Fra Noi Embrace Your Inner Italian
Those of you who read my columns would probably conclude that I am employed by FamilySearch, since I spend a disproportionate amount of my time showing everyone how to use its many features.
However, for the record, I am not employed by FamilySearch or any other genealogy company. My recommendations are objective suggestions for how you can find more information on your ancestors and other relatives.
Since FamilySearch is 100% free anyway, they have not made one thin dime in subscriptions as a result of my columns. I do hope many of you have used it to improve your research.
That said, I want to throw a few other suggestions your way that have nothing to do with FamilySearch. My goal is not to get you to spend hard earned money on subscriptions to anything. However, if you need additional information that you cannot get free from FamilySearch, here are some random tips to help out.
One way I construct a family is from the death notice/obituary. For example, here is a made-up family:
“Rosa Quaranta, April 21 1927, to June 6, 2018, beloved wife of the late Vito, beloved mother of Joseph (Rita), Nick (Amy), and Maria (Bob). Grandmother of Victor, Rosalyn, Eddie, Kathryn and baby Jimmy. Sister of Giovanni Masciopinto and the late Carmela De Cosola.”
What have we learned, or not learned, from this obit?
1) We have Rosa’s birth and death dates. This may confirm the birth date we already have, or it gives us something to search for.
2) We do not have Rosa’s surname “nee’” but we have her brother’s surname.
3) Vito died first (“the late Vito”), so we should try to find his obit prior to 2018.
4) Naturally we do not know the birth dates of Joseph, Nick and Maria from this obit.
5) We do not know the maiden names of Rita and Amy, nor the surname of Maria’s husband Bob.
6) We do not know which of the grandchildren belongs to each of the three children.
Obviously, if this family is close to you and you know the answers to all these questions, you won’t need the sources I am about to mention. However, as you try to construct the families of the children of your grandparents’ brothers and sisters, or great-grandparents’ brothers and sisters, you may not know all these people, so you could use some of the resources below.
Let’s start with #1. The obit gave us Rosa’s birth date. This obit lists both birth and death dates. Many obits do not. A lot of obits now appear on the funeral home web sites, and most but not all of them show both birth and death dates. If the obit does not list the exact date of death, you might need to contact surviving relatives to ask them. Do not bother contacting the funeral home or the cemetery for this kind of information. They are not obligated to help you with genealogy dates. In this example, you can use the confirmed birth date to search for a birth certificate if you haven’t found one already.
One thing to keep in mind with more recent families is that they do not always name the grandchildren after the grandparents. Many of our relatives these days marry people who do not know or care about this tradition, or have other traditions that supercede it. One small rule I use is the following: If the grandparents have really-Italian first names, then their children might be named for the grandparents. In this example, we have Vito and Rosa, not Victor and Rose. They may both have been born in Italy, so when you see the children Joseph, Nick and Maria, it is entirely possible that Vito’s parents were Giuseppe and Maria, and Rosa’s father was Nicola. But this is a guess if you have nothing else to work with. When you see the list of Vito and Rosa’s grandchildren, no first name is repeated, so it’s likely the tradition was not used by that generation. The point of all this is that if you are looking in Italian records for Vito or Rosa’s birth, and you find one with the right date and a parent that matches Vito and Rosa’s children’s first names, you might have the right record. You can’t use this method unless the people in question universally name the kids and grandkids using the old tradition.
Number 2 seems obvious. Rosa Quaranta is survived by her brother Giovanni Masciopinto, so naturally her maiden surname is Masciopinto, right? Most of the time, yes, but I’ve been fooled on this one too. It makes logical sense to search for her birth as “Rosa Masciopinto”. What happens if you can’t find it? Let’s say we do not know that Rosa’s father, not a Masciopinto, died young, and her mother remarried a man whose surname was Masciopinto. The obit will typically not say “half-brother” or “step-brother”. And back in Italy, Rosa will carry her original surname rather than be given Mr. Masciopinto’s surname later on. I could be looking for a birth of Rosa Masciopinto with the date, and find nothing, because there is a chance she is not a Masciopinto by birth. In this situation, if you can’t find Rosa’s birth, my suggestion is to find her sister’s obit. That one might say “nee’ Mastrolonardo” which would tell us that Rosa is probably a Mastrolonardo also. Then you search for Rosa Mastrolonardo born on that date and maybe you’ll luck out.
Numero 3. See if anything helps on the late husband’s obit. We need Rosa’s sister’s obit and husband Vito from before 2018. Maybe we do not know when they passed away. Where do you search? I usually start with Google, which would find people more recently on the funeral home web sites. (Fortunately you don’t need to know which funeral home they used – Google will find them all). However, not every funeral home has obits going back 15-20 or more years online. So start with Google. Search for: “Vito Quaranta Rosa beloved Joseph Nick Maria”. The order of the words doesn’t matter, but any google page listing everyone in the family will appear. Hey look! “Vito Quaranta, beloved husband of Rosa, nee’ Mastrolonardo” Wow! We found her birth surname!
If Google doesn’t come up with anything, you should try a newspaper site. I personally use www.newspapers.com but there are others. Familysearch does have access to www.newspaperarchive.com for free, so you can start there without spending money. If you don’t find what you are looking for, get a list together of obits you can’t find on google, and do a free trial on newspapers.com, and cancel it when they want to start charging you for it. The Chicago Tribune is fully searchable on newspapers.com. I wish the older papers like the Daily News were searchable but they are not. (Who owns the rights to sell the Daily News back issues? I don’t know!)
Let’s face it, not everyone puts an obit or death notice in the paper. You may look and still not find Vito or Carmela. But you should search these the same way as Google. “Vito Rosa Quaranta Joseph Nick Maria beloved”. Don’t search for the grandchildren in this search because A) they might not be named. “Grandfather of three” or B) not all of them were alive when Vito died, like baby Jimmy who was in Rosa’s obit.
#4 need birth dates of Vito and Rosa’s three kids. Since Rosa was born in 1927, her kids would have been born in the late 1940s, 1950s or 1960s. All of these are too recent for you to track down births on FamilySearch. You can try to find the family in the 1950 census (and Vito and Rosa might not have even married yet) but if any of the kids are in the census. “Vito Quaranta, Rose and Joe” then at least you have a birth year for Joseph, and you know Nick and Maria were born after April 1950 when they did the census.
Most living people shouldn’t have a lot of data on their births out on the internet, but there are ways to find public data. I’ve gone to Facebook and searched for the person, and then look for a birthday post. “Happy 50th birthday Joey!!” Aha! I have his exact birthdate. If wife Rita wishes her husband “a wonderful birthday to the love of my life” then you most likely have the right one. While you’re on Joe’s Facebook page, see if there are birthday posts for any of those random grandchildren from Rosa’s obit. “Happy 6th birthday to Jimmy, the world’s best birthday boy!!” Then you at least know Jimmy belongs to Joseph. A photo of Jimmy with his sister Katey confirms that Kathryn is also Joe and Rita’s daughter. It just takes a little detective work. Even if you’re not a Facebook friend of Joseph or Rita, these posts and photos are public, so at least they are a source for you to use.
Another unexpected source for at least finding someone’s age is Ancestry.com. They have searchable high school yearbooks. If you search for Maria Quaranta, and the high school makes sense based on what you know about where they lived, then you can get a ballpark age for Maria. She was a junior in the 1975 New Trier High School yearbook, so she was born about 1957-ish. (And you can get a photo for the family tree from the yearbook too, if you can’t find one on Facebook.)
#5 Maiden names are tricky. Most people don’t post Wedding Notices in the newspapers these days, and marriages that are too recent won’t be searchable anyplace. This one is basically solution #3 but applied to finding the maiden name. I have spent a lot of time on this one this week, and I’m having good luck with this method.
Once again we search for obits and death notices. Start with Google, and if that fails, use a newspaper search site of your choice. This time, search for just the one couple. “Joseph Rita Quaranta beloved”. We will end up finding both Rosa and Vito (his parents) but we are hoping to find at least one parent of Rita. “Herman Schnickengruppen, beloved husband of Lydia, devoted father of Rita (Joe) Quaranta….” Now we know Rita was presumably born Rita Schnickengruppen.
#6 – Which grandchildren belong to each family? I have complained about this one before. Obits for grandparents or great-grandparents either say “grandfather of list of names with no surnames” or “grandfather of 5”. Neither of these is very helpful.
Sometimes they will list grandchildren surnames, but not often. Usually it is a genealogist who does it this way because they hate this as much as I do. “Grandfather of Vic, Katie and James Quaranta, and Rosalyn and Edward Pratt”. (You have probably noticed by now that the names are just a little different each time. Sometimes they are formal, sometimes colloquial. Get used to this.) This is still a little vague. The three Quarantas could belong to either Joe and Rita, or Nick and Amy, or a combination of both. At least you know that Rosalyn and Edward belong to Maria, and we now have a surname for her husband.
If you found Rita’s father’s obit in step 5, it might say “Grandfather of Helmut, Irving, Rosalyn, Jose, Ed, and Michael.” Only two of those names is a possible grandchild of Vito and Rosa. The ones in common are the ones you want. Then if you search google for “Nick Amy Quaranta beloved” you might get Amy’s mother’s obit. This should have Amy’s maiden surname, and hopefully they list her grandchildren. “devoted Grandmother of Greg, Bob, Joanne, June, and Joshua.” Hmm, none of these is a grandchild of Vito and Rosa. So by process of elimination, you know Rosalyn and Ed belong to Maria and Bob, and since none of Amy’s mother’s grandchildren are in that list, that means the remaining three grandchildren all belong to Joe and Rita. Nick and Amy are childless.
You might end up with a list of grandchildren that is missing somebody. Remember that Jimmy was listed as “baby Jimmy” in the 2018 obit for Rosa. So if their grandparents died before Jimmy was born, he won’t be in anybody’s list. In that case, you should enter him in your tree, but don’t connect him to any of the parent couples. Leave him an orphan for the time being. When you have something more concrete, like a Facebook birthday greeting that ties him to his parents, you can connect him using your software or using the FamilySearch tree.
Let’s try to summarize all this. There’s a lot of logic behind all this, but with a vague death notice, we can still find a lot.
Looking for maiden names? Find an obit for her parents or grandparents if possible, or deceased siblings.
Looking for birthdates? Check social media
Looking for ages? If not in the census, try Ancestry school yearbooks
Looking to match up children with parents? Find an obit for at least one paternal and one maternal grandparent. This narrows down grandchildren to the ones in common to both.
I’ve had a lot of good luck lately so I figured I’d pay it forward. Let me know if these methods work for you. Email me at d.niemiec@comcast.net and please put Fra Noi in the subject.
