Monday, March 24, 2014

Persistence Pays Off

 
 
Ann Snyder stopped over for some tips about accessing the catalog on Family Search. We started talking about her search for her grandfather's name on a passenger list and decided to take a look at the Ancestry website. After some futile searching for Francesco Scibetta, we noticed the name "Franco. Scibitta" in the Italians to America database. It seemed that this reference could be her grandfather, so we put his exact information from "Italians to America" in the New York Passenger list search field and what turned up was her grandparents traveling together in 1891. The second clip below shows the names; he was 22 and she was 16, traveling as many women did under her maiden name.
 
Ann had located the family in the 1905 New York state census but was never able to find them in 1900. (They HAD to be there!) We wrote down the ward number and enumeration district from 1905 and set out to "read" the census. On the right side of the census search field we chose New York, Erie County, Buffalo and the various enumeration districts appeared. We began with the first E. D., which had 18 pages; we looked at only names of people born in Italy. No luck there. Then we noticed another E. D. with some street names that Ann recognized. This section had 31 pages, and we used the same process--just looking for those born in Italy. On page 29 we found not only Francesco, Maria A., Calagero (Ann's father) and Maria, but Maria's mother and aunt! This also verified her maiden name.



 
 
 
THE REST OF THE STORY
 
My curiosity got the best of me, so I used the census information to try to find out how these names were indexed. Using Rosalia Manuela in the search box took me to the index where the name "Secbetta" appeared. No wonder Ann couldn't find her family in the 1900 census!






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