Pursuing Our Roots

  Since last December, www.familysearch.org has been posting Cook County vital record images that were once only available for $17 through the county itself. Recently, the push has started on marriage licenses. A few columns ago, I did an entire piece of birth certificates, and another piece on death certificates, and I dismissed marriage licenses as minimally informative. I would like to amend that perspective. The Cook County marriage license is frustrating because it never lists the parents of the bride or groom. It lists the names of the happy couple and the date they applied for their license from …

There are many opportunities for genealogists to expand their knowledge. You can “learn by doing” as some philosophers would say. So you trudge along and pick up new methods as you try them, but sometimes you miss records that you need because you didn’t think of other ways to look. I have advocated many times that another way of learning genealogy is to join and attend genealogy groups in your community. Your local library may have genealogy presentations, even if they don’t have a regular group that meets there. Many of the groups that exist today are worth travelling some …

I grew up, as I’m sure many of you did, with a lot of Italian relatives who married into your family line, but some were a little different. There might be a godmother who doesn’t quite connect to the tree or folks who we call our “uncles” and “aunts,” but were they really related? “Who was Cooma Micheline? Is she a cousin of Nonna?” Nobody seemed to remember. More on them later. For now, let’s focus on actual branches, however tenuously connected to the trunk. The relatives who married in Italy typically are from the same town, or from towns …

There are many ways to get your daily news updates these days. Facebook and Twitter have a lot of news blurbs. Each TV news network has apps and updates, as do the local TV stations. But I’m an old fashioned guy who wakes up in the morning before work, opens the garage door, walks out to the driveway and picks up a fresh copy of the daily newspaper. About three seconds later, I realize I’m not wearing any shoes or socks … Being a genealogist, I don’t begin the morning newspaper with the headlines, local news or sports section. Yes, …

Last month we looked at birth certificates and what you can learn from them. This month, we follow with marriage licenses and death certificates. Why do we cram two types of documents into one column? Well, frankly, the Cook County marriage license has so little data that it would be the world’s shortest column! The fact is that Cook County created a format for the marriage license in 1871, and at least as of 1964 the format was relatively the same. The paper is split into two halves. The top half lists the name of the groom and his age, …

When starting our research, most of us were eventually given guidance by experienced genealogists. At least I hope we all were. A lot of my earliest work came from interviewing living relatives, because I had to ask them for the names of their brothers and sisters, and then the dates of birth and death. I learned early on that once their sister has been dead for 30 years, it was not on the tip of their tongues what her birthday was, having not celebrated it for so long. When they listed their siblings for me, they almost never mentioned any …

Shakespeare asked, “What’s in a name?” but we should be asking, “What IS his name?” Recently I have been going through a lot of Cook County birth and death certificates, and it reminded me that people don’t always carry exactly the same name from birth through to death. We are all aware of the problems researchers in encounter because women tend to take the names of their husbands when they marry. But traditionally in Italy, women used their maiden names throughout their lives. It is easier to deal with looking for the birth of Anna Volpe in 1822 and the …

This has been a summer and fall of big news in genealogy both nationally and in Chicago. In mid-July, the Family History Library decided to end their program of sending microfilm to local family history centers. The decision was made due to technological advancements as well as rising microfilm copying costs. I’m sure most of you know that when you are researching your ancestral towns in Italy, you need to choose which microfilms you need based on which record type you want (birth, marriage, death, allegati, processeti etc.) and which year range you need in order to find your immigrant …

  Last month we reviewed newspaper resources. If you know the date, for death notices and such, you should find microfilm and go ahead and locate the death notice in the paper. If you are just trolling for any mention of your family name, you will need to use only searchable digitized newspapers. This logic can apply to any newspaper research, whether in Chicago or not. There is no way to go through newspapers nationwide, but let’s find out what is available in Chicagoland. At this writing, we have the Chicago Tribune and the Chicago Sun Times, plus suburban papers …

While I was in St. Paul, I spent a lot of time at their state historical library. (Believe me, I wish I lived closer to Springfield in order to do a lot of work here in Illinois!) They have one of the best collections of Minnesota newspapers around, covering most major cities and some smaller towns throughout the state. So before I went up there, I made sure I had a complete list of everybody I wanted to find in those papers, particularly death notices. When preparing to work with newspapers, whether small town or big metropolis, you need to …