Where was Giovanni Orto’s Hometown in Italy?

I inherited my Dad’s hard drive and I found information about David Orto. I’d never heard of the Orto family. He married my 2nd cousin twice removed. His parents were born in Italy and married in Saratoga County, New York. Where in Italy was John Orto born? Dad has “Monapoli? or Barrie, Italy” written on […]

Is Mary Cutler My Eighth Great Grandmother?

FamilySearch came out with a new feature that shows where your ancestors are buried. I visited the Old Burying Ground in Lexington, Massachusetts at the end of March 2023, and I was surprised to find I have five 8th great-grandparents buried there. My first reaction was I need to go back and see the graves, […]

Where Did My Immigrant Ancestor Come From?

Locating where your immigrant ancestor came from is always a challenge. Here is one way I solved the problem. In From Tursi to Niles – The Fusco Family – I had a death certificate that said Leonardo Fusco was born on 22 September 1884 in Messina, Italy the son of Frank Fusco and Rosaline Anzollati. […]

From Tursi to Niles – The Fusco Family

My husband asked me to research his best friend’s genealogy. Giovanni Andrea Fusco was a blacksmith in Tursi, Italy, and decided to immigrate to the iron-working town of Niles, Ohio. He was followed by two of his brothers and a cousin, and as was typical of the Italian immigrants, the families stayed close together and […]

Free Research Consultations at FamilySearch

As they are expecting more requests than normal during RootsTech (February 28 through March 1, 2024), FamilySearch is recruiting volunteer consultants. I’ve signed up for the late-night shift. If you’re one of those researchers who sits down and gets into the groove late at night, I’ll have slots available from about midnight to 2 a.m. […]

How I Got Started With My Italian Research

As you can see from Vincenzo Chiariello’s Declaration of Intention, he was born in Naples, Italy. Except he wasn’t. The hardest part of researching our Italian ancestors is finding where they came from. The second part is finding the records. In this case, I was fortunate since researching in Naples is exceptionally difficult and I […]

Hobart Spencer Jr. Was Most Likely the Husband of Betsey Hazen

Pioneer Cabin, Campton Station, Grafton, New Hampshire built around 1775. Twenty-four photos, including photos of the interior, are available for viewing at the Library of Congress website. A family history written in 1963 asserted that Hobart Spencer was married three times, and the third wife was Betsey Hazen. But with today’s access to digitalized documents, […]

Citations for Photographs

Originally published 3 February 2020

I was embarrassed when I enthusiastically reached out to an Ancestry member and told her I had an exact copy of the portrait of Angelo Fonzo and Anna Bosco she had posted on her Tree and asked how she was related to the family. After she didn’t answer, I figured out that she had just copied my photo and somehow she ended up being listed as the contributor which has spread to about 15 other trees. Meanwhile, the original hangs on Aunt Maggie’s wall.

While copying my photo and claiming it as your own is rude, I’m not upset about my photo being attached to someone else’s tree as I also attach others’ photos to my trees. However, I do want the source citation to travel with the photo everywhere it goes so everyone knows where to locate the original source. There are two ways to do that, embed the information into the photo (not seen) and captioning.

I read a bunch about IPTC/XMP and asked my husband the computer programmer for help and only got frustrated. Then at https://www.digitalcitizen.life/how-add-metadata-picture-windows I found an easy way to embed the information on the photo. Right click on the picture, click on Properties, click on Details. Here’s where it got a little tricky, I clicked on Title under Description and then the box opened up under the Value column and I was able to enter the title of my document. Then I clicked on Comments and added the source citation. Below I played with Origin, Authors, Date acquired, but I think putting the whole source citation under Description takes care of what I was trying to accomplish. Be sure to click Apply to save your work. I had heard about this in several webinars so I figured serious genealogists should be doing this with their digital images.

So I applied the Metadata and it showed up on the images on my computer but not on the image when I uploaded it here, at FamilySearch, and at Ancestry so I think the best way to go is with a caption.

Adding a caption is easy and you can do that with Microsoft Word, or Microsoft Paint, or Gimp. I’m sure there are more programs out there.

Adding a Caption with Microsoft Word

Adding a Caption with Microsoft Paint

Adding a Caption with GIMP