blank genealogy chart that looks like the NCAA Sweet 16. If you’re feeling ambitious, get one with 64 spots for your ancestors. Just google “blank ancestry chart” and choose a chart that looks good to you. Save it, in case you need to start over. Print it, so you can write on it when you find something. It is important to have an up-to-the-minute list of what you have found, so you don’t get confused.

Fill in what you know. Naturally parents, grandparents, and great-grandparents if you know their names. If you don’t, that’s ok. If there’s a nasty bad ancestor who left your family and no one knows anything about them, that’s ok too. Do what you can.

All I want to discuss today is the task of tracing the ancestry back as far as the records will allow you, without leaving your laptop. Some of you may not get far, if there are not many records available from your area in Italy. You’ll find that soon enough.

You need to know where to find specific types of vital information that will help you get the next set of parents. Let’s say that you never met your grandparents, because they never came to America. How do you find their names?

If your parents are still living, just ask them. Simple. If your parents are deceased, you ought to have their parents’ names on a death certificate. What about their parents?

The parents of the bride and groom, including maiden names, are always listed on an Italian marriage record. Hopefully by going back that far, you’re looking for Italian records.

Not every record that exists has been indexed, but the best thing to do is give it a try. Search for the marriage of your grandparents, for example, by doing the following:

1.Log into www.familysearch.org

2.Click Search, then click Records

3.In the box to the right, click “More Options”

4.Click “Type” then click the box next to “Marriage”.

5.In the name at the top, type the groom’s first and last names.

6.Click “Spouse” and type the first and maiden last name of the bride.

7.Click “Search”. You might get zero hits. You might get 47,312 hits.

a.If you get zero hits, replace some of the vowels in the names with ? wild card.

b.If you get 47,312 hits, click on “Marriage” under Add Life Event, and enter a town, province, or region if you know them. You can also put a range of marriage years that make sense. When were your aunts and uncles born? Pick some years prior to those births if you can.

8.If you have less than 100 hits, you can scan and find the couple you are looking for.

9.Click the down arrow by “Document Information” to show the digital folder number and image number.

10.Click the name underlined to see the record detail screen. Do a screen shot by holding the Windows key and pressing “PrtScn”

11.Even if you cannot view the image, the index shows you parents names of both the groom and the bride, which gives you four more ancestors than you had before.

12.Repeat this procedure for any other ancestor couple you have.

This seems like it goes forever, but eventually you will not be able to find the marriage of ancestor couples. It might be before there are civil records. It might be that they never indexed the records. That’s ok. Do the best you can. It’s not a contest.

As you write the names of these couples on your blank chart, you’ll have a list of all the ancestor couples you can find on the first go-around. Now, you should try to find the details about those families.

For each couple on your chart, do the following similar procedure:

1.Familysearch.org. “Search” “Records” “More Options” just like before

2.Click “Type” and select “Birth” and “Death” (If you’re feeling lucky, click “Marriage” too.)

3.Leave the first and last name blank.

4.Under “Add Family Member”, click “Father” and type in his first and last names.

5.Click “Mother” and type in her first and maiden last names.

6.Click “Search” and see what happens.

7.Again, you might get zero hits, or 83,209 hits.

a.If you get zero hits, change some vowels to “?” wild cards.

b.If you get too many hits, click the boxes next to their names, so you only get exact results.

8.Look at the search results. You can see those that make sense because they are from the right town, or the right range of years. If you’re looking for the children of a couple who married in 1899, and you find the same couple but the kids were born in the 1820s and 1830s, then it’s not the right couple and those kids don’t belong.

9.For each search result that has the right parents and the year makes sense, click the to see the detail screen.

10.Click the down arrow by “Document Information” to show the digital folder number and image number.

11.Take your screen shot. (These can be found in the Captures or Screenshots folder on your computer.)

12.If FamilySearch will allow you to view the image, click on the thumbnail image

If you cannot view the image itself, you may have to go to Antenati (www.antenati.cultura.gov.it) and find it there. Many Italian records are indexed on FamilySearch but can only be viewed on Antenati due to contractual agreements.

I will never ask you to skip looking at the actual records and just rely on the index, but now that the index has millions of additional records, you can do a lot more without becoming an Italian language expert. After you build the basic tree, you can go back to the Italian civil records and get more details and fill in the dates of birth, marriage and death.

Some of you might remember that I have done columns before about getting started with a basic tree, but it is so much easier to use the indexes.

See my earlier columns at franoi.com/roots for tips on working with wild cards if you find too many or too few search results (hits).

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 of the members of a family, which is important to track down birth records for the Italian-born siblings by looking in the right country. When you see the fourth sibling born in Illinois, you can tell that between child 3 and child 4, the family left Italy to come to America.

Census records cannot be 100% accurate or complete for many reasons. When people were at work, neighbors or other tenants in their building would give info to the census takers, and it might be very inaccurate. Families might have been missed altogether. Children who were born in 1901 and died in 1909, for example, never appear in the federal census at all. Lastly, if the census taker was not fluent in the language of the people in that neighborhood, the spelling of the names might be way off, to say the least. The census bureau did try to get bi-lingual census takers to work every ten years, but they couldn’t always find qualified people.

The early census records, from 1790-1840 don’t tell us very much. It records the name of the head of household, and a count of the number of adult males, females, children, and slaves. If you had family in the US during those early years, you may never get a list of all children of that family.

Once the census was 1850 to the present, every name was supposed to be recorded, so there are no more counts like before. Each person who was counted is identified by name, age, sex, color, profession, birthplace, handicaps, and of course their street address.

Let’s cover a few of these:

–           The age is in years, unless it is a baby under the age of one year. Only 1900 lists the month and year of birth, and these are often wrong. The ages are often wrong too!

–           The birthplace only shows the US state of birth, not the town. It also only shows the nation of birth, if not born in the US. So do NOT expect to find the tiny town of birth in Italy, or even the province or region. You’ll find “Italy”, “Illinois” or wherever else they came from. Naturally if you have relatives born in various areas of Europe that changed hands, such as Poland, you might have the same person born in Poland in one census and Germany in another.

–           In order for the US government to know how to allocate resources, they needed to know who was blind, deaf, insane or “idiotic”. Sorry but those were the terms back in that less-enlightened era.

Anyone who has done genealogy for more than a year or two is aware of the great fire….not of 1871….the fire of 1921 that destroyed the entire 1890 US Census. A few scraps exist but if you want to hear 10,000 genealogists groan all at the same time, mention the year “1890”!

Each census asks different questions, usually because of events of the previous ten years. Due to the number of immigrants coming through New York and many other ports in the 1900-1909 era, the 1910 census asked more detail about the number of years in the US etc. The 1930 census asked if the person owned a radio, which practically no one owned in 1920. Maybe Marconi!

Though the census was taken right through 2020, we are not allowed to see anything from 1960 to date. The latest US Census available for our research in 1950, due to a law restricting release of the census for 72 years to protect privacy. Yes, if YOU were born before April 1st, 1950, you are probably in a census record and you can find it on-line.

If you want to learn from the census, you should try to find each family you want to learn about, and find them in each census that makes sense. My parents were born in the 1930s so they are in the 1950 census as teenagers, 1940 as kids, and neither is in 1930. My grandparents are in the 1930 census as young married couples, 1920 as kids, and only one grandparent was in the 1910 as a small child. The other three grandparents were not in the US yet.

Great grandma Abbinante died in 1949 so she missed 1950, but her husband Palmo barely made it. Use the known dates of arrival in the US, and their death years, to know if they are in that census year. Usually the census was taken in April, so that may decide if a relative was in the census or not. If you unexpectedly find your ancestor in the US and they weren’t supposed to be there, it could mean one of two possibilities. Either you found the wrong person, or you found that your ancestor went back and forth to Italy.

Let’s say you look for the same family in every census and you do not know much yet. My great-grandparents married in Italy in 1907.

1890: census doesn’t exist

1900: No reason to search – they married in 1907.

1910: Palmo was in the US in 1910 working, but I cannot find him in the census. Wife Anna was in Italy with her kids.

1920: Palmo and wife Anna were in the 1920 census on 507 N. Ashland (near Grand Ave.). Children Joseph, Nick, Dominick, Tony, and Frances. Mary wasn’t born yet. They lived in a building with the family of Phil and Maggie Moretti. Maggie (known to our family as Cooma (Comara) Michelin’) ended up being godmother to my Mom, even though I can find no genealogical link between the Moretti’s and Abbinante’s. The census failed to mention that Joseph, Nick and Dominick were born with the surname “Liturri” to my great-grandmother and her first husband. Those kids were never named Abbinante. The census takers were told to count everyone, but they used ditto marks to repeat the surname, so since the head of household was “Abbinante”, all the kids were called “Abbinante” even though the first three were not. If your family has a multiple marriage, and a Brady-bunch family, it may explain why you can’t find some of your relatives as children – check under both surnames.

1930: Palmo and Anna were in the 1930 census with younger children Frances and Mary at 1355 W. Grand Ave. They lived with “cousin” Nick Pompilio aged 57. Nick and Tony died of TB in the 1920s. Dominick and Joe were now married and lived elsewhere.

1940: I finally found Palmo Abbinante in the index spelled Ablemutto! And when I see the handwriting, I’m not surprised! There is a little X with a circle around it next to Palmo’s name, which indicated that he was the person who gave the information about the entire family to the census taker. 1940 was the first year they marked the “informant”. This helps us measure the reliability of the information. If the informant was the upstairs tenant, the data on Abbinante might be far less accurate. They are at 1411 W. Grand this time. Frances was on her own and Mary was married to Joseph Purpura who are enumerated with Palmo and Anna. Cousin Nick died in 1933.

Look closely and see that Joseph Purpura’s relationship to the head of household is “sonshgashgsajdg” It should say “son-in-law”. His daughter Josephine should say “Granddaughter” but it says she is the 2 year old daughter of a couple who were 59 and 61 years of age!

1950: Palmo is found in the index under the name Palmo Francesch. No kidding! He is at 1124 S. Richmond. His wife Anna had died in 1949. There are a Greek family and a Russian family in the building. He lived alone on the first floor. The family of Frank and Theresa Leo live in the building, who were in their 20s at the time and are very distantly related to Palmo. I wonder why Palmo wasn’t living with any of his children.

Since I know Palmo died in 1951, and also because the 1960 census won’t be released until 2032, that ends the census of my great-grandparents family.

What have we learned from my one family?

–           Names are misspelled in the index so poorly that it was almost impossible to find them. All census records back then were handwritten. The government probably didn’t care too much WHO you were as long as everyone was counted. Census takers were paid by the number of people, to give them incentive to go back and try to find the folks who were missed the first time.

–           Some of his children got stuck with their step-father’s surname

–           Not in the same address – they moved at least every ten years. They could have moved more frequently, but the census only shows where they lived that one day every ten years.

–           Some of the kids were born in Italy and some in Illinois. One child lived for two months in 1918 and thus never appears in a census. One daughter moved from Italy to Illinois, married at 16, and only appears in the census with her husband.

Keep in mind that each census has different questions, so you will need to read the headings at the top of the page to see that one column is “number of years married” and another is “number of marriages” and another is “number of years in USA”.

Now that I told you want you can find, where do you look?

The census is on many genealogy web sites. The most common are the actual census site, data.census.gov, but the easiest to use are good ol’ www.familysearch.org and good ol’ www.ancestry.com. Each one uses a different screen to search, but the keys are:

1. Don’t be too picky about the spellings – use wild cards. (Not one Palmo Abbinante turned up even though there were several in the US)
2. Don’t be too picky about the age. Use a wide range of birth years unless you get too many search results. Then narrow it down.
3. If the site allows it, search for one person and also search a spouse at the same time. Both Familysearch and Ancestry allow this. Then you can try “Palmo” no surname, and spouse “Ann*”. Only couples with both names will show up.
4. If you have to use a lot of wild cards, fill in the birthplace with “Italy” or “Illinois” to weed all the Abbotts out of your search for Abbinante.
5. In Ancestry, find the census search page before you start.
6. In Familysearch, search “Records” and click “Type” and check the box “Census, Residences and lists”. Use “Residence” and limit to “Illinois” or wherever, and the year of that census “1940” through “1940”.

You may find some surprises in the census that will raise new questions. I found a relative born two years before her parent’s marriage. I also found my mother’s mother listed twice. She is with her second husband and their two children at one address, and she is listed with her first married surname, with her six children, at another address! Hint: She wasn’t living with her first set of children, but they told the census taker she lived there so the kids wouldn’t be split up and sent away.

Keep in mind that the on-line indexing on all the sites comes from a computer generated list that was not quite AI but pretty close. This means you might have trouble finding your Ablemutto family……Abbinante!

Good luck – write to me at d.niemiec@comcast.net and please put Fra Noi in the subject.

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 won’t name the second son and make a duplication.

Rule 4: Second daughter is almost always named for the mother’s mother, with the same exception.

Rule 5: If a baby in the family dies, the next baby of that gender usually is named for the deceased one. So you can have two, three or more Vincenzos in the same family. That’s a tip-off that the earlier Vincenzo had died. Look for a death record between the first Vincenzo’s birth and the second Vincenzo’s birth.

Rule 6: This rule usually overrides the above rules. If the baby is born AFTER the father has died, the baby will usually be named for the deceased father. If it’s a girl, they take the feminine version of the father’s first name, such as Francesca if the late father was Francesco.

Under normal circumstances, there is usually not a son named the same as his father EXCEPT if that father died before the son was born, OR if his mother’s father accidentally has the same name. Filippo and Francesca can have a son Filippo if Francesca’s father happens to be Filippo, too.

This seems confusing but the point is that no rule is absolute.

Let’s get to exceptions you have to watch out for:

1. Italian first names versus American first names

This one is pretty obvious but it can affect your “parent searches” on Familysearch. First of all, the Americanization of Italian first names is not the same throughout Italy. You have to see how it works for your area. For example, my Barese relatives are filled with Pasquales who became Patsy in America, and other Pasquales that became Charlie. Most of my Vincenzos became James or Jimmy, even though Vincent or Vinny makes more sense. You have to see how it works with your family. When you search for the children of a couple, try using the initials first and see how many results there are. Father First name “O,” Last name “M” Mother first name “M” last name “P.” This would pick up both Otto and Oronzo, and any crazy spelling of Menolascina. “M” picks up Mary, Marianna, Maria for the mother. If you get 10,000 hits, add some letters to one or more of the names to narrow down the numbers. But if you know Otto and Oronzo both are the same person, you would have to do two searches to get the children of Otto Menolascina or Oronzo, because adding the second letter to either search would prevent the other name from coming up in the results.

It is typical that a couple who married in Italy and came to Chicago might use their Italian first names and not be very good at spelling their last name for the clerk, so their earlier kids would be found using the Italian first names. Perhaps later in their child-bearing years, they start to use the Americanized spellings. My great-uncle and aunt had children in Chicago under Vincenzo and Costantina, and a few years later, the exact same couple are having children as James and Constance/Connie.

The last name can become an American standardized spelling as well. Perhaps the judge who handled their citizenship case changed the spelling. Or they learned how to spell their surname and kept that spelling. “Minola” and “Mello” are both Americanized spellings of “Menolascina,” as is “Menolasino.”

2. Inconsistent first names

This is mostly in Italy, but it can be a pain.

Let’s start with the Virgin Mary. Many women are named for Mary in a Catholic country like Italy. In the rules above, I talked about repeated names if an earlier baby died who had that name. This gets a little cluttered when a family wants to name their children after the Blessed Virgin. You can get a family like this one, same parents:

Maria Luigia born 1822 *

Maria Gaetana born 1824 *

Maria Luigia born 1825 *

Maria Maddalena born 1827 *

Maria Antonia born 1829 *

* — same parents

In a family like this, are the first four Maria’s deceased? Typically, no. Only the first Maria Luigia is deceased because there’s another one. If you run into a family like this one, don’t be surprised. This type of naming scheme rarely applies to other names. If a family has a Giuseppe, Giuseppe Rocco, Giuseppe and Giuseppe, odds are the first three are deceased. And the next number applies to this family above.

3. Why do people use one name at birth and another at death?

This has many possible answers.

Answer 1: The clerk made a mistake.

Let’s say Maria Carmela Abbinante is born in 1832 and married Vincenzo Patano in 1853. A death record in 1879 shows “Marianna Abbinante” with the same parents and with Vincenzo Patano as the surviving spouse. Most likely, the clerk was distracted, or had one too make espressos that morning, or one too many sambucas the night before. We’ll never know. If you do your “due diligence” to make sure that another sibling in this family didn’t also marry a Vincenzo Patano, and the age is pretty close to correct, then it is likely there’s a simple error.

Answer 2: The documents use a slightly different name to keep from confusing this person with another one in town.

There is a MASH episode where another soldier in Korea happens to have the exact name of the series hero, Benjamin Franklin Pierce, and they get each other’s mail by mistake. That’s a pretty unusual duplication of names because they could come from anywhere in the USA. But when you realize how many duplicate names there can be in a small Italian town, this happens more than we want.

Lets’ say a couple named Gaetano Iacobellis and his wife Maria Francesca Burdi have a dozen kids and most of them are boys.

Son Vito Iacobellis and his wife have a Gaetano Iacobellis and a Maria Francesca Iacobellis among others.

Son Vincenzo Iacobellis and his wife also have a Gaetano Iacobellis and a Maria Francesca Iacobellis among others.

Son Pasquale etc. You get the idea. If eight sons of Gaetano live to get married and have children, you could have eight (or more) Gaetano Iacobellis and eight (or more) Maria Francesca Iacobellis born in a short period of time. This problem does not apply to the daughters of Gaetano because their children will all have the surnames of their husbands, so there will be less confusion.

Once in a while, you can find that a Maria Francesca Iacobellis marries someone named Giovannelli, and one of her cousins meets a different Giovannelli at the wedding and they get married, too. Now you have two Giovannellis married to two different Maria Francesca Iacobellis. So sometimes, one of the Maria Francesca’s suddenly starts showing up in the birth records of her children as just “Francesca Iacobellis.” Now you are searching for the children and you see some Giovannellis whose mother is Maria Francesca and some whose mother is just Francesca. Thank you, Mr. Clerk for separating them this way.

In all seriousness, I have had two couples where both the grooms have identical names, and both brides ALSO have identical names. When this happens (and it happens more than you think) you have to hope that the clerk takes steps to differentiate on the births of their kids. They need to change the groom or bride’s name in one couple to keep their kids separate from the other couple’s kids.

You will discover the duplicate couples when you end up with a family of 26 children and they are born a few months apart! In that case, you need to see if they refer to Father #1 as “Giuseppe di Pasquale” and father #2 as “Giuseppe di Vito,” or they drop the “Maria” and keep just “Francesca” for one of the mothers.

Sorry if I’m twisting you into a knot with all this, but I am just letting you know that you could run into duplicate families like this. The fact that these families stay in your town for generations, and they marry the same families in that town, and they repeat names from grandparents, I could probably calculate the probability percentage of running into this situation. But who wants math equations in a genealogy column? Certainly not I.

Answer 3: It is quite frequent that a person of either gender who has two first names will end up with the clerk using one of them on marriages, or on births of their children, or on their death record. Remember that we usually do not know what they were called by each other in town. People would use “sopranome” nicknames, usually to keep them separate from the others in town with the same name. But they could not legally use those names on official civil documents.  One Giuseppe Rocco Ventrella would show up as “Rocco” and the other as “Giuseppe Rocco” or just “Giuseppe.” It was probably up to the clerk rather than the person.

Also, you should NOT be surprised if a couple named Vito Mazzoccoli and Maria Luigia Campobasso have a child, and the next child in that family belongs to Vito Mazzoccoli and Maria Campobasso and the next child belongs to Luigia Campobasso. Why do they do this? I wish I knew.

Answer 4: This one is for the people who are able to get copies of Church records from Italy before 1809. Since these are baptism records, you are seeing the full baptismal name of the person. Most baptismal names have 3-4 or more Christian names followed by the surname. If the family is wealthy, mostly landowners, there could be 6-8 Christian names. Not sure why, but it is a pattern I noticed.

What you will also notice is that if a person is baptized Francesco Paolo Vito Antonio Battista in 1782, that person may die as “Antonio Battista” in 1827. Why not “Francesco”? I wish I knew the answer.

Let’s just say that it’s rare for a person who is baptized Francesco Paolo Vito Antonio Battista to die after 1809 and appear in the civil death records as Francesco Paolo Vito Antonio Battista. Extremely rare.

This leads to two problems. Problem 1: If your great-5th grandfather died as Antonio Battista, how do I find him in those baptism records when he won’t necessarily be baptized as Antonio blah blah blah Battista? The Antonio could be anywhere in the myriad of Christian names.

To solve this problem, you have to do the following. First you need to get Antonio’s parents’ names from that death record. Be sure it is the right Antonio using the spouse on the death record to make sure it is yours. Then when you are in Italy going through the Church records (or you are one of the lucky few who has church records on Familysearch) you have to find EVERY child of those parents, to be sure you find the right Antonio.

So you find the baptisms of the following children:

Vito Antonio Francesco Paolo — baptized 1775

Luigi Vito Antonio — baptized 1777

Erasmo Nicola Vito — baptized 1780

Francesco Paolo Vito Antonio — baptized 1782

Giuseppe Vito Pasquale — baptized 1785

Giovanni Erasmo Luigi —baptized 1787

What a mess! But the last name with an Antonio in it is the 1782 baptism. That is most likely your Antonio who died in 1827, regardless of the age on the death record. (Those can be very wrong a lot of the time.)

I don’t want to spend a lot of time on this for the many of you who have not been able to get to the church records yet. But you will run into a major hurdle finding the right ancestor’s baptism unless you follow this method. If you find someone with the first name “Antonio,” it might be the wrong ancestor. If you don’t find someone with the first name “Antonio,” you may think you hit a dead end.

Take a good look at families in your tree. If you find a family with no children for 5-7 years and then they have kids again, it is possible you rejected children in the records because you were too strict with the way the names are recorded. Or you could have too many kids and the mother is 58 years old, which means you were too lenient and you have a duplicate couple.

Feel free to write to me at d.niemiec@comcast.net and please put Fra Noi in the subject. I may try to make a presentation out of this topic at Casa Italia – watch for it on their social media pages.

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 a copy, you should. This film describes the effect of World War II on the young Italian Americans in Chicago who served their country, were changed from boys to men, and for some, who never came home.

The movie includes interview segments from about two dozen Chicago Italian-American World War II veterans, of whom as of mid 2025, only Carl Liture remains living at age 99!

Thanks to the DVD, the recollections and stories of all these people are preserved forever.

There are many other DVD documentaries about Italian Americans in other cities, and not connected necessarily with World War II. Many of the people interviewed in those movies are gone as well.

So the point I am laboring to make, is that we need to record the stories of our relatives for posterity while they’re still among us.

I know I spent a lot of time hanging out with the older generation relatives, and even though I didn’t have a clipboard with notes or questions on it, I was interviewing them, in a way.

Now that many of them have gone, I am the carrier of their stories, and I should record what I know for myself.

I would think we have all seen a lot of great professional interviewers on television. Talk show hosts like Jack Paar, Johnny Carson, Larry King, Dick Cavett, Charlie Rose. Also in-depth interviewers like Barbara Walters, James Lipton, Mike Wallace, Dan Rather, and many podcast hosts. I have tried to see what their techniques are, so I can get the benefit of the stories from my relatives.

A professional interviewer has to establish a rapport with their subject. If we interview family, we have that part covered. We can’t be too forward, saying something awful like “I need to talk to you — you’re over 90 and won’t be around long.” That’s when you would hear one of those wonderful Italian curse words!

I don’t claim to be an expert but there are a few things I would try to do.

It would seem obvious to me that the subject should be comfortable, and the environment should be free of distractions. It would be hard for someone to think back seven decades while grandchildren are running around chasing the family dog! Don’t start the interview after the third Sambuca either. It may help then be more talkative, but it will cost you accurate recollection.

A good interview should be conducted when the subject is at their most alert. Don’t do the interview right before or after a nap. You want them thinking clearly. If they work best after a double-espresso at 7:30am, then you should be ready to start at 8!

If the subject has had a very difficult time, such as a war injury, or the loss of a spouse or child, I would not get too much into that bad topic unless the subject has talked about it many times. I have seen Dan Rather interview a lot of rock stars on his recent show “The Big Interview” and he seems to have a method. “Now I know you have written about this in your autobiography, and I don’t want to dwell on it, but when your drummer died from the overdose, what did you go through?”

Other interviewers don’t do their homework. A recent documentary on Liza Minelli, now almost 80, opens with footage of Liza, Lorna and Joe at their mother Judy Garland’s funeral in 1969, and Liza (being interviewed in the present day) said something like “I’m sick of being Judy’s {expletive deleted} kid!!” Sadly she didn’t want to talk about a number of other topics either that are a major part of her life story. This is not a criticism of Liza. It is an example of someone who is either tired of speaking to the press about personal mistakes, and who perhaps does not want to settle the discussions once and for all. Some famous folks would like to keep the aura of mystery. Johnny Carson springs to mind. There are many things we don’t know about famous people, and there are things we know too much about.

When we get back to our relatives, it is likely that A) they are not famous, and therefore are not sick of the press reporting falsehoods about their crazy life; and B) having never been interviewed, they might feel the pressure that this is the one and only chance to either make a lie stick forever, or to settle the debate about that first wife once and for all!

In the time you have spent with your subject over the years, you probably have an idea how your subject will react when you bring up their four failed marriages and the stepson nobody knows where he came from. Remember your audience. The family may want gossip sometimes, but 50 years from now, descendants not yet born will want to know what life was like, not the sordid mistakes.

I have also seen some interviewers who make what I feel is the biggest mistake of all. They don’t listen. They ask the subject “So after your mother died, you did what”. They answer “I had no one to keep me in Tulsa so I moved to New York City to try to get involved in the garment business.”

Then the interviewer asks “You married your wife in 1959?” A) nothing to do with the answer of the last question, and B) the second question is a yes-or-no. Very boring. First ask about the garment trade.

“Why New York? Why not Oklahoma City?”

“I had a buddy. He wasn’t my buddy for long. He partnered with me to open a shop, then took all the assets and left me with the liabilities!”

“So you left for where?”

“I heard he took off for Chicago so I moved here. Never did find him. Took me 20 years to pay the creditors but I’m proud to say I paid every red cent.”

“And your buddy?”

“I’m sure he’s gone but if he ever shows up at my house….”

“But Chicago wasn’t all bad, right?

“Yeah I met my beautiful wife of 62 years at a coffee shop.” etc

The questions and answers above combine to tell a story, mostly because the next question is essentially “and then what”. Your relative may not be a great story teller or writer. That’s where you come in. Get them to talk about things they want to discuss, and use one event to trigger the next memory. If you ask about Chicago and they say, “Well I met that old {leaving out nasty words here}, my first wife.” Then you should say “We don’t need to discuss her unless you want to.” During the course of an interview, you might accidentally hit a sore subject. Maybe Mike Wallace would have probed deeper, but he had TV ratings to consider. You just want to keep memories for future generations. You might get fewer memories if your subject becomes guarded because you keep digging about the first wife too long.

I want to make a fine point here, but you should do a few things when storing these memories.

1. Don’t just interview the 90 year olds. Some of their recall has probably gone due to age. But if you talk to cousins your own age, or even younger ones, you are capturing their life experience for the future.
2. You might want to play the raw interview video or audio to your subject to make sure there’s nothing in there they will get mad at you for.
3. Make sure the interviews are easily available to the family. Don’t leave one copy on your iphone and then drop the phone in the commode and lose it all. I lost my only copy of a recording of my thoughts on 9/11 recorded that evening. It’s gone and can never be reproduced.
4. Donate a copy to the Casa Italia Library and the IA Veterans Museum if appropriate. Send a copy to the Family History Library in Salt Lake City, because people might look there. Library of Congress etc.

When you’re done with an interview, play it back to yourself a dozen times. If you’re horrified by how boring it is, or how bad your questions are, take some notes and try again. Watch some professionals on youtube to see how it’s done.

And fifty years from now, when people are playing your interviews to learn about Nonno, they’ll have you to thank!

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 not contributed much to it, but I have used it to great personal advantage. I’ll explain.

Familysearch, Ancestry and other sites have asked people to upload their genealogy work to their sites, and then allow others to search that work in order to assist them in their own research. You can find multiple people with similar trees with different data, but it’s difficult to know who to trust.

FamilySearch decided to make a single family tree combining everyone’s information. That way there shouldn’t be duplications, and people can settle disagreements about information in THE Tree. Sounds democratic with a small “d,” doesn’t it?

The idea is that you download your tree from your computer into a gedcom file (check your software manual or web site for how to do this) and upload it to “the” tree.

Familysearch will check every person in your tree to see if there is an exact, partial match, or a pretty vague match, and ask you if you want to merge a person from your tree with a person in “the” tree.

What if you have Filippo Giacomo Carbonara, born July 8, 1832, in Triggiano, Bari, with no death information and “the” tree has a Filippo Carbonara born in 1832, died Sept. 9, 1883 in Capurso, Bari. Is this a match? It’s hard to tell from the information above. It could be two different Filippo Carbonaras, even though the towns are nearby. You may have to say, “No this is not a match” and go on.

If you have a lot of people in THE Tree, this process could be extremely long.

What happens if you merge the two Filippo Carbonaras and then do some checking to find they aren’t the same person? It’s a hassle to “unmerge” a person who was merged already.

The good news is that the screen to merge two people into one person shows everything you need to know to decide if they are the same. You can see parents of both, spouses of both, dates of birth, marriage and death of both. If everything looks the same, you can merge with confidence. If not, it is best to wait and do some more checking.

One thing to note: THE Tree does not contain living people with information. If you are the person who submitted a name, such as a parent who is still living, you will be able to see that record when you log into FamilySearch, but no one else can, because that person will be marked “living.” If that person passes away, and you mark them “deceased” in THE Tree, they will be searchable to anyone.

Due to the number of people in my tree, I have only contributed a small number of ancestral families, rather than the thousands of people connected to my file.

However, anyone with a FamilySearch login can search THE Tree. That is what I have been doing for the past couple of weeks.

When you get into FamilySearch, you can click “Search and then click “Family Tree.”

There is also a section called “Genealogies.” What is the difference? Well, the genealogies were submitted a long time ago, before THE Tree was created. This data is not mergeable or changeable. In many instances, the person who submitted the trees to the genealogies section are now deceased themselves, so you cannot ask for help with a particular person.

Let’s try a search in THE Tree. My usual method is to search for a name, and then search for either the parents OR the spouse of that person. This will narrow down my search to the person I wanted, I hope!

Please keep in mind a couple of things when you try this. First, at this writing, there are about 1.67 billion (with a b) names in THE Tree, despite trying to merge people together to eliminate duplicates. Second, the search gives you lots of hits that get progressively less likely to be yours. But do not be scared when your search comes up with 60,000 hits. It works very well finding the closest matches based on the data you searched with.

The results show you parents and/or spouse(s) and/or children of the person you searched for. They then show you the connected parents/spouses/children to the right. Note: They don’t show all children all the time. Sometimes they don’t show any children, but that does not mean there are no children in that search result. Take a look at this result screen:

If there are only 1-2 kids, they are in the right as connected to the Filippo Carbonara on the left. Others show parents and a spouse but no kids. Most often, if the parents are connected, the kids aren’t shown in the search result.

However, if you click on one of the Filippo Carbonaras on the left (or one of the parents/spouses/children on the right) the first thing you will see is a snapshot of that person’s record.

Under the name is a unique identifier for that record containing letters and numbers. This may help you find a specific person again later rather than searching the other way.

You then have a few things you can click to move forward.

click the star to “follow” this record. Any changes that anyone makes to this person will end up sending you a notification that a change was made.

click the “box with a line to another box” to see how you and this person are related. This requires that you have enough of YOUR tree uploaded into THE Tree to trace up and down to connect you with the person you clicked.

You can click on “Person” to get to the person’s record and all the details.

You can click on Tree to see where this person fits into THE Tree. Typically you would see a few generations.

You can click on anyone on THE TREE screen to see some details to the right. You can click “children v” to see all known children of this couple. You can click to see the known parents of the couple next to the symbol.

To the right, there is usually “Landscape” but you can click that and see more options:

Portrait will show you the same tree in upright format.

Fan chart will show you an ancestor chart from the person you selected, fanned out so you can see what lines need the most help.

“Descendancy” shows a text chart starting at the person you clicked, and working toward the present.

Lastly “First Ancestor,” well, even I don’t understand how this works spo let’s skip it for now.

All the tree manipulation is cool but I want to typically look at the person’s data, so I usually click “Person.”

There is a LOT of info on each person’s page, so here is Filippo’s page below:

I’m going to just do a few basics here, so you get the best advantage from the site.

When you see a pencil next to a piece of data, it means “edit.”

Click the pencil for you to edit the data itself, or to add a source.

When you edit a piece of data, FamilySearch asks you why. This is so the reason you changed someone else’s data can be explained to them (remember the “follow star?) When the other person sees the change, and decides that your change is completely off base, they can change it back and explain why. This sounds like two people can get into a debate about one piece of data in this gigantic tree. Yes, that’s exactly how it works!

You can see the last person who changed that piece of data, and click on their name. This will open a small box showing the person, and ways to contact them (e-mail or FamilySearch chat).

Below the birth, christening, marriage, death and burial information, there is a section for the other family members, including known parents, siblings, spouses and children. This is the best place for you to decide if this person is really the one you want to work with.

I also like to the bottom right as y9ou scroll down this page. “Print Options.”

You can print some of the details in different ways.

Person Details – prints the person details and various relatives on one printout (they’re all PDF files)

Pedigree – prints several generations of ancestors in a standard pedigree chart

Portrait Pedigree – prints a graphical tree of several generations.

Fan chart – see above

Family Group Record – this just shows the details of the person, their spouse, and their children – I like this one – the other printouts don’t always show the birth death and marriage dates.

Family Group Record with Sources – this one goes on and on depending on how many FamilySearch records have been linked to people in THE Tree. It is a very good place to check the data and verify if the other genealogists who edited this record are doing a good job.

There is now way one column can explain all the details of how to use THE Family Tree but I hope it has pushed you into checking it out. There are classes around the Chicago area that explain in more detail so keep your eyes open for them at your local library or genealogy group.