CONFERENCE
NOTES
September 17th, 2005
Members of POINTers In Person Chicago and Chicago-North chapters were proud to present “Discover Your Italian Roots”, a full-day Italian genealogy conference at the Italian Cultural Center in Stone Park, IL. The conference replaced our regular PIP Chapter meeting on September 17th, 2005.
The conference was created and prepared in its entirety by Rose & Peter Ducato (#1812), Jerry Farenga (#1763), Helen Larsen, Daniel E. Niemiec (#2304), Lisa Perkins (#4779), and Geneva Shay (#3252).
The presenters who were not on the committee were Deanna Spingola (#2393), Linda Davenport (#3769), Dr. Dominic Candeloro and Vince D’Orazio of the Milwaukee PIP Chapter (#3418).
The conference hosted a total of 113 paid registrations at $40 each, of whom eight of them paid at the door and 105 paid in advance. Only four people who paid did not attend.
Registration was from 8am until 9am and everyone enjoyed sweet rolls, coffee and time to talk to each other. Presentations began at 9am in the Florentine Room and “La Cantina” which was the basement of the Italian Cultural Center. Everyone could choose between two presentations.
Geneva Shay presented “Using Passenger Arrival Records”. She showed the group a number of web sites where passenger arrival records could be found, such as Ancestry.com (covering Baltimore, Boston, Galveston, New Orleans, San Francisco, and early New York 1850-1891), Castlegarden.org (no images but lots of data on early New York lists 1830-1891) and Ellis Island.org (New York 1892-1924). She explained search techniques, including the use of www.stevemorse.org, which helps search these other sites with more wild cards and more fields than are available at the sites themselves. She then explained the information to be found on the passenger lists. She also covered some census information that can be used to help narrow down which of the people in the passenger list web sites is your ancestor.
Meanwhile in “La Cantina”, Helen Larsen presented “Beginning Italian Genealogy”. Her primary focus was on finding the ancestral village in Italy using basic records available here. She showed how you could find the ancestral village using family lore, passenger lists, census records, civil and church records, draft cards, naturalization records and city directories.
After a short break, presentation 2 began with Linda Davenport talking about “Working With Italian Records”. She began with pronunciations (which help us spell the names better) and handwriting (such as a drop-down “s” that looks like an “f”). She then showed how to recognize the different types of documents (birth marriage and death) from a microfilm. She showed the critical genealogical info on a birth record and also showed the other data (the date the baby was presented to the mayor) that one should not use. She then covered the death record and marriage the same way. Finally she covered the allegati records, which can include the births of the bride and groom and deaths of their parents or previous spouse.
Meanwhile, Dan Niemiec was presenting “Chicago Resources for the Italian Genealogist” which concentrated on non-internet sources for information on Chicago relatives. It went through each type of record (birth, marriage, death, burial, citizenship) and where you can find these records and what data is on each one that can help you find the Italian town of origin. Many examples were shown.
Lisa Perkins
presented “Internet Resources for the Italian Genealogist,” showing how the
internet can be used for genealogy how-to, finding ancestors, and learning
about ancestral origins. Lisa displayed
graphical examples of advanced search techniques using Google.com and presented
practical examples and methods of locating and extracting census and emigration
records. Website examples included the
use of Ancestry.com, FamilySearch.org, EllisIslandRecords.org and
CastleGarden.org. Lisa also introduced
advanced search capabilities available from stevemorse.org. Strategies were presented for ascertaining
the reliability of internet information while stressing that most information
should be used as a tool for locating original source documents. Lisa closed with stressing the unique
challenges of documenting electronic sources and presented website resources to
aid any researcher in this pursuit. Handouts included a list of all websites
discussed as well as other key sites every Italian researcher should visit on
the information highway. Handouts from
Lisa’s presentation are published at the PIP Chapter 1 website under “members
articles” http://www.rootsweb.com/~ilpip1gs.
Dan gave his presentation on preparing for your genealogical trip to Italy. The primary point was that you must do every bit of research that you can with sources available in America before you visit Italy to do research. Now that you are ready, you have to bring a digital camera and learn how to change the settings manually for the best results in low light situations. You need to bring voltage converters and plug adapters in order to charge your equipment. You also need to bring a laptop to store your research and photos, and back up everything you gain on the trip to a flash drive or a MP3 player with hard disk space on it. When dealing with the priest, it is critical to explain to him (in Italian if possible) that you will not need his help in reading the records. This will help open the door to you because the priests sometimes think that they need to hold our American hand and thus do not want to commit the time. Take as many photos as you can in the cemetery and the church records book and sort it out later when you get home, because you’ll never get done what you need in a short visit.
After the third presentation, 121 of us enjoyed lunch provided by Casa Italia in the Chandelier Room at the old Scalabrini Auditorium building on the campus. We had a few announcements and acknowledgements, including a gift of a metal photo family tree for George Koleas (#1527) who set up a coach bus and brought 28 Milwaukee genealogists to the Chicago conference. Without George’s efforts promoting the conference in Milwaukee, it would not have been as well attended or as successful. Lunch consisted of Cheese Ravioli, Pizza bread and garlic bread, mixed salad, roast chicken and potato rosemarina, with soda, coffee and fresh fruit for dessert. The food was excellent.
Rose Ducato began the afternoon sessions with her talk on Oral
History. She described the dynamic
nature of the oral history interview versus a written recollection. One area that can be cleared up in an
interview is the name change. These
changes throw us off the track when researching. She encouraged people to write a book using the stories they were
told, to preserve the information for future generations. This includes their own recollections, not
just those gained from interviews. She
then gave tips on interviewing relatives to draw the most out of them. Rose showed various ways to preserve those
memories in forms of a cookbook, family book, and CD done in PDF format so that
any book can be shared by anyone. She encouraged us to get those family
photographs out of those scrapbooks that are damaging to your
photos. You need to preserve them in acid free books. Sometimes
those old photographs can evoke memories of the past.
Dominic Candeloro, Chicago’s premier Italian-American historian and author, talked about his book “Chicago’s Italians: Immigrants, Ethnics, Americans”. He discussed the historical factors that affected the immigration to Chicago and the neighborhoods. The many dialects from Italy determined where people of different provinces would settle. After the big wave of immigration, World War 2 pushed Italians to become American-Italians rather than the other way around. However, they kept their culture and their social groups they imported from the old country and formed new groups to protect the Italian-American image in the dominant media culture. Although in Chicago they have not succeeded in political power, they have done well in a number of other fields.
The final presentations began at 3pm. Deanna Spingola, director of the Naperville Family History center, presented a talk on what can be gained by using a family history center. She talked about the microfilm available from Salt Lake and resources available only there, such as books. She then talked about the resources available at local centers such as CDs, Chicago microfilms on permanent loan, Family Search and Ancestry.com, and then explained what you should do before you start research at a center.
Dr. Vincent T. D’Orazio, a POINT National speaker and member of PIP Milwaukee, gave an interesting talk on surname origins. He discussed the types of names that are based on locations (countries, provinces, regions, other towns), based on characteristics (nicknames, physical descriptions, superlatives like big and little, colors), occupations, and patronymics. He also talked about names that could have come from cultures that had only a short impact on the Italian peninsula.
At the end, everyone filled out an evaluation form, which we will use IF (that’s a big IF) we decide to do this again. We booked the cultural center in November 2004, and started work in earnest in January 2005 and have been working steadily since. We used an LCD projector and a laptop for Powerpoint presentations in the Florentine Room and a standard overhead projector for transparancies in “La Cantina”.
Our conference web site, www.chicagoitalian.org, will be converted into a portal to take people into the PIP Chicago and PIP Chicago-North web sites on Rootsweb. Conference photos can also be found at www.chicagoitalian.org for a while.
Future meetings of PIP Chicago-North will be November 5th, 2005, plus the second Saturdays of March, May, July, September and November 2006, tentatively. See our web site www.chicagoitalian.org for details.