How to research to Find My Family Tree?

How did I manage to find my family tree the “old way”

Finding my family tree has been some sort of adventure. I barely knew where to start – at that time, internet was not yet developed, so this had to be done the old way- but at least I knew the questions I had to find the answers for. What I never imagined, was where this idea would take me to. In fact, I did my research twice, one on my father´s branch and another on my mom´s. In both opportunities, the idea was boosted by someone else, but to find my family tree, has lead me to a very interesting journey.

This story is about 25 years old now. Visiting some second grade cousins, I was approached with a birth certificate belonging to our common great grandmother. She was called Juana Amorena Bonnefois. She was the mother of my father´s mother, but that was the first time I was hearing from her, at least as per her name. I remember my father saying his own origins were mostly Italian and Spanish but that he had -and therefore I had- a small portion of French blood. Just then I found out the connection: Juana was born in France, like her mother was, and our French family name was Bonnefois (by the way, I’ve found it beautiful, as it means “good faith”).

The thing is that one of my cousins was planning a trip to Italy. By that time everybody was talking in our country about a new Italian law that allowed descendants of Italian emigrants to get Italian citizenship and thus passports, by complying with some paperwork (mostly getting birth, marriage and death certificates from their closest Italian ancestors up to them). And he thought it was a great idea to get his Italian passport too. So he proposed me to work together to gather the rest of the documents, so we together with our brothers and sisters could open a family file at the Italian Consulate in Uruguay to apply for the Italian citizenship.

So why starting by Juana I asked? Because -he told me- her birth certificate, is the most concrete data we have, and when looking for this kind of information, it is very important to work based on documents as it is quite easy to make mistakes. Sometimes people research on the wrong family or think their surnames are just spelled or written one way… This is a document, the best way to find our family tree, and if we all gather documents like this and put them together with family stories, we will manage to solve this sort of puzzle. He continued by telling me Juana was born in Bayonne, France and moved to Paris, but at some point she emigrated to Argentina. In Buenos Aires she met our great grandfather, Ferdinando Varini, who himself was born in Reggio Emilia, Italy, and who is our closest common Italian relative. Therefore he added, if we manage to get the citizenship, this will be because of him. I have already contacted someone in Italy he continued, who will get and send me Ferdinando´s birth certificate. Getting our grandparents birth, marriage and death certificates will be an easy task; the problem we have is that our timeline breaks in Buenos Aires. I know by family tales that Juana and Ferdinando got married at the Church of la Merced in Buenos Aires, he told me, but so far I have been unable to get their wedding certificate, and if we do not get it, we won´t be able to comply with all the required paperwork. By the time the wedding took place, there was no Official Registry, so all the records concerning the birth, civil state and death of people was mostly in the hands of the Catholic Church. In the times of President Peron in Buenos Aires, in just one night in 1955, many churches were burned, and La Merced, among them, so all historical records were lost forever, and this was also the destination of the book where Juana´s and Ferdinando´s wedding was registered. I left his house promising to search at home if among a bunch of documents and photos I had from my grandparents, I could eventually find a copy of this wedding certificate, or at least some other traces of it. To make the story short, we never found her wedding certificate, but the things I found out among those photos and documents at home, fascinated me and encouraged me to find my family tree and getting to know more about my ancestors to whom I owe a part of what I am now. I never got an Italian passport but, because of that search I started then, I ended up getting the Spanish citizenship as per my grandfather on the side of my father (until the moment I´ve found the original documents my father wasn´t aware of the fact he was registered as the son of a Spanish man, but this is part of another story…)

How to find your family tree nowadays?

• Since I did my first steps in family tree construction, we have come to a long way technologically speaking, and specifically in what has to do with information management, and the way data might be gathered, organized and offered to the public.
• Birth, death, wedding certificates and baptism faiths, have always been a great source of reliable information on our ancestors, because they have complete names, precise dates and places, and because they do always enchain at least other four relatives or even more if we consider that some of these documents do also include witnesses. But sometimes they are not easy to get or might even get lost, as it happened to me. Some other times, we are unable to get them because we do not know our ancestors exact names, or last names might have minimum changes over the years that could complicate our search. I heard about people checking on old family tombs for names, birth and death dates…in the internet things are much simpler.

How can ancestry.com help you to find your family tree?

You either might be trying to get any of those certificates and are lacking exact names and other relevant data, or you might just be trying to find out who your relatives are, know more about your origins and challenge yourself to see how far back you can go: now you can get extraordinary help from internet sites like ancestry.com

• Online family trees like the ones offered by ancestry.com are searchable family databases, displayed as family group records. They are trustable because data has been supplied by individuals and organizations throughout the world interested in the subject and contain many generations of a lineage and include valuable dates.
• Just follow the link http://trees.ancestry.com/ and get connected with your family story : ancestry.com makes easier the part of manual work you have to do when making your family tree, as your name is all that it takes to start it. The more you add, the better ancestry.com can help you.
• Ancestry.com does also provide you with interesting information about the meaning of surnames.
• You will find that ancestry.com is so user friendly that you do not even need to know about “computers” to use it.
• Leafs get displayed in a very ludic way: you will feel you are in some sort of treasury hunt, and at the end of the way you will get something precious: the story of your family that is the story of you.

By, Carmen Vazquez Sibils