Everyone in your ancestor's small town may belong in your family tree.
Small towns may hold more genealogy gems for you than big cities. Let's use my 2nd great grandmother's little town of Santa Paolina as an example. The town has a very small number of houses, and a very small number of families.
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| Small towns are a blessing when researching your family. |
There may be only a small number of last names in your small town. Get to know them by looking at each year's vital records index files. Get familiar with the names so you know how to spell them. Later, when you're looking at records, you'll recognize even the most poorly written names.
Most of the names in Santa Paolina were brand new to me. But I learned them fast.
Choose Your Entry Point
You're looking at this town because at least one of your ancestor's was born, married or died there. Start with that ancestor's documents. All you can find.
As you enter the facts in your family tree, you can begin to branch out.
I first found my 2nd great grandmother by going straight for her 1871 marriage record. Now I had her year of birth and her parents' names. I found her birth record and her parents' birth records. I searched the years around her birth and found her siblings' names. I figured out her parents' marriage year and found those documents.
Now I had the names of some of my 4th great grandparents. With those names, I could search for the siblings of my 3rd great grandparents.
The family is blossoming out so quickly!
Some of the siblings I'm finding have their marriage date and spouse's name on their birth record. Now I can pick nearly anyone and build out their wing of the family.
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| Leave no stone unturned. Each document could be important to you. |
As I identify each relative's vital records, I change the original document's file name. Now I can see which documents I've processed and which may still hold goodies for me.
In a small town, you may have a very manageable number of documents for each year. Unless your only goal is to make yourself a long scroll of a family tree leading back to Charlemagne, harvest all those documents. They're all your people.
Think how many more DNA matches you can identify by spreading out your branches to take in that entire small town.
And speaking of big, wide, deep family trees:
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