Pursuing Our Roots

  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 …

When I first went to Salt Lake City years ago, I saw a rather elderly lady struggling to drag two large heavy carts of papers with her into the Family History Library. One cart bumped into the door, the other cart fell over. It was not a pretty site. As I rushed to help her, I thought to myself. “Self, make sure all your documents are portable and electronic so you don’t have to lug carts full of papers everywhere you go.” With scanners and cloud storage, you can carry any number of pages with you in a phone or …

  As it gets closer to Veterans’ Day, we are reminded of our ancestors who sacrificed so much to serve in our Armed Forces. Sadly, the World War II generation is rapidly shrinking as they reach their nineties, and there are no combat veterans living who served in World War I. I hope that when you research your family, you try to go beyond just names and dates and attempt to create a story of their lives. Part of what we do is to supplement the lack of autobiographical narrative by finding genealogical items our ancestors left behind, and to …

  In many of my recent columns, I have discussed the rapid growth of familysearch.org. I have been working on so many areas of American records that I have forgotten to check on Italian civil records. All I can say is “Wow.” Let me first remind you of the project because it will explain why they’ve done what they’ve done. The LDS Church has microfilmed millions of records all over the world over many decades, including lots of Italian civil records and a small percentage of Italian Catholic records as well. In the 2000s, they began to digitize these films …

View image | gettyimages.com When you begin your genealogical journey, two possibilities can happen. One is that you focus like a laser beam on a single person and do whatever you can to find everything you need about that one individual. The second possibility is the one that usually happens to everybody! Once you ask for the names of your grandfather’s brothers and sisters and THEIR kids, you have a lot of people and a lot of data to find for each of them, and it can be overwhelming, if you’re not organized. Everybody organizes their lives in different ways. …

  I have written this column every month for the past 11 years and, in the process of researching for what to write, I learn how much I didn’t know! I have been on a multi-month odyssey looking for petitions for naturalization, and I have found out yet more new information that should make life easier. Last month, I concluded that the only way to find Cook County Circuit Court petitions and Superior Court petitions was to order microfilm from LDS to your local Family History Center. There is an easier way! It turns out that the complete set of …

Last month we learned how to find our ancestors’ applications to become United States Citizens. I would like to add some new information about the process first after spending the past month trying to find many distant relatives. The only index on line is an index to the card file. This is what the card looks like:     The first critical piece of information we need is the “Title and location of court”. There are basically three choices here that cover 99% of the people in this index: US District Superior Court Cook County Circuit Court Cook County A …

The recent documentary “The Italian Americans” discussed the period at the beginning of World War II. The government decided for security reasons that certain foreign-born American residents would be classified as “enemy aliens”. These were people whose home countries were at war with us. Also, these people had not filed for citizenship. Obviously, many Italian Americans fit this classification until the practice was ended in 1943 when Mussolini’s government fell. There were many reasons Italian immigrants opted to not become American citizens in the years leading up to World War II. Many wanted to return to Italy after they had …

  Last month, we discussed on-line family trees, and some of the pros and cons. The major pro is that when you upload your tree, the on-line sites (familysearch and ancestry) check your tree for matches with other trees already in their web sites. Keep in mind a couple of things when working with these two web sites. Familysearch is limited to the data that they have already microfilmed, and are now in the process of making those billions of images available on-line.  Information is completely free due to being funded through the Mormon Church, who created the web site …