Pursuing Our Roots

  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 …

  Will Rogers, the great humorist of nearly a century ago, used to say “All I know is what I read in the papers.” This was his way of saying that he learned the truth from the newspapers, which was ironic even then. Just about every form of news, if properly scrutinized, has the potential for opinions that are stated as facts, misinformation, and plain old errors. So are our genealogy sources! All we know is what we read in our genealogy sources, and we have to learn which sources we can trust and which we cannot. Since we cannot …

      A few years ago, I received a phone call from a cousin I had not heard from in some time. Some years earlier, this distant relative and I had been in regular contact while I was working with them on their branch of the family tree. They gave me the data on the descendants and photographs, so the tree would be up to date. I gave them ancestry going farther back than they ever dreamed. Then they called me years later to tell me that they found the same ancestry data on the internet and I should …