MEETING
NOTES
L-R: Frank Scalise, John Storts, Dan Niemiec, Rose Ducato, Pete Ducato, Geneva Shay, Diane Kinn, Jerry Farenga, Toni Garofalo, Mike Dizzonne, Terry Jackson
MAY
3RD 2003
Eleven Italian
genealogists gathered in Schaumburg on Saturday, May 3rd for the 12th meeting
of PIP Chicago-North Chapter. Ten of them continued the discussion over
lunch at Dominick's Deli afterward.
We had one member return after a long absence, Diane Kinn, who is trying to
find her parents' or grandparents' passenger manifests. Her parents came
to the US too late for the Ellis Island web site, and her grandparents may not
have come through New York. She is from Brooklyn so we advised her on
finding naturalizations for New York and later manifests on microfilm, using
soundex films first to find the right ship and then the manifest films.
We had one new member, Michael Dizzonne, who is a distant cousin of Dan
Niemiec, chapter co-chair. Michael found Dan with one e-mail and ended up
with 14 generations of ancestry in Triggiano Bari. Michael grew up in the
"Grand and Ogden" neighborhood and noted that his family and other Di
Zonno family members changing their names to Dizzone and Dizona.
Dan passed a list of web site surnames around and asked the members to check
the surnames for accuracy and add or subtract anything they needed to. He
also asked them to write down the towns that they need film for that have not
yet been filmed by the Family History Library. Dan plans to relay this to
the FHL for review.
Dan has written a Constitution and Bylaws, to be E-mailed to the members and
discussed between today and the next meeting. The idea is not to
formalize the meetings but to set up an organizational structure that will
stand on its own if any one important member should leave the chapter.
Steve Morse is best known for creating the search engine for Ellis Island that
nearly got him sued. He also developed the 8086 computer chip in the
1980s. Steve has created a do-it-yourself kit to set up a database and a
search screen on a web site. Dan is using it for some databases on the
PIP 27 site. (Lisa Perkins from PIP Chapter #1 told Dan about the
kit.) Steve has implemented search engines for other web sites such as
Genealogy.com, Ancestry.com, and others. They allow greater flexibility
than the search engines on the web sites themselves.
The chapter has decided to begin extracting the marriage records from microfilm
of Chicago's 11 Italian Catholic parishes, to be placed on a web site for
searching. Dan asked for people to volunteer to extract the marriages of
the churches they are familiar with in their previous research, so the names
will be spelled correctly more often. Michael, chapter co-chair Rose
Ducato, Geneva Shay and Jerry Farenga each volunteered to extract from their
respective ancestral parishes.
Other members who attended were Toni Garofalo, Frank Scalise, Peter Ducato,
Terry Jackson and John Storts.
Our 3 meetings for the rest of 2003 are all Saturday, 10:30am-12:30pm at the
Schaumburg library.
July 12th, 2003
September 6th, 2003
November 8th, 2003
Visit our website for further information at:
http://www.rootsweb.com/~itappcnc