Looking for foreign relatives or ancestors

ITN asked subscribers who had attempted to trace a branch of their ancestry or find lost or unknown relatives outside of the US to each let us know the types of resources they used. We wanted to know which websites proved helpful; whether or not they looked for records of baptisms, marriages or land ownership in a church, courthouse or library; where and approximately when they conducted their in-person search; whether or not they visited a graveyard and any advice they had on doing that, and what sort of expenses were involved in all this. We also wondered, upon their discovering any relatives, how they contacted them and how they were received.

We printed responses in the last three issues, and the series will wrap up next month.

In my 30-plus years as an avid genealogist, one of my great pleasures has been finding living relatives. Aside from feeling the joy of getting to know family in the countries of my ancestors, I have proven to my husband that I am not just “looking for dead people.”

The ancestor of mine who most recently immigrated to the US arrived in 1865, so I had to do traditional family history research to discover the native town of origin.

With a more recent immigration, older family members may know cousins in the old country or have stories that provide clues to the place of origin. And these newfound cousins often have knowledge and memorabilia that provides clues to extend the family tree back to earlier generations.

Over the years, I have connected with seven cousins “across the pond” and have met all but one face to face. With one exception, I had found and corresponded with each cousin from home before that in-person meeting.

Two cousins found me. I regularly participate in free mailing lists of RootsWeb and post my research interests on a surname list or place list. RootsWeb archives all postings back to the beginning of each list so they can be searched later.

A fifth cousin Peter from England responded to my 1999 surname posting in 2008! Fortunately, I still had the same e-mail address, so the reply reached me.

And fourth cousin Patrick called me one Saturday morning in 2007 from Ireland (it helps to be listed in the phonebook!) asking if I were the one who posted my family interests on the Roscommon mailing list in 1999. We have since collaborated on our family trees. It is so nice to have a cousin on the ground in the native country to do research.

Peter and I met in Winchester, England, in 2009, and I expect to meet Patrick in 2013.

I join family history societies in the countries of my ancestors’ origins. These usually cost £12-£15 ($19-$24) per year to join. I have done this mostly in England.

The umbrella organization for English family history societies is the Federation of Family History Societies, through which you can find a family history society for any English county. The societies generally have a members’ queries section for posting research interests. (Pre-Internet, they were published in the quarterly journals.)

Sometimes you just have to go to the place. This was the case in finding my cousins Henry, Mabel and George in County Tipperary, Ireland, in 1999. The breakthrough clue was finding the family tree submitted by their grandfather that was published in Burke’s 1912 edition of “Landed Gentry of Ireland.”

I was able to match up this tree with my research in original Quaker birth, marriage and burial (BMB) registers on microfilm at the Mormon church’s (Latter-day Saints’) Family History Library and from writing to and then visiting the Friends Historical Library in Dublin to look at original Quaker monthly meeting minutes.

Despite having a place name and being armed with a detailed (1:50,000) Ordnance Survey of Ireland Discovery Series map of the area (good local area maps are essential), I was still not confident I had the right place. Irish place names are notoriously difficult; one letter out of place and it’s a totally different place. Also, you can find multiple places with the same name.

A good source for sorting this out is the “General Alphabetical Index to the Townlands and Towns, Parishes and Baronies of Ireland, 1851,” available in genealogical libraries and as an e-book at Google Books ($31.20) or in print at Genealogical.com for $60.

On the 1999 trip, I was within an hour’s drive of the presumed place, so I decided to give it a go. I parked in front of the burial ground marked on the map. Quakerstown was just a wide spot along a country road, not a town at all. I walked down a drive to a farmhouse to ask if this was the place I was seeking. The farmer said, “Yes. What family are you researching?” I told him the surname and he said that that was the surname of the mother of his neighbor George.

I walked down George’s lane to a beautiful old house. No one was home, so I left a note saying that I was going to see the ancestral house nearby that the farmer told me about and asked George to call me at my hotel.

As I was driving back to the hotel after seeing the ancestral house, I was impeded by a flock of sheep. On the other side of the flock was a parked car, and there was a man walking toward me through the sheep.

“Are you Susan?” he asked. “Did you leave a note at our house? I’m George. Come back to the house for tea.”

Within 30 minutes of arriving back at the house, George’s sister and brother arrived. His brother Henry unrolled the 4-foot-long family tree that had been prepared by their grandfather and which was the basis for the entry in “Landed Gentry of Ireland.” I was having tea with my fifth cousins once removed!

One of the lessons in all of this is to do your homework at home before venturing overseas. Much of my research was done pre-Internet; I looked at books, censuses, civil registers, etc., on microfilm (available through the Latter-day Saints’ FamilySearch Centers) and sometimes read the original documents at archives and record offices overseas. Today, I marvel at the accessibility of records on the Internet that I used to have to travel to or wait to see.

My favorite English research site is the subscription site Findmypast, which costs £49.95 ($80) for a 6-month membership. Even without a subscription, you can learn about genealogical records in the site’s Get Started section.

Or you can go to the free Genuki site, a fabulous reference source for doing genealogy in the UK and Ireland.

In all of this, there’s always an element of luck and serendipity in finding your overseas cousins. Had that flock of sheep not held me up, I would not have had the wonderful encounter with George and his family that sunny afternoon in Tipperary.

Susan Hayes
Corvallis, OR

My husband, Jim, and I, along with my husband’s sister, Mary Pat, and her husband, John McCoy, went to Gubbio, Italy, back in September 1990 to visit the birthplace of their father, Emil Meni­chetti, and, hopefully, find records of his birth and early years.

Well over two years had been spent planning the trip. We had all been to Italy previously (though not to Gubbio), and in those days very few Italians spoke English other than those employed in hotels and restaurants. None of Jim’s family spoke Italian. I learned some with the help of two sets of language tapes and a local Italian-American club.

Most of my planning was done with very heavy reliance on ITN, which I referenced to choose hotels and for information as to how to arrange for certain things we wanted to do or see while in Europe.

I assumed we would need to check for birth records in churches, so I was really dismayed to find so many churches in the small, walled hill town of Gubbio, which is not far from Assisi. An employee at our hotel then told me that the town had a sort of bureau of vital statistics and where to find it.

Jim and I set off down the 90-some steps to that building. There were no computers, phones or copy machines, just file cabinets and shelves of ledgers and two or three people very willing to help.

I printed out my father-in-law’s name as it was originally spelled plus his date of birth. A search of the file cabinets failed, but in the bound ledgers of fill-in-the-blanks forms, they found the page that recorded the birth of Jim’s father, Emil.

I sat down with sheets of blank paper provided by the agency and, by hand, copied the page in a way that indicated which words were printed (in a script used over 100 years before) and which words had been written (also in the ornate handwriting of those days).

Back in our hotel room, I translated the page to the best of my ability and found that it documented Jim’s grandfather reporting the birth of Emil, his son, on the previous day. He had brought two friends with him as witnesses. All three of these men were illiterate farmers who lived “outside the walls.”

The name of the baby’s mother was not given, just recorded to be “not married nor related,” although we knew her name from Emil.

When we returned to Arizona, an Italian friend of a coworker translated the text into English for me.

Perhaps none of this is helpful in today’s world of computers, but I feel it was an interesting life experience and wanted to share.

Nancy Menchetti, Phoenix, AZ

I enjoyed both articles on genealogical research in the January 2013 issue, but I would make one correction. On page 44, the subscriber wrote, “… the Catholic Church has refused to allow the Mormons to microfilm their records.”

Many years ago I was told by a Catholic prelate that each pastor is responsible for his church’s records and he may release them or not, as he sees fit. While this policy may have become more conservative as identity theft has increased, I doubt that Canon Law has forbidden it.

In fact, you can find Roman Catholic records in the Family History Library in Salt Lake City from locations as widely separated as Poland and Pittsburgh. However, to find them, you must first search on the desired location, then look under “church records.”

Kit Stewart
Sequim, WA

My husband, Dennis, and daughter Meredith and I went to Croatia in June 2008 to find my grandmother’s village and relatives.

One of 13 children, Nanny came to America in 1908, escaping from ever being abducted and sent to South America as a slave. She was Serbian and landed at Ellis Island with nothing but the clothes on her back. She came from what was then part of the Austro-Hungarian Empire and what is today Croatia. The name of her village was Perna, about an hour’s drive west of Zagreb.

With a population of maybe 100 people, Perna a few years ago had no school and no shops, just farms. I e-mailed the Croatian National Tourist Office in New York and was given the e-mail address of the town hall clerk of Topusko. Topusko is the town nearest Perna, about eight miles away.

Over many months, the clerk and I corresponded, though we spoke different languages. She asked for any documents I could find, and I sent copies of my grandmother’s Orthodox Christian baptism certificate, her Ellis Island paper showing that her name, Lubitcha, was changed to Louise, and her citizenship papers.

The baptism certificate was the one piece that gave us the best chance of finding relatives, as it listed Nanny’s parents and the address of their house. The clerk found someone who remembered my grandmother’s family and we were encouraged to visit Perna, so Dennis and I and our daughter Meredith traveled to Croatia.

We drove to the village and went to the location of the family home. When we arrived at the door holding a piece of paper with their address on it, the present owners were very worried. We think they thought we were repossessing it!

That couple didn’t speak English, but they called a woman who did and she came over. It became tense, but once everyone knew why we were there, the food and drinks came out and we spent the day meeting people.

We discovered that most of my cousins had moved to Serbia after the civil war.

My grandmother’s house, which actually had been across the street, had been replaced (and the address somehow switched with the one across the street). The elderly couple living there had been expecting us.

We ended up being taken to the family cemetery, where gravestones bore pictures of the deceased, and there on a gravestone I saw the face of my grandmother, though it was actually that of one of her sisters, a great-aunt of mine. They had looked so much alike!

Before heading home, we also found out where the town hall clerk lived and finally met her, thanking her and leaving a gift. She had done so much for us, all on her own.

As an aside, not long ago I took a cheek swab and sent it to the DNA Ancestry Project for testing and found out that my relatives were Eastern European and Persian. That explains why my grandmother’s relatives look so Asian.

Lee Hanle Younge
Big Flats, NY