I have been making good progress connecting some of my Italian DNA matches to each other. Eventually I will have to figure out how they connect to me, but connecting them up makes me feel like I've accomplished something!
I have been working through my Italian DNA matches on AncestryDNA, creating new online private trees to trace their family lines. In some cases I've been able to trace back several generations more than my matches have in their trees, at which point I generally share my work privately with that match.
However, another option is to create a family tree for a group of matches that match each other, either via the Shared Matches listing (which really needs to be included for all matches, not just 4th cousins and closer!) or by common ancestors in their family trees. I suspect this is similar to the DNA circles idea, but since none of my test kits have any DNA circles, I have to make up my own. :)
So far I have successfully linked two out of three shared matches on the Larro / Lerro common surname. I was able to fairly quickly connect two of the matches as 2nd cousins with common ancestors Domenico Antonio Larro and Mary Josephine Perri. I think I may have spilled the beans to the two of them that they are actually second cousins, but maybe they had already figured it out. :)
The third match is more challenging. She is the daughter of an adoptee, and his father, George Larro, is the connection point. But she has very little information on this ancestor, and trying to connect with living cousins, some of whom don't want to know about the family line abandoned by George so long ago, is difficult. We have some theories on how he might connect to the tree, but I am leaving that to her to pursue.
In addition to these shared matches, I have a connection-by-marriage with another DNA test taker who shares these same three matches. However, he and my father's DNA tests do not show up as matches to each other on AncestryDNA. Our marriage connection is via my Giordano line and his Lerro line, and that shared line makes my cousin in Italy his cousin, too, through opposite sides of that marriage. But we suspect we are related by blood as well, since we have a number of shared DNA matches. Not only do we share on the Larro/Lerro group above, but we also share matches with the group I connected back in March. So we are both convinced we are cousins. We just have to figure out how!
A chronicle of genealogy adventures
Showing posts with label Giordano. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Giordano. Show all posts
Saturday, July 9, 2016
Friday, March 25, 2016
Matchmaker, Matchmaker, make me a match....
A Smart Match on MyHeritage has led me to my first Italian cousin, as opposed to the Italian-American cousins I have been connecting with up to this point. In my experience, MyHeritage, being an Israeli-based company rather than US, attracts more European users. So if you have European ancestry and want to connect with living cousins, put a tree out there. Unless your ancestry is the British Isles, in which case Find my Past is probably the better bet. If I ever find Irish townlands of origin for my Irish lines, I might finally spend some time on Find my Past, but I'm not there yet!
I've connected with many Swedish cousins on MyHeritage (lots of cousins of Buzz Aldrin!), but had not updated my Italian line recently. Adding in some of the recent Italian discoveries from my Omignano focus the last couple of months brought up some new hits. I sent a message via the web site to contact my potential cousin, and a couple of weeks later, she replied! And even though I don't speak Italian, and she doesn't speak English, we've traded emails and exchanged pictures of our Italian Giordano ancestors. So now I have a cousin to visit when I finally get my Italy trip plan together. And maybe local feet on the ground to hunt down records, especially if they are OUR family records and not just MY family records. :)
Working through the Omignano records is reaping benefits! Time to get back to it....
I've connected with many Swedish cousins on MyHeritage (lots of cousins of Buzz Aldrin!), but had not updated my Italian line recently. Adding in some of the recent Italian discoveries from my Omignano focus the last couple of months brought up some new hits. I sent a message via the web site to contact my potential cousin, and a couple of weeks later, she replied! And even though I don't speak Italian, and she doesn't speak English, we've traded emails and exchanged pictures of our Italian Giordano ancestors. So now I have a cousin to visit when I finally get my Italy trip plan together. And maybe local feet on the ground to hunt down records, especially if they are OUR family records and not just MY family records. :)
Working through the Omignano records is reaping benefits! Time to get back to it....
Thursday, March 10, 2016
O Little Town of Omignano....
My last name, Jordan, is an Americanization of the original surname of my great grandfather: Giordano. Francesco Giordano came to America in 1889 from the little town of Omignano, Salerno, Campania, Italy. My father's family knew him as Frank Jordan.
In October 2013 I discovered that Family Search posted unindexed digital images of the collection "Italia, Salerno, Vallo della Lucania, Stato Civile (Tribunale), 1866-1929" on their web site, including Frank's birth record. Using this image set, I traced back a few more generations, which led me to my first set of direct line kissing cousins. A pair of first cousins once removed married, so one set of 4th great grandparents double as a set of 5th great grandparents. (Does that count as killing 4 birds with 2 stones?)
Given the small size of the town and the high likelihood of intermarrying, it occurred to me that I might be related to quite a lot of people in the town. And so, an idea was born, The Great Omignano (OMG, no!) Indexing Project!!! But it was just an idea, and like many ideas, it sat on the shelf for awhile. There are gold mines of information in all that Italian text, but to get to them, you have to filter though all that Italian text, an endeavor both time consuming and fraught with bad handwriting. I worked back a few generations, concentrating on the Giordano surname and not much else, but did not roll forward to closer generations that lead to living cousins. And after that flurry of excitement on the Italian hometown breakthrough, I moved on to other things.
Fast forward two and a half years. I'm starting to see Italian line DNA matches on the various testing sites. Trying to figure out where these 4th cousin and further out matches fit in is tricky when my tree is not fleshed out both forward and back. I found myself creating private individual family trees on Ancestry for each DNA match so I could try to build out their trees to figure out how we connect. After spending two weekends building trees for OTHER people, I finally remembered my epiphany from 2013 and decided to take action on that idea. The Vallo della Lucania images include births, marriage banns, marriages and deaths starting in 1866. In 1875, the Omignano record books were converted to fill-in-the-blank forms, but prior to that, the entire record is one big handwritten paragraph.
So the past few weekends, instead of building out yet another DNA match tree (no doubt more of those will happen later), I turned to building spreadsheets. I started with death records, capturing a number of data elements for each record, including the URL to the image. For the totally handwritten 1866-1874 records, I've only captured the year, order number, name and URL information for about 200 people - those will take more work to decipher than the form-based ones to complete the index. I have recorded all the information from the 1875-1887 deaths, about 320 people. Since I was not focusing solely on the name Giordano, I actually added several more dates and people to my tree just from those records! I'll take that as a sign that I'm on the right track. Already I recognize the common surnames of the town, and they are an immediate clue of a potential shared line in the trees of my DNA matches.
So we'll see how long this project stays at the top of the to do list - hopefully I'll be able to finish some record sets before something else jumps the line. And then I'll be able to use this spreadsheet index as a tool for looking up potential ancestors of DNA matches!
In October 2013 I discovered that Family Search posted unindexed digital images of the collection "Italia, Salerno, Vallo della Lucania, Stato Civile (Tribunale), 1866-1929" on their web site, including Frank's birth record. Using this image set, I traced back a few more generations, which led me to my first set of direct line kissing cousins. A pair of first cousins once removed married, so one set of 4th great grandparents double as a set of 5th great grandparents. (Does that count as killing 4 birds with 2 stones?)
Given the small size of the town and the high likelihood of intermarrying, it occurred to me that I might be related to quite a lot of people in the town. And so, an idea was born, The Great Omignano (OMG, no!) Indexing Project!!! But it was just an idea, and like many ideas, it sat on the shelf for awhile. There are gold mines of information in all that Italian text, but to get to them, you have to filter though all that Italian text, an endeavor both time consuming and fraught with bad handwriting. I worked back a few generations, concentrating on the Giordano surname and not much else, but did not roll forward to closer generations that lead to living cousins. And after that flurry of excitement on the Italian hometown breakthrough, I moved on to other things.
Fast forward two and a half years. I'm starting to see Italian line DNA matches on the various testing sites. Trying to figure out where these 4th cousin and further out matches fit in is tricky when my tree is not fleshed out both forward and back. I found myself creating private individual family trees on Ancestry for each DNA match so I could try to build out their trees to figure out how we connect. After spending two weekends building trees for OTHER people, I finally remembered my epiphany from 2013 and decided to take action on that idea. The Vallo della Lucania images include births, marriage banns, marriages and deaths starting in 1866. In 1875, the Omignano record books were converted to fill-in-the-blank forms, but prior to that, the entire record is one big handwritten paragraph.
So the past few weekends, instead of building out yet another DNA match tree (no doubt more of those will happen later), I turned to building spreadsheets. I started with death records, capturing a number of data elements for each record, including the URL to the image. For the totally handwritten 1866-1874 records, I've only captured the year, order number, name and URL information for about 200 people - those will take more work to decipher than the form-based ones to complete the index. I have recorded all the information from the 1875-1887 deaths, about 320 people. Since I was not focusing solely on the name Giordano, I actually added several more dates and people to my tree just from those records! I'll take that as a sign that I'm on the right track. Already I recognize the common surnames of the town, and they are an immediate clue of a potential shared line in the trees of my DNA matches.
So we'll see how long this project stays at the top of the to do list - hopefully I'll be able to finish some record sets before something else jumps the line. And then I'll be able to use this spreadsheet index as a tool for looking up potential ancestors of DNA matches!
Tuesday, October 22, 2013
Crossing the Pond - Italy!
I did a quick stroll through Family Search this evening and found they have posted images of records from the hometown of my great-grandfather Francesco Giordano (Frank Jordan), Omignano - I found my first Italian record, of my great grandfather's birth! (His is the last record on the page, the last for 1887.)
https://familysearch.org/pal:/MM9.3.1/TH-1971-28331-2765-67
His parents are Giuseppe Giordano and Rosalia Cammarota. Now I need to learn some Italian....
Update 10/22/2013: Marriage record for Frank's parents, Giuseppe Giordano and Rosalia Cammarota: https://familysearch.org/pal:/MM9.3.1/TH-1942-28331-2028-14
Update 10/31/2013: And Giuseppe and Rosalia were kissing cousins!!! His grandparents were her great-grandparents, making them 1st cousins 1x removed. This is the first set of married cousins I've found in my direct line. So now one set of 4th great grandparents double as a set of 5th great grandparents.
https://familysearch.org/pal:/MM9.3.1/TH-1971-28331-2765-67
His parents are Giuseppe Giordano and Rosalia Cammarota. Now I need to learn some Italian....
Update 10/22/2013: Marriage record for Frank's parents, Giuseppe Giordano and Rosalia Cammarota: https://familysearch.org/pal:/MM9.3.1/TH-1942-28331-2028-14
Update 10/31/2013: And Giuseppe and Rosalia were kissing cousins!!! His grandparents were her great-grandparents, making them 1st cousins 1x removed. This is the first set of married cousins I've found in my direct line. So now one set of 4th great grandparents double as a set of 5th great grandparents.
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