52 Ancestors Week 31: End of the Line

From Amy Johnson Crow: Week 31

The theme for Week 31 is "End of the Line." Do you have an "end of the line" ancestor -- one who you're convinced won't go any further back? What about an ancestor who lived at the end of a street, or one who lived in a small town where the train station literally was the end of the line? Feel free to be creative with this prompt!

What? Did you think I was going to use the "That's all folks"
image from Looney Tunes? You're despicable.

      I'll never forget the first time I saw the classic "That's all folks" image from Looney Tunes in my hints on Ancestry. I thought it was clever how people used an image from pop culture to denote the end of a line they can't break through no matter how hard they tried. Though, if you're researching French-Canadian ancestors that image may pop up more than the all of the ships, coats of arms and maps of France combined. At that point a clever image becomes a bit of a nuisance. I get it. People can't go further back in time and people have to do some serious jiggery-pokery to get around that infamous "end of the line" block. I've done that and I didn't even have to go to Italy!

Oh, hi 18th century ancestors!

   Italian research can be a bit of a mixed bag. Mainland Italy began civil registration in 1809 while Sicily waited until 1820 to have their town halls record every birth, marriage and death in their cities and villages. Sicily, why do you have to make things so complicated, huh? 

    All joking aside, when you work on an Italian tree chances are your "end of the lines" may be in 1809 or a bit beyond that date thanks to the digitization of records on Familysearch and of course Antenati. Does that mean your research is at an end that date? Nope. Not at all! There's so much more you can do!

        One of the first things you should do is not panic and not book a flight to Italy. If it's too late I recommend going to Naples. The pizza there is amazing from what I've been told. If you're lucky, the town your researching might have a wide variety of records from 1809 to 1861 that could help you reach the hard to find 18th century ancestors of yours from the comfort of your own home. The towns of Gesualdo, Frigento and Grottaminarda are three towns in Campania that have really, really good records.

Oh, hi even more 18th century ancestors.

    The records in those towns alone allowed me to push the trees back for my great-grandparents Giuseppe Carrabs and Clementina Forgione to well into the 1700s. Granted, I had a little help from my distant cousin Mary since she was the one who actually went to Italy and digitized the records long before I ever even heard of Antenati. I still owe her a big hug for her efforts! And maybe some cannolis.

    Still, even if you didn't have a cousin who digitized the records, you could still go back further than 1809 by simply looking at death records and marriages to see who's related to who. You could get an age of the person at the event and from there you can extrapolate when your person was born.

    Once you've exhausted all of your research options, you can either say you've reached the end of the line or you could actually book that trip to Italy we talked about earlier. Some church records prior to 1809 are available online. It just varies from town to town. If you go to one of your ancestral towns and ask for church records for your ancestor, you might be able to push things back if the records can be found that is. You never know if anything has been lost in a natural disaster or have been eaten by rats.

Just chipping away here. Remember how it
used to look?!

    I guess the point I am trying to make is to not get discouraged by something that seems like the end of the line because most of the time it isn't. There are more than one way to handle a brick wall and sometimes you need to think outside the box.

    Look at how I broke through Domenica Gullo's line. I had to ask the town hall at San Pietro a Maida for her marriage record and that gave me information on her parents. From there I was able to look at the records and connect the dots. It's still a work in progress, I'll admit. But, it still counts!

    The end of the line doesn't always have to mean the end of your research. There's more than one way around that brick wall. However, some lines really can be the "end of the line" thanks to a variety of circumstances ranging from document availability to a lack of digital records. Does that mean you should give up? Not a chance! Some lines may be stuck for sure and some lines can still be pushed further back in time. It just depends on a variety of circumstances like I said. It's up to you to determine whether or not it's truly the end of the line.

    I've gotten a few of those images I talked about earlier for ancestors whose lines were anything BUT the end. That was more than a little annoying. Was someone really that lazy and didn't want to put in the work? Who can say? I'm not a mind reader.  I don't use those images and if you do that's fine. Just know that in some cases it's never the end of the line.

That's all, folks!

See ya next time!