Nick Benotto

A genealogy blog by Nick Benotto

I’ve always been fascinated and intrigued with history. In school I was often placed in the honors history classes. So naturally I was curious about our family history. Mama Benotto also loves history and so maybe it’s something I inherited from her. I was always asking her questions about her grandparents that unfortunately had passed before I was born so I never got to know them. The only way I was able to connect with this distant generation was by cooking and using their old family recipes. Great Grandma’s one-egg cake, Great Nana’s special meatballs and Great Grandpa’s wines.

One day, after asking mom a lot of questions, we decided to do our family research in a more organized and efficient way. We decided to try to go back and document family as far as we could go without having to travel back to Italy to search the dusty archives in small towns, although our next Italy trip will probably include some genealogical research. I’d love to share here with you readers the five main techniques that enabled us to research as far back as the mid-1700’s.

The Spiral Notebook

We began with deciding to focus on the four branches of mom’s family, who all originated in Italy. So, we bought a thick spiral notebook and divided it into four sections with each family name on the dividers. We then wrote down the names of the people we wanted to research every few pages. This list grew as we discovered more and more names. After that, we began to fill the pages with everything we knew about them from our memories. Of course, mom had more memories than I had that went further back than mine, but I contributed what I could. I also thought to draw a rough diagram for mom that started at the bottom of a page so we could work our way up the tree and watch as it grew. This visual was extremely gratifying!

Join Helpful Websites

Something very helpful was signing up for a few valuable sites. The first one we joined was the Ellis Island one. This site contains the ship manifests from all the ships that arrived at Ellis Island beginning in 1892. Before Ellis Island was established the immigrant ships would dock at Castle Garden which is located at the southern tip of Manhattan and was used from 1855 to 1891. I remember how excited we got when we finally found a manifest for one of my great, great grandmothers. Oddly, it was listed under her maiden name. And we actually found her by searching for her children who sailed under their dad’s name. We later discovered that Italian women usually keep their maiden names.

This was actually a great discovery because now we knew another family name. Turns out this great grandmother sailed with her four young children two years after her husband left for America. Once settled, he sent money for his wife and children to join him in New York. Most of the ship manifests supply information such as the port they sailed from, the town they were from, their occupation, how much baggage they had and if they were in steerage. Sometimes it included how much money they came with and who they were going to meet in America.

Another important and helpful site filled with so much information, is Ancestry dot com. This site also has ship manifests and in addition it has birth, death, marriage, social security and naturalization records going back about a hundred and fifty years. I will talk more about this in the next step.

It may also be helpful, even if you think a bit morbid, to check the Find a Grave site. Mom found the listing for her great grandfather here and it even had a picture of his grave stone. This was her least known great grandparent because he died young and her grandmother was too young to remember much about her father. Consequently, there was scant information about him.

Interview Every Living Person in Your Family

With our rough diagrams in hand, we composed a list of general questions to ask our close and distant family members. Unfortunately, most of our older relatives who would have been the most helpful had already passed on. Mom was especially frustrated that she hadn’t asked her grandmothers more questions about their parents and to share stories of how their parents arrived in America from Italy. So, my advice is do not put off talking to your older family members!

My mom’s maternal side of her family had more mysterious origins than her paternal side. Her dad, my grandpa, often spoke of the place in Italy where his father was born. We knew that town name and we even eventually visited there. It was incredible to meet distant cousins and see the church where my great grandfather was baptized. In fact, I think that would be another good story to share to my blog. It’s an experience I recommend to everyone.

And so, we had conversations that led to other conversations with people we didn’t even have on our lists. Cousins of cousins contributed bits and pieces to the puzzle, some sending us pictures of great, great aunts and uncles, or supplying last names of people we only knew as Rosie, or Carmela or Luigi. All this information filled our spiral notebook and added branches to our family tree. There is a nice family tree function on the Ancestry website but we would initially use our hand drawn tree for each family to keep track of people.

A few important things we learned as we went along. One is that no one seemed to use their given names. It was maddening at times. Uncle Luigi’s true first name was Carmine, Great Aunt Jennie was Vincenza and to make matters worse it was recorded as Vigenza on her birth certificate which we finally located after hours of pouring over records. Antoinette was supposed to be Antonia but was recorded by the midwife as Tony! Additionally, once in America, the immigrants chose to Americanize their names to better fit in and to avoid possible discrimination.

The next issue was that the last names were often misspelled and morphed into difficult to locate new names. We became experts at playing scramble the name. Guess how many ways you can misspell Benotto! Lastly, in Italian families, the names would repeat every other generation. This was actually helpful in trying to guess who to search for. If you knew the grandparents’ names, you could be 90% sure of the grandchildren’s names and vice versa. (Although I am the only Nick Benotto in the entire family tree.)

Use the Census Reports

You will find access to many years of census reports on Ancestry. There are the federal ones and other times you can find the state census as well. These were invaluable in providing all kinds of information such as occupation, addresses, children’s names, naturalization status, and language spoken. Sometimes there would be the date of immigration which you can then back track to find the ship manifest and ship they sailed here with.

In our case, the census provided mom the name of her maternal great, great grandmother. She came to America with her daughter and husband. When we searched for her parent’s names on her death certificate there was a very interesting piece of information there. The dad had a very, very unusual first name. If you remember above, I told you that mom’s maternal side was more unknown than her paternal side. All we knew was that they said they sailed from Naples but we were pretty sure that was just the port and not their hometown. When mom did some research on this unusual first name, she discovered that it was used only in this one small town in the mountains of Campania, Italy. And almost 100% of those who immigrated to America from this small town settled in one particular neighborhood in Brooklyn. This was the neighborhood where this branch of mom’s family was from. And so, we are almost 100% sure we now know where this branch of the family originated. We celebrated this discovery by sharing it with all the members on mom’s side of the family. No one had ever heard of this town before!

Take a DNA Test

I realize this may seem a little controversial. Mom gave it a lot of thought but with my encouragement she went ahead and did it through Ancestry. You don’t need to identify yourself and the results are sent to you in your own secure account on Ancestry. There was some interesting information in mom’s report but it was pretty much what we thought. She was mostly from Southern Italy with a smattering of Greek and Turkish, which is not a surprise as they were frequent visitors to southern Italy and mixed with the population.

What this also does is link you with others who share your genetics and who have also taken this DNA test through Ancestry. You don’t need to connect with them, it’s your choice. They may message you but mom uses a pseudonym and she can choose not to respond. The upside was that mom connected with some of our distant cousins who were the nicest people and so willing to share their genealogy information that they had unearthed.

We received some truly old and awesome photos that we treasure and one cousin helped my mom located her great grandfather’s death certificate. This was the one she knew little about and he died at 42. His death certificate provided cause of death which gave her some closure. And the reason why we couldn’t locate this certificate on our own (believe me we searched) was because his last name was so badly butchered it was unrecognizable. Other distant family is happy to share their research and hear of yours. This enabled mom to go back many generations on her mom’s family in Sicily to the mid-1700s.

Overall, this genealogical research project was fun, enlightening and so very interesting. It was a puzzle or a detective follow the clues endeavor. We found some skeletons in the closet; some history lessons and we came to appreciate things like antibiotics and vaccines after seeing the death certificates of so many of the children who died through the years. We ended up putting all the research together that we discovered along with old pictures and added some old family recipes that everyone contributed and we published a book for all the family members who were interested in having this piece of our history to pass down to their children and grandchildren.

I hope some of my ideas and techniques are helpful to you in your family search and you decide to embark on discovering your own story. Have you already researched your family history? Share your tips in the comments!