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.

I was almost 11 years old when I first saw the announcement of the election of a new Pope. I didn’t know of any of the Cardinals except Cardinal Cody of Chicago, so the announcement of Cardinal Albino Luciani of Venice was not a surprise or shock. The media did not pick him, so they were shocked and surprised.

The real surprise and shock came 33 days later when my father tried to get me up to go to school and I didn’t want to get up, and he told me that the Pope had died and I probably swore and said “That was last month!” “No the NEW Pope died!”

You never saw anyone get out of bed so fast!

Then the shock and surprise that they chose a Cardinal from Poland. I am part Polish so there was great pride that one of “my own” was elected.

What we knew right away is that 455 years of Popes born in Italy had ended with the election of Cardinal Wojtyla. What we didn’t realize at the time is that it is now almost 50 years since an Italian had been elected Pope. The church has sent Cardinals to many new places around the world, and the former dominance of Italian Cardinals in persuading the others to choose one of their own seems to have ended.

The announcement of a new Pope is always a moment of great joy, anticipation, and typically surprise. I was able to watch as Pope Benedict and Pope Francis were announced and gave their first speeches and blessings to the world.

But nothing surprised me more than the announcement in May.

“Eminentissimum ac Reverendissimum Dominum, Dominum … Robertum Francescum”

Who the heck was this? Australia? Great Britain? What part of the world did they go to THIS time??

“Sanctae Romanae Ecclesiae Cardinalem … Prevost”

Hmmm, France? I never heard of this guy!!

Then the EWTN commentators erupted. “He’s from Chicago!!!”

I shrugged: Must be a mistake. Didn’t sound like Blase Cupich to me.

“We have an American Pope! They said that would NEVER happen!”

As the researchers tried to figure out who Robert Francis Prevost is, the confusion began.

By now, everyone knows he spent most of his career as an Augustinian, worked in missions in Peru, then was named a Bishop in Peru, then came back to Rome to be in the Curia, and became a Cardinal only two years ago. That’s a very short time to be known by 133 voting Cardinals from 71 different nations!

I don’t recall anyone asking about the new Pope’s ancestral lineage before. Cardinal Bergoglio (Pope Francis) was born in Argentina but his father had been born in Italy, and that was about it. But when you have a North American-born Cardinal elected Pope, the first question is “Where is his family from?”

Boy did that start the questions.

“We think he’s Franco-Italian.”

“Both of his parents were born in Chicago, we think.”

It seemed like no one knew for sure.

Well, I do not claim to be the most renowned Chicago-Italian genealogist on the planet. Far from it. However, since it is unlikely another Pope born in Chicago with possible Italian ancestry will be elected in my lifetime, I thought this was a project worthy of my experience, and I hoped I would be the one to break the brick walls that were blocking most of the others who wanted to be the first to show Robert Prevost’s ancestry.

A number of genealogists immediately worked on the maternal side. Mildred Martinez Prevost was born in Chicago to a family from New Orleans. Her father was born in the Dominican Republic while it was controlled by Haiti, and her mother was listed in the census as mulatto or black. The Pope’s maternal grandmother has grandparents who were mixed-race.

Meanwhile, a lot of genealogists, myself included, tried to connect the paternal line to Italy. How cool it would be if the new Pope were a Chicago-born Italian!

I first started looking for census records of the grandparents, John and Suzanne Prevost. In 1950, the census said John was born in Italy and Suzanne in France, which matches up with the “Franco Italian” initial analysis that first hit the press after his election. The 1950 census also had the Pope’s uncle born in 1917 in New York, so I naturally presumed they were not in Illinois yet.

But when I looked for the 1920, 1930 and 1940 censuses, the family was not listed. I tried every method of searching. How badly could they misspell Prevost? I looked for other documents that might establish their residence as close to those three census years as possible. The best I found was the World War II draft cards of the Pope’s father and uncle. Their father was listed as the nearest relative, living on 5465 S. Ellis Ave. in Chicago. Since the indexing of the 1940 census must have been messed up, I had to find this family by looking for the census enumeration district that included this block, and then read everyone’s name and find that address. I located the district using a wonderful web site called www.alookatcook.com which brings up Chicago maps and helps you figure out the census district based on the address.

I go to FamilySearch and find the right district, with 30 pages of names. I read through the entire set, and even though they had people living on the 5400 block of South Ellis, on the odd-numbered address side of the street, there was no one listed at 5465. The number was not written on the census page, and no names looked like the Prevost family anywhere nearby. I kept reading all the names, and some leftover names at the end of the district (presumably houses where no one was home when the census taker came to call) but there was nobody to be found. It’s not a complicated family. “John, Suzanne, John and Louis.”

I checked 1920 and 1930 the same way, with no luck.

Next I looked for a citizenship application for either John or Suzanne. I found John, but only as a witness to someone else’s naturalization. I checked under maiden names etc. No dice. Maybe they were citizens in New York, but nothing turned up there either.

As much as I would like to claim Pope Leo as a part-Italian from Chicago, a single census from 1950 is, frankly, insufficient evidence.

I wrote on Facebook to my genealogy pals, who are some very well known local speakers and researchers, asking them what I had failed to do in my search. It didn’t bother me to not find it, if nothing was there to find. But if my method was incomplete, I wanted to find out how.

Most of them made suggestions, which I had already tried. E for effort.

The FamilySearch “Family Tree” was next — what had other people found? Maybe they heard a TV interview with one of the Pope’s brothers that gave a clue. All I found was an Italian birth date somewhere in Torino, for someone named Giovanni Prevosto. The date was close to the birthdate that appeared on John’s death certificate, and it was Prevosto, so this must be it.

But no one had any document in the United States that firmly showed John/Giovanni Prevost was born in Torino, or anywhere else, and who his parents were. This was circumstantial at best, and guesswork at worst.

One of the issues of FamilySearch Family Tree is that anyone can edit a record, and someone put Torino, then someone else deleted it, saying “no evidence”, then someone else would put it back, etc. Everyone was arguing about it, but no one had the breakthrough. Someone even put the Torino birth info on John’s FindaGrave record, and others used that as evidence of his birth for FamilySearch.

Since no one had found the paternal Italian lineage, some people presumed that the Italian must have been somewhere on his mother’s side. But the records in Louisiana are fairly accessible and complete, and no one really found anything but Louisiana, and France, plus the maternal grandfather being born in “Haiti”. Five days into the Papacy, there doesn’t seem to be any more evidence of Italian ancestry on the mother’s side than on the father’s. Some folks presumed that since his mother’s family came from New Orleans, there MUST be Sicilian blood. But almost all of the New Orleans ancestors were traced back further in New Orleans, or back to France. One ancestor died in 1891 and his death certificate said that his parents were “born in Cuba”. And of course the Haitian.

I spent an evening with my local colleagues at the FamilySearch center working exclusively on this. I hoped one of them would be detached enough to come up with a search strategy I had not thought of yet. They came up with search strategies I had already tried, so I had to try them all again to prove to them that it seemed like a good idea but had already failed. Five of us together couldn’t break the case.

At this point, I am feeling like I’m out of my depth, because my years of experience should have helped me think of ways to find some other paper or evidence.

Then a well-respected colleague popped up on Facebook and told me that a group of 15 researchers had solved the problem.

I felt a little genealogist-envy at first, and I wanted to read their conclusion and explanation and see if I could punch holes in their theory. But I couldn’t.

It was so simple, I’m upset I didn’t think of it myself.

They saw on the son’s draft card, on the 1950 census, and on the father’s death certificate, that John Prevost was a foreign language teacher at a private school downtown. Since it was a private school, one would think there would be an advertisement in the newspapers. They looked in the Chicago Tribune archives and found Prevost Language School.

Then they found “Riggitano-Prevost Language School” a few years earlier.

Then they found “Riggitano Language School” a few years earlier than that.

Okay, maybe some teacher named Riggitano partnered up with some guy named Prevost, and eventually Riggitano sold his half of the school to John Prevost. Makes sense, right?

They started looking for Riggitano in the newspapers and bumped into a scandal about the Foreign Language teacher having an affair with a French woman……turns out it was Suzanne, the Pope’s paternal grandmother!

Without getting into the details, the researchers now searched for the link between Giovanni Riggitano and John Prevost. They finally found it in an alien registration paper, which lists his name as John Riggitano Prevost, and said he entered the USA as “Salvatore Giovanni Riggitano Alioto”. Hmm Alioto. This is the first discovered document (and perhaps the only one) where it is established that Riggitano and Prevost were one and the same person.

Now they had a birthdate on several documents, a full Italian name, and a way to look for a passenger list. The alien registration showed his birthplace as Milazzo, Messina, Italy. Someone looked for a birth of Salvatore Giovanni Riggitano (who is Alioto?) in the birth records of Milazzo, and found him there, June 24, 1876, father Santi Riggitano, mother Maria Alioto. Ahh!

This group of 15 people combined to write a 14-page report of their findings.

How did he pick the name Prevost? Simple! John’s wife Suzanne’s mother was a Prevost.

Conclusion: I don’t know how anyone would have found this if John had not been owner of this foreign language school. Without the school name change, no one would have connected Riggitano with Prevost and found the other documents. Maybe they would have tried the alien registrations looking for Prevost. The newspapers probably would not have covered the scandal if Giovanni Riggitano was not a prominent businessman. If he was a janitor somewhere who changed his name, we might still not know.

Even though my family doesn’t come from Messina, and the maternal Italian connection is still to be determined or refuted, a long-delayed feeling of pride that I share a connection with the new Pope.

Big news! Some of it great, some of it…not so good.

When I was at the Rootstech conference in Salt Lake City in 2024, Familysearch was making a big deal about using “AI” technology to transcribe genealogy documents into searchable data.

They gave us a taste by indexing words from wills and probate records which are typed on a typewriter rather than handwritten. My genealogy colleagues who need wills and probate records were all excited, and rightly so. My Italian genealogy colleagues were expectedly disappointed.

I’ll try to explain this for people who are not tech nerds like me. The original documents housed in libraries and government offices were photographed and posted on FamilySearch. But a human being would have to read each record and type into a computer the name, date, location, parents, and other data from each photograph. Simply put, you can’t search a photograph of a piece of paper for the words that are in it.

The process of human beings looking at each photograph one by one will take forever. There are uncountable billions of images, and the humans who review them are volunteers. Even though a lot of people are willing to help, most of us don’t have time to give for free.

That said, if they can teach a computer to “read” each document and extract the names, dates etc. from it, it would be much faster and they could put as many computers to work as they like. Computers don’t need coffee breaks or vacation or sick time! They work around the clock and they do not get tired like me!

Sounds great, but how does this work in reality? The computer has to look at each letter of each word on each document, and determine what that letter is. It could be a typewriter letter “a” or it could be handwritten “a.” Typewriter script is usually consistent, so the “a” on one document looks mostly like the “a” on other documents. When the computer examines the shape of the letter “a” it checks that shape against what an “a” should look like, and reports that the letter is an “a.” It does this to the next letter and on and on until it finishes one page, then it goes to the next page. Then it goes through 2000-3000 pages for a typical film. Then it goes to the next film. (Did I mention that there are literally millions of films?)

However, when the documents are handwritten, and most Italian civil and church records are indeed handwritten, the shape of the letter “a” can vary based on the handwriting. Different clerks wrote records within the same town, and the “a” might be a little different. A left-handed writer will make the “a” different than a right-handed writer.

In addition, the lower-case “a” handwritten can look a lot like the lower-case “o.” It depends how the tail of the “a” or “o” swoops off the rest of the letter. If you have looked at Italian civil records and you have had a hard time knowing if the surname is “Menolascina” or “Menolascino” or “Menaloscina” or “Menalascino” because the “a” and “o” are similar, you understand what I mean.

As a human being with research experience, or just because you have cousins who spell the name “Menolascino,” you know what the name is supposed to be. A computer, because it cannot “think” the way we do, will objectively convert the handwritten letter into “a” or “o” without considering that somebody’s cousin spells it “Menolascino.”

If the computer just looks at the writing, and concludes that the name is “Menoloscino,” you may try to search for “MenolAscino” and not find the record.

So that is what “AI” computer technology is supposed to do. It takes all of the information in these documents into account when deciding whether the “a” is really an “a” or “o.” I do not know how it works but I imagine that after the AI computer reads thousands of pages within a specific town, and the name is “Menolascina” 75% of the time, then the “a” in the fourth character of the name is actually an “o” even if it looks like an “a.”

Now that I have confused just about everyone, what does this all mean?

A few weeks ago, someone told me that most of the records from Bari have been processed by the AI computers and were searchable on Familysearch “Records.” Until 2025, very few records could just be searched. You had to go into the FamilySearch catalog, find that town, find the births, find the right year, check the index (if there is one) and find the record. Sometimes, you would have to use Antenati Beni Culturali and do the same process. Now, you can go to FamilySearch and search by name, year, record type (Birth, Marriage, Death) and parents/spouse.

This has opened up the floodgates for me because of the number of families in my tree.

Why does it matter to search for the right names? Just go to the catalog and find who you need, right? Well, that system works best when the family stayed in one comune. If they moved around, or the parents came from two different towns, you might not find all the children in the same town. The solution is to search for the parents, and search the entire province or region and leave the town name out of the search, and you might trip over one child or more who was born in another town that you would have never looked in.

The other great feature is that you can try to search for deaths. Deaths are the hardest records to search for, because you don’t usually know when your Italian ancestor died. Let’s say your great-great grandfather was born in 1825. He married in 1848. His children were born between 1849 and 1862. He could have died any time between 1861 (maybe he died before his last child was born) and the 1920s. You would have to search each year of deaths between 1861 and 1925. Now, by searching FamilySearch, you can leave the year blank and just search for the name. The search results will show names of parents and the spouse, so you can be sure the one from 1883 is the correct one.

So far, I have found hundreds of additional children to add to many families, saving all the time of searching the “film” year by year. In many cases, the children were born in a “third” town. This means I have a father born in Triggiano and a mother born in Carbonara, and for some unknown reason they moved to Valenzano and their children were born there. Why would I just check Valenzano if the parents had no connection to that town prior to their marriage? I would have to check all the nearby towns and hope for the best. This would take a lot of time and I might come up empty. By searching the the “AI”-generated index, I tripped over the “third” town easily and found a bunch of descendants for a family I needed. Many families, actually!

I also found a lot of individual death records because I just searched for the name, or used wild cards like asterisks and question marks, and I also searched for either or both parents, or the spouse to narrow down the results. I have a lot more of these still to look for but this is going to save a lot of time. And as noted before, if the person died outside of their birth town, or outside of the towns their children were born in, I would have no way to find it without the index pointing to “third” town.

I started this column with the fact that there would be some bad news.

Let’s start with the obvious.

Bad news #1: The “AI” index is not 100% accurate.

Since we’re dealing with a computer, as opposed to a thinking human with research experience, the computer sometimes mixes up different letters. Lower case “a” versus “o.” Lower case “t” versus “l.” Lower case “e” versus “i” especially in names like De Nicolo or Del Medico. Lower case “q” and lower case “g.” Etc.

The same family may have children under “close” names. Example:

Vitantonio Mastrolonardo and his wife Maria Chiara Rubino

Some of their children show parents “Antonio Mastrolonardo” and “Chiara Rubino,” or “Vito Mastrolonardo” and “Maria Rubino.” Basically any combination of names could show up, which is the fault of the original records. But now that you are searching FamilySearch, you have to allow for multiple combinations of names, or you might miss some of the children of this family.

There are other mistakes I have noticed. I see a lot of people who were born in 1900 who were indexed as having been born in 1890. The AI should be reading the year as “Millenovecento,” which is in typescript, and conclude 1900.

Bad News #2: Not every Italian record has been indexed this way.

For Bari, it looks like they indexed the same “films” that were recently made available on Antenati Beni Culturali. https://antenati.cultura.gov.it/ Even though my town records go from 1809 to 1945, the records that were indexed only include 1809-1900, and 1930-1935. I wish I understood why. (As of this writing, the same records on “Antenati” have NOT been indexed.) You may look for all the children of a couple who married in 1890, and you will only find children who were born up to and including 1900. Your part of Italy may be different, so you should look for people you already know about, in order to see how many years were convered by the AI index.

Bad news #3: Not every record is readable by the computer

Yes I have been disappointed by this, because in some instances, I found children I did not know about, but I did NOT find children I do know about. Why aren’t they found? It could be that the index did not pick up the letters in the way they should. But the real reason might be that the page has ink bleedthrough, book worms, weak ink that is hard to see, and other reasons why even a smart AI computer cannot make sense of the shapes that appear on the page. As a result, that page may be removed from the index for further review.

In general, I give you the following advice. Use this index to lead you to the records that you need. But do not stop there. Go to the records themselves and use your “GI” Genealogical Intelligence so recheck the “AI” computer and see how accurate it is.

You may need to use Antenati to go to the actual record image – many images were removed from FamilySearch some time ago.

To get the low hanging fruit, as they say, search for the death record of an ancestor who died in the 1800s, and you do not have the death date yet. You might save yourself a lot of time searching for the death. And you might find the parents of this ancestor, if you didn’t have them already.

I am searching for Angela Pesole, so I use asterisks to cover for Angel”O” and “Pes”O”le

When searching for deaths, select the province from the place names. If you want to look in the specific town, that’s up to you, but I always leave the province open. If you just put “Italy” you might get too many results from towns and families that have no connection to you.

Click “Spouse” and type enough of the spouse’s name to narrow down all the Angela Pesoles to the one you want. You may have noticed I put a question mark in the spouse’s surname. His surname is “Lozupone” and lower-case “Z”s are particularly misread by AI. They come out as “g” a lot.

Click “type” and select only “Death.”

If you can’t find a marriage of one of your ancestor couples, try the same method as above but select “Marriage” and select either the Spouse or parents. You can search for marriages by bride or groom, but put the other spouse in the spouse area when searching.

Another search method is to find all the children of a couple who are your direct ancestors.

Same as above – click “Birth” and type in your birth location to search – I highly recommend using the province but you can do anything you want.

You need to search for the parents in order to find all their children. You might find similarly named parents from the wrong time frame but you can ignore those. In this example, it would probably be smart to replace “PAT*” with “P?T*.” The “a” could become “o” and you’ll miss “Potano.”

Again, click “Type” and this time select “Birth.”

This is a lot to process, and I didn’t want to split this into two columns and make you all wait a month longer. Try these methods and let me know if you solved an old problem using these methods. I cannot speak to how much of Italy was processed with the AI computers, or if other parts of the world were done the same way. You should try to search your area and write me at d.niemiec@comcast.net and let me know how you did.

I have a lot of very distant cousins. They are so distant that I never met them, yet they are in my family tree. I have closer cousins that I do not hear from, and there are people who have left our family due to divorce. Roughly once a year, I search to see if any of these people have passed away, so I can update my tree, and visit the grave or crypt if possible.

Among all the sources we use, the death notice (sometimes called “obituary”) is a common resource and relatively inexpensive.

Today, more notices are posted on funeral home websites, which are part of the “package” and cost nothing to search on Google.

I’m sure that most of you are very familiar with the information we can find in a death notice, such as:

• Name of the deceased
• Names of surviving relatives, possibly including maiden names
• Names of predeceased relatives, possibly including maiden names
• Often the name of cemetery where they will be buried or entombed or inurned
• Possibly the date and place of death
• Sometimes the date and place of birth

Unlike a death certificate, you don’t have to pay $17 for a copy. You need to either subscribe to a newspaper archive website, or you use one for free at a public library or a FamilySearch center. Even if you pay a subscription for a newspaper website to use at home, you can look up as many death notices as you want.

There is no one place to simultaneously search both newspapers and funeral home websites. You use the newspaper site to search its holdings, and you use Google to search funeral home sites.

As prices went up and funeral home websites offered a place to post biographical details without charging by the word, the notices became more detailed and listed more relatives. More importantly, people could put stories and personality traits that never appear in a newspaper notice. Plus, they give the rest of us a place to comment and tell stories about the deceased, which the newspapers certainly do not do. Lastly, most funeral home websites show the birth and death dates, which the newspapers almost never do unless you pay to show it in the text.

There are several schools of thought on how you should search for a death notice/obit. Not every death notice has the same format. You could have ones that start like this:

“Robert Johnson, beloved husband of Gloria, father of Bobby Jr. and Veronica”

“Robert Johnson, beloved husband of Gloria (nee’ Antonucci), father of Robert (June) and Veronica (Edward) Barletta”

“Bob Johnson, beloved husband of Gloria, father of Bobby Jr. and Roni”

These would all be for the same person and family, but you can see the subtle differences.

The family can choose to use as much or as little detail as they want to. They can list maiden names of every female. They could list the deceased parents of Robert. They could list the children’s married names. Since each family decides how much to list, you may need to use multiple search methods to find the notice.

When you’re combing either resource, don’t forget the two possibilities: someone passed away and they did not place a death notice or obituary in a newspaper or at a funeral home website. And the obvious possibility that no one passed away in that family yet.

The trick is that you want to find your specific family, using combinations of names. If you just search for Robert Johnson, for one thing you’ll find web pages about the old blues singer. But you might find dozens of Robert Johnsons who are not your cousin twice removed. You should use the deceased’s full name, and his wife’s maiden name.

“Robert Johnson Gloria Antonucci”

That search would probably eliminate all the blues singer sites, and if Gloria or their children choose to list her maiden name, it is not very likely that there are a dozen Robert Johnsons who passed away who happen to all be married to a dozen different Gloria Antonaccis.

If you search for Robert and mention Antonacci, and the family chose to not put her maiden name in the notice, you will not find Robert’s notice. So I have an alternate method you can try. Search for all the first names, plus the surname.

“Robert Johnson Gloria Veronica beloved” (The son Robert won’t help the search because his dad Robert is already there.)

Because Johnson is such a common name, you could find multiple families, but the family has to have all those people to get the google hit.

I also added the word “beloved.” This is to try to narrow down the results to just death notices and obituaries. If I left that word off, there might be newspaper pages of thousands of marathon runners that contain a Robert, a Gloria, a Johnson and a Veronica on the page, but it won’t be a death notice for Robert.

I have to complicate things by talking about people that predeceased the person you are looking for. Robert Johnson’s parents both died before he did, and so did his brother Frederick and sister Carla. The family can choose to omit the people who predeceased Robert, which means you might not find Robert’s notice if you also search for his parents and siblings.

So to summarize, I suggest you try the following search methods.

Method 1: Search for as many full names including maiden names, children/sibling married surnames, plus the word “beloved”

Method 2: Search for the surname, and the first names of the spouse and each child without their surnames, plus the word “beloved”

I would suggest you use the formal names rather than nicknames. If her name is Becky, search for Rebecca. Michael rather than Mike.

Basically, the more common the surname, the less likely you’ll find the right family.

So with all that in mind, let’s go back to the pieces of information you can find.

Typically most newspaper death notices do not show either the birth or death date but the funeral home sites often show both.

Of course, both newspaper and funeral home sites are supposed to list the final resting place, but many families say “Private” nowadays, which doesn’t tell us anything. When I find “Private,” I first check Find-A-Grave, and if that fails, I check Catholic Cemeteries of Chicago. Find-a-grave might show that the person was cremated and has not final resting place. Catholic Cemeteries kiosks can only help if the person died in Chicagoland and were Catholic.

Most notices list all surviving descendants, parents and siblings. Grandchildren may not always be named, and are rarely linked to their parents. So you get a list of 21 grandchildren without surnames, you might not know who they each belong to. You may also get “Grandfather of 21” and no names at all.

Many notices list ONLY surviving siblings, not all of them. If you are sure you have found the right family, you may figure out that Uncle Vito and Aunt Agata had passed away before Uncle Giovanni. Now you look for the two who passed away earlier. You might also get a notice that lists “brothers Luigi, Giuseppe, the late Vito, the late Angelo” so if you didn’t know they had died, you can look for them too.

Lastly, on the funeral home sites, people can post their condolences and thoughts, and you might get a little genealogy, and a lot of personality, of the person who died.

So with all this in mind, when you create a death notice or obituary, put as much information as you can. We don’t know how long these funeral home websites will keep their old obituaries up, but a genealogist can find them years later and get a lot of info and a decent profile of someone who has gone.

In some of my recent columns, I have discussed some lesser-used resources, mostly because A) I have discussed the “most-often-used” resources a lot more, and B) I am finding out how useful these lesser-used resources can be. A recent example was the atti diversi, the records of stillbirths and orphans, with occasional deaths of adults in other towns that you might never have found otherwise.

Today’s column concerns something very simple but very necessary sometimes. It is called the “indici decennali.” These are indexes for each town that cover a ten-year period.

As we have gone over before, in every commune, each year’s births have their own index. So do each year’s marriages and deaths. So to find all members of one family, you need to go to each year starting with the year the parents married, and then search every year until the mother is about 50. This will cover the family completely. If one of your ancestors had a child after age 50, please recheck that record to see if it is an error.

So why do we need a ten-year index if we have indexes for every year? There are many reasons.

Reason 1. The index for a particular year was missing, or just was not filmed.

Reason 2. The ten-year index might have parents listed, when the annual index might not.

Reason 3. It’s a lot more convenient place to go through all ten years

Reason 4. The ten-year-index is usually sorted by surname, rather than just putting all the letter “C” together like they do in the annual indexes.

So your next question, based on those cool reasons, is “Dan, why didn’t you tell us this before?” Well, there are a lot of drawbacks as well.

Drawback #1: There are no ten-year indexes before 1866. I have not seen any after 1910.

Drawback #2: Many indexes are simply missing. When they microfilmed the records, the index was missed … a lot!

Drawback #3: This was someone’s “busy work” project, and often they got bored and made mistakes.

So let’s go through these Reasons and Drawbacks.

Reason 1: Use the ten-year index when the regular annual index is missing.

This seems obvious, but if you didn’t know about the ten-year index, you would waste a lot of time reading through the entire year of births to find one record you need. The ten-year index might save you a lot of time.

Reason 2: The ten-year index might have the parents listed.

The annual index after 1866 is usually grouped only by the first letter of the surname, OR the first letter of the FIRST NAME. And more often than not, it is just a name and a record number. So if you need to find all children of Vito Raimondi and Maria Di Cintio, you have to check every Raimondi in each year to find if Vito and Maria had children that year.

With the ten-year index, at least you might get the father “Vito” and that will reduce how many records you need to check. Yes, it could be a different Vito with his wife, and you can rule that one out. But you must check it to be sure. So by only going through the few records with the father, or with both parents in the ten-year-index, it’s a major time saver.

Reason 3: It’s is more convenient to go through the ten-year index in one place, rather than ten separate one-year indexes.

Of course, it’s a time saver. You will eventually have to go through each film/folder on FamilySearch or each year on Antenati, to get to the actual records. But you can make a list of what you need and skip the years that don’t have any children of that family.

Reason 4: Sorted by surname

I think they ultimately made these indexes for themselves! Good for us! These are so much easier with surnames grouped by surname, then by year, then by first name or sequential record number. It depends on the person who made the index. I have been working on records for the city of Bari, where there could be 2000-4000 births per year, and the indexes are in terrible shape sometimes. Having to only search for the surname “Casadibari” instead of reading ten years of annual indexes, every person whose name starts with “C”, is a huge time saver. Also, when the annual index is sorted by FIRST name, and you don’t know the names of the children you are searching for, you have to go through every name in that index to look for “Casadibari” because the first name could be anything.

This sounds awesone! What could be wrong??

I mentioned three drawbacks above – let’s get some of you prepared to be disappointed.

Drawback 1: No ten-year indexes before 1866, none after 1910.

I cannot speak for every town or province in Italy but I can take liberty that other parts of Italy have the same problem as Bari. Actually, it is very inconsistent whether there is a ten-year-index or not. Some are lucky. Montrone, for example, has indexes to Births 1866-1895. Marriages 1866-1895. Deaths 1866-1905. That’s as good as I have seen. They are also microfilmed very haphazardly. You might find 1866-1885 on one film, 1886-1895 on another, then 1896-1905 on the first film. You have to hunt through the catalog. And the indici might be at the province archive, so it might be in the catalog under the province rather than the comune.

Drawback 2: Many ten-year indexes are simply missing.

Check the comune and the province before giving up. Nothing more to say.

Drawback 3: There can be mistakes.

If someone asked you to go through a file cabinet and make a spreadsheet with an index to each document, and which folder it can be found in, well, after the first few hours, you might get bored and accidentally enter the wrong folder, or copy and paste bad information. I found this while looking for Nicola Casadibari of the city of Bari. The ten-year index had him listed under someone else from 1867 with a ditto mark under the year, but when I went to the 1867 Bari births, he was not that record number. I checked all the letter “C” in the 1867 annual index, and he was not there. I had to check the 1868 and 1869 annual indexes before I found him in 1869 with the same record number as was listed in the ten-year index for 1867. So the ditto mark was wrong and I had to go down the proverbial rabbit hole looking for the error. But I found it. It took a couple of hours. AND it made me write this column!

I would say that there are more ten-year indexes for births than for marriages or deaths. But if you don’t know a marriage or death date, the ten-year indexes can at least tell you “Well he didn’t die in Alberobello between 1866 and 1885” Much easier than checking 20 annual indexes.

If you have had good luck using these records, please e-mail me at italianroots@comcast.net and please put “Fra Noi” in the subject. I’m curious how lucky you have been using these forgotten records.

In several columns I have mentioned that some Italian genealogical records are available on FamilySearch, some on Portale Antenati, and some on both.

Recently, there has been a significant change, one I am profoundly unhappy with.

An agreement was signed recently that has done the following:

If the records appear on the Antenati site, they will be in the FamilySearch catalog, but you cannot view them EVEN IN A FAMILYSEARCH CENTER OR AFFILIATE, unless you are logged into FamilySearch with a church login.

If the records do not appear on the Antenati site, the restrictions continue as before.  You might need to be at a Center or Affiliate.  Some records can possibly be viewed from home.

This is all confusing, even for me!

So for Italian genealogical records, if you are a member of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter Day Saints, you can access records with no change.  So for the members of the LDS Church that have Italian ancestry, they can continue to use the records with the superior interface of FamilySearch.

If, like me, you are NOT a member of the LDS Church, you have to content yourself with using the Antenati site, depending on the records they hold.

For example, the records from Triggiano, Bari are divided up thus:

Births 1809-1920, Marriages 1809-1945, Deaths 1809-1945 could all be accessed at a FamilySearch Center or Affiliate library…….not anymore!

Births, marriages and deaths 1809-1900 are in the FS catalog but can only be viewed on Antenati.

Births, marriages and deaths 1901-1920 are in the FS catalog and can be viewed on FS from anywhere.

1921-1929 Births cannot be viewed at all because the privacy laws were changed to 100 years.  So they have microfilm numbers but nobody can see them anymore.  I know it’s 2024 and thus births up to at least 1923 should be viewable, but as of now, they are not.

1921-1929 Marriages and Deaths are in the FS catalog and can be viewed on FS from home or anywhere else.

1930-1935 Marriages and Deaths are in the FS catalog but can only be viewed on Antenati.

1936-1945 Marriages and deaths are in the FS catalog and can only be viewed at a Center or Affiliate.

I cannot speak to other provinces and regions, but this confusion is going to make genealogy very difficult for new non-LDS researchers.

I wish I could explain the logic behind this “agreement”.  Why would FamilySearch give us access to records regardless of church membership, and then take that access away and grant it ONLY to church members?  Doesn’t it seem that far more descendants of Italians are more likely to be Catholic than LDS?  Is FamilySearch going to start denying access to anyone but LDS Church Members?  I do hope this is not the direction they plan to go.

Any records that can no longer be viewed on FamilySearch just show the camera with a triangle (it is no longer the camera with the key.)  If you click on that camera, you get the following:

There are other records that are held by national record repositories in other countries, but they are typically viewable in FamilySearch with a pop-up that says “Images provided by the National Archives of Scotland” or something similar.  So we can use the FamilySearch site with no change.  Why can’t we view images on FamilySearch with a pop-up “Images held at the Provincial Archives of Bari”?  The images that are on Antenati were created by FamilySearch, so why is Antenati the place we have to go to view them?

For those of you who wonder why I am bad-mouthing Antenati, it is a question of the interface on the web site.  My primary complaint is that on FamilySearch, there is an image number in the corner of the image screen, and if I see that I need to jump 100 records forward, I do not have to click the forward button 100 times.

I can just add 100 to whatever image number I am already on, and then go there.  Contrarily, on Antenati, I either have to click forward 100 times, or I have to change screens to the thumbnails, and scroll 100 thumbnails forward, then click on the thumbnail.  Why can’t Antenati just allow me to change the image number?

This is important to Italian researchers because we have to go to the index to find the name(s) we want, which might be image 493 on that “film”, and we need record number 320 for that year.  So we need to leap forward from the index image to the page that has record #320.  This would typically be clicking the forward button many times.

In addition, each time an image comes up on FamilySearch, it zooms in the same way as the previous image.  So if you need to read the name and the parents, you zoom in.  Then you jump 100 images and it will also be zoomed in the same way.  Not Antenati.

Antenati always brings up an image that is too small to see, so you have to zoom in.  Then you go forward to the next image, and it is also too small to see, so you have to zoom that one also.

Finally, Antenati’s image servers are much slower than FamilySearch, so it takes longer to load and zoom and view each image.

I hope to be able to report in a future column that these problems with the interface will be fixed, but don’t count on it!  It has worked this way since it started, and so far I have seen no updates or improvements.

Also, Antenati has no additional records added to it, so instead of working exclusively in Antenati, you have to jump back and forth between Antenati and FamilySearch.

I will keep you up to date with any changes that happen with this “agreement”.

Lately, I have been working with a record type that you may never need, but you ought to know about. These records might solve problems you have had for a while. They are called “Atti Diversi.”

It sounds like “random stuff.” “Stuff that doesn’t fit the other records.” “Found these in a shoebox under the bed.”

But actually, Atti Diversi records contain three key categories of information that we may need access to. Keep in mind that Atti Diversi were started in the 1810s and continued through unification in 1865. Starting with 1866, these records were integrated with the regular births and deaths. So if you have not yet gone back before 1865, you may never have tried to look at these. But you might have seen them in the catalog for your town.

Atti Diversi records go by year, and have three different types of records for each year before proceeding to the next year. So you have to check all the records for one year before you jump to the next or previous year.

In the regular birth records 1866-1929, you will sometimes see births that tell us that this baby was born without life “senza vita.” In that situation, there is no death record for that child. One document takes care of both birth and death, and they put that document in the births. In the atti diversi, the stillbirths are in their own section. “Atto di Morti Nati.” Your town might combine these with the regular births even before 1865, but frequently they do not. I guess they figured no one would be looking up these babies for any reason. You will notice on the Atti di Morti Nati that there is no name of the infant. There will be the parents’ names and the baby’s gender, “maschile” or “femminile,” and in the middle of the document, will be the date this baby was stillborn. So you may need to search all stillbirths within the Atti Diversi looking for your ancestors as the parents. You may find none, or you may find several. I found a few where one twin was stillborn and the other survived. The stillborn is in the Atti Diversi and the survivor is in the Atti di Nascita records.

Why would you look for stillbirths? These children obviously didn’t grow up and get married and have children of their own. But if you want to see the complete family of your ancestor with all children, you should look for the stillbirths starting with the year they married and keep going until the mother is well past 40.

In the course of going through these stillbirths, I noticed that the same mother usually has another baby within the year. Nobody was telling these couples to wait before trying to conceive again, and if they were told this, they didn’t often listen. I found one couple who had a live birth 9 months after a stillbirth.

This is a fantastic resource that I did not think to look at. These are death records for adults who were born in your town, but died elsewhere in Italy for one reason or another. You may never guess that this 26 year old brother of your great-great-grandmother died in a completely different province in Italy. I found death records in the Atti Diversi for a number of people who were born, never married, and never died! Now I have the death record. These records usually tell you the name of the town they died in, the date of death, and the record number in the death records for that town. So you can try to go back to that town’s death records and get a copy of the official record. The Atti Diversi copy is better than nothing, but it would be a more primary source to go back and find the actual death record, now that you know when and where it is.

After 1866, these records might be at the end of the deaths for that year, in the “Parte seconda” or in the “Allegati di Morti” if your town has them. You may find a lot of these when there was a war going on, and soldiers were being killed far from home.

Record Type #3: Births of children whose parents are unknown

These usually do not include babies born to an unmarried woman and that woman’s name is recorded. Those would be in the regular births, mention the mother, and mention “Naturale.” When a baby is born and the parents are not identified at all, the baby might be left at the Church or at City Hall. If you are a fan of the TV series “MASH” there is an episode when a baby is left at the camp by a mother who could not take care of it, and they take care of the child until it must be put in the “wheel” at the local monastery. I cannot speak for how it was handled in Italy, but I imagine it to be similar.

So if you find a record of a father, mother or child “genitori ignoti,” you may not find that child in the regular birth records. If you look in the birth index for a particular year and find no one whose parents are “genitori ignoti” then your next step is to check the Atti Diversi births. These records have no title at the top but they should be “Nati di Proietti.”

These records can be long and drawn out, describing the clothing the child was wearing, what they looked like etc. If the baby’s mother decides to try to reclaim the baby once she is married and can take care of the child, the document helps identify the child despite not having the name. The exact birth dates of these children are rarely known, so they will estimate the age of the child, usually 1-2 days old. Near the bottom of the page, or the beginning of page 2, they will give the name of the child and then assign a surname.

My great-great-grandfather was a foundling whose parents were not known, and I finally found his birth record after a long frustration because I did not know the Atti Diversi might have his birth in it.

If you are lucky (or unlucky) to have an ancestor whose parents were unknown, you can still find the birth in the Atti diversi, but you will probably never know who the parents were. Your ancestor chart will always have an empty space where this child’s ancestors should be.

I have not had any luck yet using DNA to find cousins who might be related to one or both of the two people who created my great-great-grandfather, but it might be your only chance of finding that ancestor line.

So I urge you all to look for ancestors who are “genitori ignoti” in either the regular births after 1866, or in the Atti Diversi before 1866. At least you will find an approximate birth date and you will know there are no further ancestors for that line, at least for now.

If you have any questions on how these records work, please send me an e-mail at italianroots@comcast.net and please put “Fra Noi” in the subject.

When you’re researching your family tree, and you find a record you are looking for, sometimes it seems so bizarre that you question what you saw. “That can’t be right,” you think, “can it?”

I’ve been at this for more than three decades, so I have had many such moments. Sometimes, I go back to a family I haven’t looked at for a long time, and I see something that doesn’t look quite right.

This can be for many reasons. Sometimes, it can be a data entry error in your computer. “Hmm…I have someone who was born in 1943 and died in 1822….” The family tree software usually tells us that we have entered something that is a major error, based on the typical life span of the human being. Anyone who is more than 150 years old, or who died before they were born, usually pops up while you enter it in the software. But we unfortunately can ignore those errors and move on to other people and the error stays in our tree.

There are also situations where things are possible, but not likely. “Hmm, here is a marriage. The bride is 20 and the groom is SEVENTY FIVE????” Gotta check that again. Surely he should be twenty-five, and I misread it. Here’s another family with children born only 7 months apart. Either this poor mother gave birth to a premature baby so soon after her last one, OR this new baby actually belongs to a different couple.

So with all this in mind, I did a little “research within research” and spent some time looking for unusual situations in my tree that deserve a second look, to make sure they are not errors.

Even I was surprised by what I found.

For the record, none of these extreme examples will appear in a Guinness Book of World Records. These are just the most extreme examples I have in my 30+ year research in my tree. These are people related to me one way or another. You may never find examples to challenge these if you don’t have a lot of data in your tree already.

So my first search was to find the largest family in my tree. To no surprise I found the Latoria family of Franklin Park. Michele Latorre and Rosa Scavo, both from Carbonara di Bari, married in Chicago and proceeded to have twenty children. Twenty. They were born between 1907 and 1934 and none of them died in infancy. This family was taken to the Chicago World’s Fair and were given an award!

I already knew about that family and I am acquainted with several of the “cousins generation”, so that took little effort. But I wanted to see if there were a family in Italy that could match it, and I actually found only one. Winning the award for largest family in my tree…..drum roll…..Michelangelo Campobasso (1751-1831) and his wife Serafina Carbonara (1759-1823) married in 1771 (yes she was 12, more on that later) and they had twenty-one children! So I had to go back to all 21 children and recheck the baptism records to make sure none of them belonged to a different couple. None of them are born too close together, which is the first sign that you may have children from two different mothers in the same family in error. When you trip over children born 3 months apart to the same mother, you have a problem somewhere. Out of the 21 children, 12 of them died in infancy and 9 of them married and lived full lives.

So how could the mother be married at 12 years old?? We all end up finding young brides in our research, but twelve seems very wrong, especially to our 21st century eyes. So I went back to the marriage record which did not mention her age. Her parents were Giuseppe Carbonara and Caterina Boezio, so I had to go back to all of their children and make sure that this makes sense.

So Giuseppe and Caterina had 8 children. The first five children died in childhood, and I have that documented. The final three children were Maria Rosa Francesca Carbonara born 1756, Angela Vita Serafina Carbonara born 1759 and Anna Lucia Giuseppa Nicolaia born 1762 who died in infancy. The eldest of these final three children married in 1771 (age 15!) and was referred to as “Rosa” and had eight children with two husbands. By process of elimination, 12 year old Angela Vita Serafina Carbonara must be the “Serafina” who married Michelangelo Campobasso.

I will take a moment to explain how the names worked in the 18th century. The baptism records usually have 3, 4 or more Christian first names, but when they married and died, typically only one or two of those names would be used. So a family that has a child Maria Serafina Carbonara, a later child Serafina Francesca Carbonara, and a later child Angela Vita Serafina Carbonara. Twenty years later, you find a marriage record for just “Serafina” Carbonara, with these parents, it must be the Last child in this family with Serafina anywhere in their names. This makes it very difficult to find a single birth record, because you probably will not find “Serafina Carbonara” in the baptisms. You have to find every child of that family, in order to find the last child who had a Serafina somewhere in those many first names. The important thing to remember is that in a family, you will not find two or more Serafinas who live to adulthood simultaneously. The last child with Serafina anywhere in those names, is the one who might have survived to get married. If Serafina married, then the other two children with a Serafina in their names must have died before. I know this is a bit complicated, but it throws people way off track when they go to Italy for the first time, they go to the Church to find the baptism of Serafina, and they never find her because she is baptized as “Angela Vita Serafina Carbonara”.

So after all that, I have a family of 21 children in Triggiano. I also checked for blended Brady Bunch families where the father married more than once, and maybe had a lot of children with a wife, who then died, he married again and had more children. I did not find any families that came close to the 21.

So that made me look for people who married multiple times. Who, in my tree, married the most times? No, I am not related to Henry VIII nor Elizabeth Taylor! At least in Italy, I don’t have to worry about divorces and live-in relationships and other modern situations, just marriages. But I found two people who married five times each, but not to each other.

The award for most marriages goes to….Giuseppe Antonio Volpe 1802-1874, who married no less than five times. He was widowed four times, and his last wife (30 years his junior) only survived him by a few years. Amazingly, he had no children with the first four wives, though all of them were young enough to have children. Only at age 68 did he have his only child. That was worth rechecking in and of itself. What are the odds that one man failed to have children with 4 wives? Surely he was infertile. He was married a total of 34 years to the first four wives, so there was plenty of time. So I had to check the marriages and indeed Giuseppe Volpe was the son of Rocco Volpe and Francesca Perrino in each one. His daughter Anna Francesca Volpe was known in Triggiano, in the Barese dialect, as “Vecchiaridde”, “The Old Man” because her father was so old when she was born. (I do not speak Barese so forgive my word if it is incorrect.)

The next award, for Best Actress in a Wedding Scene goes to ….Alba Maria Mininni (1846-1926) who also married five times. Her last marriage was in 1904 when she was 58, but she could only have had children with her first two husbands. Again, I checked all five marriage records to confirm Alba had the same parents, and indeed she did.

The important thing with all these “Ripley’s Believe It Or Not” situations is to recheck your work. I knew one person who bragged about having a woman in their tree who had a child at age 62! I told them they need to recheck that birth record, but they didn’t want to disprove this really cool story they liked to tell. Eventually, I checked the birth and found that there was another couple in that town with the same names as the older couple, so their child was born to a young 23 year old, not a tough 62 year old. When children are named for grandparents, the chance of a Michele Pompilio marrying Maria Squeo and thirty years later, another Michele Pompilio marries another Maria Squeo, is not as unlikely as you would think.

I actually have a Vincenzo Tatone 1855-1925 who married Marianna Ancona 1859-1907, and then married a different Marianna Ancona 1853-1940. At least he could never get his second wife’s name wrong!!

Hmm. What about older parents? We already have a 68 year old dad, and he is not Anthony Quinn or Robert DeNiro! This one really made me recheck my work.

Now presenting the award for the Oldest Daddy, to Michele Carella 1834-1928. Michele was no fluke. He married in 1904 at age 70 to Angela Volpe aged 25 (more on age differences later) and Michele proceeded to have no less than EIGHT children, born when he was between 71 and 89 years old!! He lived to 96 so he certainly had health and vigor. None of the birth records listed Michele’s age, probably because even the clerk couldn’t believe it!

Now presenting Best Actress in a Childbirth, we have Grazia Liturri 1837-1921, who had her last child at 47 and a half! I rechecked all of her siblings to see if there was a younger Grazia, but since Liturri is one of my most important surnames, I had already found every Liturri in the town of Noicattaro a long time ago, and therefore I could be certain of her birth, and also that of Pasquale her youngest child.

Surely, Michele Carella age 70 and his wife age 25 was an extreme age difference for a married couple, right? Yes they are, but they don’t win the award for Biggest Age Difference in a Couple. No, I am not related to that 89 year old oil billionaire who married Anna Nicole Smith either! The award goes to Bartolomeo Felice Ottolino 1715-1794 and Grazia Albergo 1769-?, who married in Triggiano in 1788 when he was 72 and she was not quite 19. They had two children before he passed away. I checked both baptisms and the parents of each. I think the social media shorthand is “SMH”…..

So there must also be Biggest Age Difference The Other Direction, which goes to Michele Mastrolonardo 1784-1829 and Carmela Noe 1748-1828. They married in 1805 when he was 21 and she was a 57 year old widow. Since her first marriage was in nearby Capurso, I do not have their children recorded. I was hoping Michele was a step-father to kids older than himself!

It is unfortunate that these interesting situations have no explanation. The documents we find merely tell us the facts as they were recorded. Only family lore can explain why these situations occur, but since Michele married a woman far beyond her childbearing years, there are no descendants who can tell us why those two got married.

I did check my Italy records for anyone who lived over 100 years, and came up empty. Old Man Carella at 96 seems to be the winner. Since I do not have access to deaths later than 1945, I have no way to confirm anyone who died closer to 100 after that. When I searched my Italian immigrants who died in the USA, I found many centenarians. The winner of the grand prize for longevity is Maria Pinto Cirignani, born in Bari in 1882 and died at Villa Scalabrini in 1990 at the ripe old age of 108!

I have not searched my entire tree for this one yet, but I know an example of someone who was a Zia the moment she was born. “Zi Zi Deline” was the youngest sister of my great-grandmother, born in 1902. When she was born, her eldest sister Anna had already given birth to children in 1898 and 1901. So Zi Zi was an auntie of a four year old and a one year old at the moment she was born! Many of our large families with children born over a 20+ year span will run into this kind of overlapped generation where you need a chart to know which is a child and which is a grandchild!

There are many more examples but I will conclude with Longest and Shortest Marriages.

The unfortunate winner of the Shortest Marriage award in Italy is the couple Domenico Caputo born 1801 in Mola di Bari and Anna Saveria Quartadipane born 1816 in Triggiano, who is my great to the third grandmother. They married August 28th 1850, and he died September 7th, aged only 49. Perhaps they married knowing he was dying, or it was a surprise. Or her father objected to the marriage and…..well we cannot prove that either way since death certificates in Italy do not have the cause of death.

Even sadder is the American Shortest Marriage, whose names I will omit because they may have living relatives who read this column. The couple married in Elmwood Park October 4th 1958, and tragically both were killed in an auto accident on their honeymoon in Grundy County, Illinois only three days later.

On a happier note, my longest marriage in Italy is of a close cousin whose death I confirmed via relatives in Triggiano. Nicola Santoliquido was born in Triggiano in 1919 and eventually became a Professor and Mayor of Triggiano in the 1970s. He married Antonia Bentivoglio (born 1920) on December 30th 1939. They had five children and remained married until he passed away Nov 4 2014 aged 95, which was a 74 year marriage.

I have a few couples in America who exceeded 75 year marriages. Frank and Philomena Del Medico, John and Christine (Purpura) Peterson, and Carl and Norma Liture.

So at the risk of repeating myself, if you see something that just seems way off, first double and triple check it. Ask a fellow researcher to look at it to see if they see something you missed. And if it passes the test, then you have a really cool story to tell at the holiday dinner table!

If you can think of any “extreme” examples I did not come up with, please e-mail them to me at italianroots@comcast.net and please put “Extreme” in the subject line.