Finding Your Ancestor’s Origin Story: Strategies for U.S. Immigration Research

Do you have an immigrant ancestor who settled in the United States? Tracing your ancestor in their homeland requires that you know the town in which they originated. Identifying the town of origin can present a variety of challenges and often requires unique research strategies. In this class, we will introduce the strategies for tracing immigrant ancestors and demonstrate advanced research skills, record analysis, and evidence correlation.

[familysearch]

View the handout for this presentation at:

[whychromosomesmusic]

I was fortunate to correspond with my great aunt before she passed away. She provided me with a lot of the Italian ancestry including the primary comune in Italy -- Prascorsano. Thanks to the microfilms at Family Search I have done complete transcriptions of all of the original Latin and Italian records of the church parish there [births, marriages and deaths] from 1823 through 1850. I started on 1851 but some of the microfilms are cut in half on the right page so I am having to record what is there and then later use information to "fill in the blanks" so to speak. I have also done research in the Family Search microfilms for the comune of Pertusio, the comune of Valperga and the comune of San Colombano. A large number of the same surnames of these comuni are found as early as the 1880s and 1890s in Grundy and Will counties in Illinois.

[whychromosomesmusic]

Thanks for this presentation. It gave me an idea. Knowing a large number of the family surnames of my families' hometowns in Italy I could check for persons with those surnames whose immigration dates are the same in the censuses especially if they are the same as my families and have better luck narrowing down the Passenger Lists.

I have found my great grandmother on a Passenger List [also have a copy of her Italian passport] but never found the family of my great great grandfather [her father in law] when they came over from Italy. Something I learned only recently. Even wives traveling with their husbands from Italy would often go by their maiden names and that is how they may be listed on the Passenger List.

[quiltingtangent]

Wonderful webinar and speaker. Need more of this type of detail webinars.

[elained]

My great grandfather from Bohemia has different spelling of his name on most documents 😊