Pursuing Our Roots

  In the course of your research, it’s easy to get involved in too many families at once. For example, if you’re using birth and marriage records to trace your ancestry, you have to find documents for two parents, then four grandparents, then eight great-grandparents, then 16 great-greats, then 32 greats-to-the-third. Only five generations in and you’re now dealing with 62 individuals in 31 families. It’s at this point that some folks decide that genealogy is beyond them. If you start tracing the descendants of these ancestors as well as their siblings and THEIR descendants, you’ve easily expanded your search to …

    Last month I described a multitude of features in familysearch.org, and hopefully I helped beginners, intermediate level and advanced genealogists. One area I have not spent a lot of time in is the Learning Center, most likely because I have been at this for so long, that I don’t look at beginner material. However, for those of you who are just starting out with your Italian research, the Learning Center is a great place to find out how to begin (besides this column, of course!) If you happen to have other ethnicities to research besides Italian, it can …

  I have received quite a few e-mails about familysearch.org, thanks in large part to the number of columns I have written that tell you all to use it. Although the site is relatively simple, there is a lot going on in it, and the most frequent question I am asked is “How do I get started?” Step one is to set up an account. If you’re LDS, set up your account by clicking “Are You LDS?” “Yes” and using your LDS membership number from your ward clerk. If you’re not LDS, just create an account on the site by …

  What did we do without the internet? For those of us who began our genealogical journey before Ancestry.com, familysearch, fold3, and even Google (they refer to this era as B.G.!), we remember the days of having to find information by checking one location at a time. If we needed to find where someone was buried, and we did not know which cemetery, we had to visit many different cemeteries one at a time. We could call them too. If we didn’t know what town in Italy someone was born in, we had to order film one town at a …

    It’s a good thing when I get to start yet another column with the above headline. I have some new tips for those of you who may be frustrated a little with how it works. First of all, familysearch has released a lot of new Cook County births in the past few weeks. They have most of the births indexed from 1878-1933 so far, and they plan to extend that to 1940. There are some suburban Cook County births already indexed up to 1938 (Evanston, Oak Park, Melrose Park etc.) but almost no Chicago from 1933-1940 as of …

Last month we had the proverbial “brick wall”. To recap, I was helping my friend’s sister to trace her lineage beyond the grandparents who were all born in Italy. None of the records in Chicago listed the town of birth of any of them, and the family could not remember the names of the towns. All she knew was that her father’s parents were from Naples and the mother’s parents were from Sicily. None of the four grandparents became citizens so there was no naturalization petition to work with. So where do I go to find the birth towns if …

Thanks to this column, and my “check-ins” on Facebook when I am out researching somewhere, my friends know to contact me if they have a question about their Chicago or Italian heritage. I received a call from the sister of one of those friends last week. She has been bitten by the genealogy bug, and despite her best efforts, she was unable to trace her ancestry back beyond her Italian immigrant grandparents. A friend of hers had an ancestor chart back to the early 1700s and she had a case of what we genealogists call “chart envy”! So she contacted …

At some point in your research, you have unearthed everything you need about the relatives you’ve know personally, and now you’re working on finding out about their parents and grandparents. These are folks who died before you were born or never left Italy and, as a result, you never met them. With no direct access, you must rely exclusively on Italian records to find the birth, marriage and death information on grandma’s grandparents. So if you don’t have the beginning of a clue regarding what year to look for, how do you start? Step one is that you need to …

  Most of the time, my columns are designed to give advice on how to find genealogical records and work with different web sites. Unless something new is released, there is rarely an element of timeliness to what I write. If you find an Italian record now, ten years from now that record will be the same. Since Fra Noi is a monthly publication, it’s lucky for me that I don’t have to worry about being “up to the minute”. The only problem is that when web sites change quickly, I have no way to rush that information to you. …

  2015 was a rather unfortunate year for genealogists. Although a lot of new data was made available on Ancestry.com and familysearch.org, two major genealogy software programs were “retired.” In the middle of 2014, Wholly Genes Co. announced that they were discontinuing their flagship program “Master Genealogist.” They ceased support Dec. 31, 2014. In December 2015, Ancestry.com announced that they would no longer sell Family Tree Maker software as of Dec. 31, 2015. They also announced that they would cease all support for Family Tree Maker on Dec. 31, 2016. This announcement came rather suddenly and caught the genealogical community …