Finding living descendants

[rp76226]

The most difficult Italian surname research is not finding your ancestors (though doing that is not always easy either), it is finding living descendants of your great and great, great, etc. aunts and uncles. For privacy reasons, that information is understandably hidden by both civil authorities and Ancestry.com. Has anyone found any methods to overcome that problem? It also doesn't help when, like me, you don't speak the language.

Ron

[parkergambino]

Ron,

Several weeks prior to our trip to Sicily in 2017, this was the strategy:

1 - Sought out people in the correct village with the correct surnames, using:

https://www.paginebianche.it

2 - Sent a picturesque greeting card with an enclosed generic message to every candidate. The message inside was written in English and also in web-translated Italian, stating that we were interested in connecting to find relatives. Both email address and phone number were provided to accept responses. There are other ways to exchange messages (FaceBook, etc.) and we might have had even more response by tapping those. Make it easy for them! I think we sent out 2-3 dozen cards altogether to our village.

3 - We got 4 hits before we arrived. At least two were from unrelated people with the same surname. But one or two (don't remember) connected us to relatives, met them upon arrival, and profoundly socialized and feasted with them.

We were lucky in that we already knew the village of ancestry, and that people responded. Also, at the time, the on-line records extended up to ~1905 for this village. (Even luckier right now, as Antenati has some records going forward into the 1940's!) If these don't apply to your request, you may need to hunt down the village using

http://www.gens.info/italia/it/turismo- ... oni-italia

and in any event you will want to perform due diligence in assembling the fullest roster of surnames that you can manage for your shotgun approach. Depending on how rare or common the surnames are, that could be a lot of mail. We did not try to incorporate any genealogy into the initial message, but that might be an option. Most people can follow a simple pedigree that extends back a couple of generations. There is no single Goldilocks level of genealogical complexity that will apply well for everyone. But overall, the more complex, the harder to follow, the less likely a response. I would err on the side of simplicity, wait for a response before introducing complexity.
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Another possibility is to get your DNA tested and find contacts that way. Only yesterday I received my first set of results (from 23&Me), which provided me with ~1500!! DNA cousins. Depending on how fully the profiles and contact information of these people were filled out and made available (these factors vary wildly), you might be able to find and contact matching names in the correct geographic locality. The preponderance of my hits are in the USA (that can be useful), but a small number from Europe. I have both Russian and Sicilian ancestors, and the Sicilian presence was about 10 times that of the Russians.

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I'm not really a social-media kind of guy, but I do have a Facebook account and can see the potential there. Hard to keep out of the rabbit holes, which is why I mostly stay away. I'm sure there are ways to dig around on SM in general, including geographically-focused (maybe even surname-focused) genealogy groups, to find some of what you want. I'm not the person to provide counsel on how to do it.

Good luck,

Parker

[rp76226]

Thank you for the information you provided.

Ron

[erudita74]

Many years ago, I used an online internet phonebook for Argentina to locate descendants of my grandfather's oldest sister who had gone there from Sicily with her oldest born daughter who was about a year old at the time. Her husband was already there. A first cousin of my mom remembered her married surname, and I sent him the addresses I had found (there were 12 with the surname). We composed a letter in English, and he found someone to translate it into Spanish, and also paid to mail the letters. We got replies from 2 of those people and discovered that my grandfather's sister had had another 8 children in Argentina. They sent us photos, including a copy of the same photo of my grandfather's mother which had been taken of her as an elderly woman living in Brooklyn, plus they sent us all of the descendant info, including dates, names of spouses, their children, etc. For a while, I was in touch with two of the descendants via email. One had even worked for a short time in the United States. Luckily, they could read and write English as, although I can read Spanish, I have never studied it, and they complained when I tried to use a google translator to email them in Spanish. So they emailed me in Spanish, but I answered them in English. Of course, this was in the late 1990s, early 2000s, and we have since lost contact.

[saccolicious]

I do quite a bit of this research as well on the US side. It depends where they settled. The vast majority of my family came into the Boston port and settled outside of Boston, and the Registry of Vital Records in Boston is open to the public (and now, is free to visit) to go and look up birth, marriage, and death records for Massachusetts (pre-1930 records are available for free on FamilySearch). You don't have to prove relation to any of the people you're researching, and you can view records up to the present.

I don't know of any other states, however, that are as open as Massachusetts in this respect. Plus, I don't have the ability to go to other states' capitals to do the research. For other states, I use a combination of Ancestry and Newspapers.com. Use the immigration and census records to piece together the families up to 1950. From there, use Newspapers.com to find obituaries (subscriptions required). Also, Google searches for obituaries in the last ~15 years. I've found this tremendously successful for research on families in New Jersey, New York, and Connecticut. I have one large contingent of people from my towns that settled in Wappingers Falls, Poughkeepsie, New York, and Newspapers.com has access to a local paper that has run obituaries and engagement and marriage announcements for that town since the 1930s. You can confirm a lot of this info with various other sources on Ancestry, such as the directories which often have an address and birthdate, as well as the SSDI and birth/marriage/death record databases for certain year ranges.