NO YANKEE DOODLE DANDIES...

A few months ago when our work started to slow down I found time to begin putting together a history of our family…it’s something I’ve always to do but had little time to do…my father was born in Italy but his father and/or mother may have come from Albania because as a child some of my relatives and my father ‘talked’ a different language I was told was Albanian…I had no clue if it was true or not, although when they couldn’t seem to find the right words in Albanian they intermingled French and Italian words that I understood…it wasn’t difficult to imagine someone in the past may not have been born in Italy …none of them new who it was…I had a hunch some may have come from Sicily but I hope not!
So I went for it…

I began jotting down my parent’s parents, brothers and sisters, wives and children’s’ names as far as I could remember and e-mailed my lists to some of my cousins in Montreal…I received a little help but not much…all but one of my parents’ brothers and sisters were long gone…and my mother’s living sister is 104 years old and can hardly remember what she had for lunch, poor thing…
So, I enlisted Google for information on how to proceed …
Google helped me to be aware what to look for such as names, places, occupations and life happenings…and things to be careful in believing or accepting…
Occupational data could be important in that it may indicate migrational patterns…old records may include references to towns and villages that no longer exist, censuses are usually helpful but people often lie or a child may have been born out of wedlock or a woman may be a widow who didn’t want to report it…
First names can be confusing, such as a first name like Giovanni could be noted as John or Jonathon or Jack, Edward for Edwin, Peggy for Margarite, Antonia for Tony, and so forth…
I read that people sometimes reduced their ages on marriage certificates while others may have increased their ages either to marry or to join the armed forces…Baptismal certificates could be helpful but it was not unusual for parents to baptize their kids when they were four or five years old…
This week we have cousins visiting us from Montreal and they’ve been able to give me names that I didn’t remember…my father was the second youngest of seven children and my mother was seventh of eight sisters…I found out I had cousins who were born and died before I was born…I hardly knew they existed or their names…a few of the living ones are twenty years older than me…
It goes without saying I’ll be looking into Donas’ history too…she’s from Arkansas with relatives coming from Great Britain…
I’m about to purchase a genealogy program and see how far back I can go with both sides of my family and Donas'…I ultimately would like to know if any of my relatives served in the armed forces…I don’t expect to fine any Italian war heroes because there are none in history…I do know that Donas had relatives who were in the Civil and Spanish American Wars...