I used DNA to locate possible descendants of George Bentley Sr. of Greenfield, New York and then I followed the paper trail to verify the connection. See my report at Substack by clicking on the button.
In 2022 I stopped blogging and started posting at Substack (you can subscribe for free), but Substack posts don’t show up in internet searches so I’m posting here and directing you there.
The Brasiles were a family of mojolica ceramic makers until it went out of fashion. Two cousins left Scafati for towns on the other side of Mount Vesuvius — Gregorio went to Capua, and Angelo went to Acerra. A few years later, Gregorio left Capua and joined Angelo in Acerra. Three of their descendants settled in Chicago.
21 August 2021
I recommend you have a copy of your genealogy research that only you can edit. Ancestry will allow you to create a GEDCOM file which is a generic file that can be imported into most genealogy programs. FamilySearch will not. Yesterday I was working on a client project and wanted to include a pedigree chart. I didn’t like the one I created with the free version of Legacy Family Tree, but Legacy Family Tree will allow you to import directly from FamilySearch. The free version of RootsMagic does not support downloading from FamilySearch.
When I imported the GEDCOM file from Ancestry to RootsMagic, all the sources were there. That’s a really import feature for me. The first time I tried to import from FamilySearch to Legacy Family Tree I said to do 99 generations – I stopped it somewhere in the 20th generation because I had over 200,000 individuals and most of them I knew did not have sources and were probably not correct. The second try I asked for six generations, but the sources just pointed to FamilySearch, not the actual sources. Finally I imported the Ancestry GEDCOM to Legacy Family Tree and all the sources were there.
Picking your program will probably be a personal choice of what is most important to you. The sources and pedigree charts with RootsMagic was more important to me than linking to FamilySearch so I chose it over Legacy. But there may be Legacy Family Tree features that are more important to you, I recommend you try them both out. And there are more free programs available so there will probably be a Part 2 to this blog.
5 July 2021
Yesterday my sister called me and wanted to do some genealogy on our biological father’s side. Good start, talk to your relatives and see what they know. I looked at FamilySearch and saw that James Delbert Liftchild KHQL-1PS had some hints that needed to be evaluated.
First lesson – look at the hints carefully and evaluate if they are really a match. They are only hints. She looked at the first hint, New York, New York City Marriage Records, 1829-1904 and said, “1829, that’s too early so that’s not a match.” I pointed out it was 1829 through 1904 and told her to look at the record. It was a match.
Then we moved on to his daughter Doris Ruth Liftchild G9T5-JK5. There was a marriage record for her that looked like a match but we have her birth as 26 October 1901 and the marriage record said she was born around 1906. That made her 32, not the same age as her husband, James Collin Williams – 27. Think she lied? So my sister toyed with the idea of just attaching the source and then having someone else come along and say, “No! That’s not a match.” She didn’t feel good about it so we started doing some digging.
We clicked on Search Records FamilySearch and Ancestry. “Ancestry has more records,” she said. “Ancestry has a different search engine, it’s good to check both,” I answered. So we started looking at the results and discovered another sibling in the 1920 Census. Harry Liftchild, Jr. was born about 14 years after Doris. Because he was born in 1919, he would not be 110 years old today so my sister put him in as a living person and then we went looking for a death record which we found and added to his profile.
Then it all came together in the 1940 Census. Harry Liftchild age 21 and his wife are living with Doris Williams age 35 and J. Colin Williams age 35 as the brother and sister-in-law of J. Colin Williams. Birth years are around 1919 and 1905 which match the 1920 Census for Harry and the marriage record for Doris and James Collin Williams. Harry would have been James Collin’s brother-in-law. My sister was now confident that the marriage record was a match.
As we ended our session, I pointed out that she had done some real research, not just attaching hints. She felt pretty good about that.
Originally published 7 October 2019
I think I scare patrons at the Family History Center when I start opening multiple tabs, but once I’m done helping them, I notice they do it themselves. Opening tabs helps me not lose my original ancestor as I follow a chain of hints. I also refer back to the original ancestor as I compare his information to the hint.
Multiple tabs help me as I’m working on several family units with the same last name. In Italian genealogy, the same names are used over and over so I’ll have two cousins named Giovanni Manna born around the same time having children in the same time period and it is the wives names that tell me which family the children belong to.
At home I have dual monitors. Yes, it was weird at first but now I can hardly work without them. Usually I have a document on one screen and my genealogy program on the other while I enter the data. It is not unusual for me to have two screens running Firefox and about 15 tabs open in each.
For example, last night I was answering a question on my Facebook page, (Genealogy in Acerra, Italy). Right screen had Facebook open so I could keep referring back to the information provided. Left screen had 10 tabs of marriages open as I searched each of their indexes. I found the marriage record in the 8th tab but I’d never heard of the town the husband was born in.
Back to the right screen, new tab, Google the town. I found something that looked like it. Right click, open the Wikipedia article in a new tab which lead to another search idea. New tab, new search, found what I was looking for, moved tab to left screen to compare the information with the information on the town I had on the right screen. Good match.
Type abstract on Facebook in the right screen with the name of the town as written and in brackets the modern name, download the document from the left screen, open GIMP to crop the document and attach it to the abstract, add URL for the document and post to Facebook.
Originally published 23 August 2019 The developers at FamilySearch made their search very intuitive. It ignores diacritics (those symbols over letters), it ignores spaces, it ignores punctuation, and it is not case sensitive.
This information again comes from the Rootstech 2018 lecture entitled Finding Elusive Records at Family Search by Robert Kehrer.
Asterisk * – Matches zero to an infinite number of ambiguous characters.
Ex. Stan* = St, Stan, Stanley, Stanislaw, Stangl, Stanko, etc.
Ex. *lus*k = Luslick, Slusack, Skillusk, Slusak, etc.
Question Mark ? – Matches only one ambiguous character
Ex. Eli?abeth = Elisabeth, Elizabeth
Ex. Sm?th? = Smithy, Smythe, Smythe, Smiths, Smithe, Smitha
Ancestry does things a little differently. “The * represents zero to five characters, while the ? represents one character. Wild cards do not work with Soundex matches. When searching with wild cards, at least the first or last character must not be a wild card, and all searches containing wild cards must contain at least three non-wild card letters. “
Soundex ignores all vowels and h, w, and y. Just click on the Exact & Soundex button to use this feature. See the link below for more information.
So conducting the above searches on Ancestry, Stan* gives me Stanyard, Stanchfield, Stang, Stanton, etc. And Sm?th? gives me Smythe, Smithy, Smitha, Smiths, etc. And finally, Smith with an Exact Soundex search gives me a lot of Smith. I stopped looking at page 29.
The wildcard search is great for finding alternate spellings and transcription errors of our ancestor’s name. I might use the Soundex search for odd names and as a last resort, but it doesn’t seem as helpful as the * and ? Play around with it and have fun. I tried no capitals and a double question mark at FamilySearch (sm?th??) and got Smithey, Smithie, Smethus…