Getting Started with Family History
It may be easier than you think
I started doing Family history or Genealogy many years ago, when I still lived in Italy. I started by simply asking my living relatives about what they remembered about their families. It is always interesting to see how different people react to questions about their ancestors, but most of them are happy to talk about it, and wonder why you are so curious.
After asking my closest relatives all that they knew, I then went to the next stage, I spent a good amount of time researching in catholic parishes information that could help in my search. Fortunately, at least some of my ancestors (and many of my wife's) used to live relatively close to where we lived at that time (in Piedmont).
I could have waited to do that work, after all, those parishes were close to my home!
However, I am glad that I decided not to wait, and moved by a strong desire and urgency, in a few months I found all that I could in that area.
What happened next was that I had the opportunity to move to Brazil and for many years I had no chance to go back to Italy. Even now, when I travel to Italy, I really do not have enough time to work extensively on my family history.
While living in Brazil, I worked as a volunteer for the family history center of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, assisting members and non members of the church to find their ancestors (many Brazilians have Italian ancestors).
One day, almost by chance, I decided to take a look to the microfilms of Italian records of another part of Italy (Puglia), from where 25% of my ancestors came from. I was surprised and happy to find out that the Church had many microfilms of those areas, and that gave me the opportunity to move forward my work.
Those were the pioneer days of family history. Now we have many new resources made available to genealogists, thanks to the internet and the new programs created by the church and others.
As the Family Search website suggests, to search for our ancestors "can be a life-changing experience. Learning about our ancestors can bring perspective and understanding to your own life. It only takes a few minutes to learn how to get started."
I have tried it and I can say that it was and still is a life-changing experience
Visit https://familysearch.org/learn
Using social media for family history research
I have only recently decided to start using the New Family Search of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints. I have all of my family history – genealogy in the old PAF files and I was not too excited to start uploading information on the internet and connect what is already there in my family tree.
However now that I have started doing it, I can see already some benefit. The first surprise was to find that someone in Argentina had submitted information about one of my ancestors who lived in Italy. Through the New Family Search I found the email address of this person and I wrote to her.
It was a great surprise when she sent me a complete family tree of that ancestor, a family tree that goes back to the year 1623.
An article on Deseret News suggest the use of blogs to gather even more information by connecting with people over the Internet.
According to the article
There are thousands of blogs related to genealogy and family history used by Mormons, Catholics, Jews, Baptists, atheists, and others to study and find their ancestors. People are starting to recognize that blogs and other forms of social media work really well for genealogy.
I suppose that I could write here a list of last names in my family history that could attract others who are doing the same work here
This is a short list, starting from the closest to me
Martinengo, Causarano, Janna, Bertazzolo, Mussarelli, Sasso, Maraldo, Toffoli, Musso, Vercellino, Montesi, Mamola, Santini, Ongaro, Piccinali, De Martin.
Just to start…