Tracing your Geneology: What methods do you find the most useful?

[Deebs]

Hello-

I have a general question for all of you.
What methods are the most useful for you when researching your geneology?

I discovered the Antenati website because of all of you, here (and many thanks). Do you use any other online resources?

Have any of you had success writing to city administrators/parishes?

Have any of you hired a professional to do the work for you? Would you recommend that?

[darkerhorse]

For me, access to microfilm from Sicily at the local public library and to records from Sicily at a local FHC, neither source available online, plus finding and quizzing long lost relatives.

So there.

[darkerhorse]

For non-Italian genealogy, I found elaborate family trees online already constructed by others.

[NickAndreola]

I regularly use both antenati and familysearch.org https://www.familysearch.org/search/col ... gion=Italy because antenati does not yet cover all of the areas of interest to me.

I build charts and add info as I find records. Each record has multiple bits of info....for example if I find a marriage record for a person or the birth record for one of their children, I pay close attention to if their father & mother are noted as fu or di......I pencil a + or a - that date on the chart for them....doing accumulated info like that really helps narrow down search parameters when you dig into the previous generation.

If the family were immigrants to the USA, I look for any information on Find A Grave.com and dig into the (most often) available local records for their USA location. For instance Milford, Massachusetts has significant info on archive.org like this https://archive.org/details/annualrepor ... 6/mode/2up

[mjclayton1]

What "methods" are most useful? There's plenty of data out there to mine (for Italian research, Family Search and Antenati are the tops for me), but more than anything else I would say "persistence" is key.

Genealogical research is both uplifting and exhausting. There are far more "downs" than "ups", but the "ups" are often sublime. Soooooo worth it. But at the end of the day, you just have to roll up the sleeves and put in the time. Any number of genealogical sites will offer revelations, including Ancestry, Ellis Island, NY/US Census data (so many Italians came thru NY).

As to parishes, no real luck there. But, truth be told, I haven't done (tried) too much of that. Oh, and I would much rather do the work myself than hire a professional. I understand some don't have the time - or the wherewithal - but those discoveries that YOU make are absolutely priceless.

Good luck.
Mark

[Italysearcher]

Oh, and I would much rather do the work myself than hire a professional. I understand some don't have the time - or the wherewithal - but those discoveries that YOU make are absolutely priceless.

I think you would be surprised at how excited the 'professionals' get when a brick wall is broken down for a clients.

[mjclayton1]

Oh, and I would much rather do the work myself than hire a professional. I understand some don't have the time - or the wherewithal - but those discoveries that YOU make are absolutely priceless.

I think you would be surprised at how excited the 'professionals' get when a brick wall is broken down for a clients.

Hello, Ann-

Make no mistake, I don't doubt that for one second. I'm not a "professional" by any means (although I'm pretty good at certain things), but as an example, my doing research for friends - sometimes even complete strangers - has been extremely rewarding for me, too, and at so many different points in time. We all get out of this... what we get out of this. All I was trying to say (perhaps not very clearly) is that, even in openly acknowledging that professional researchers often offer "priceless" services (and results), it can be that much more meaningful in saying you found something yourself. In the very same breath, I can also say that I would be "almost nowhere" in many respects with my own research without the great assistance of the many kind and helpful people here!

What I'm (also) ultimately saying is that everyone has a balance in that regard. Some lean to being their own self-researchers and still others are the polar opposite. There really is no right or wrong here - just your own personal preference.

Mark