It is said that researching family history is second only to scouring the web for porn in popularity. I’m not sure if that’s true, but I can see how it might be so. If ever there was a medium perfectly suited to establishing lineage and contact with unknown family it is the Internet.

I’ve always had a simmering interest in genealogy, but the sorry state of family tree applications never got me very excited. These were almost always legacy beasts that could import the archaic GEDCOM standard file format and do little more. Where these apps really failed was in areas of collaboration and visualization. What good is a family tree if you are the only person who can work on it? And, much thornier, how do you slice and dice such a fractal dataset so that it is actually useful?

In recent years Ancestry.com has stepped in and taken care of much of the problem. Ancestry is run by the Church of Latter Day Saints (the Mormons) as a commercial offshoot of their ginormous genealogical holdings. The site is strictly secular though and offers an amazing array of backend research services that turns one’s offline family tree into a portal to dozens of historical record repositories. Just upload (or enter) what you know and the site begins searching census records, immigration manifests, military archives — and the best of all, other people’s trees that link up with yours back in the mists of time. Depending on where you’re from you can flesh out your family rather easily. Just a few nights ago I actually got bored after taking my mom’s mom’s line back so far through the UK that my line proceeded through a reverse Norman invasion back to France in the 11th century. Goodness knows how far back the recorded lineage goes.

Perhaps the most entertaining feature of Ancestry.com is the “Find Famous Relatives” function, six-degrees of separation on steroids. Basically if you have a pretty fleshed-out tree (and especially if any branches of it stretch back through the UK), Ancestry returns a bewildering collection of well-known relatives. For instance, I am the seventh cousin twice removed from William Faulker. This means ol’ Will and I share the same great-great-great-great-great-great-grandparent, though this person is two generations off from me. (Twice removed is what you are to the first cousins of your grandparents.) Not exactly thrilling. Ah, but there is thrill. I am the twelfth direct cousin of Werner Von Braun. This means we share the same great-grandmother¹². Let’s set aside that Herr Von Braun developed the V2 rocket for the Nazis and instead focus on his role as the father of the American space program, OK?

Even before I found Ancestry.com the web has been an inadvertent boon to family-finding. All you really have to do is get your name indexed by Google and it is off to the races. In the last six years I’ve been contacted by dozens of people with similar surnames or lineages who think they might be family. There’s Roberto di Tolve, a citizen and resident of Holland who was born in Barile, Italy and who is now a close family friend. Roberto travelled to Barile with my family and I in 2003. He’ll be back with us this July. There’s Stephanie Saville of the Paternoster line who traces her line to the famous winemakers of Barile. Most recently there’s Mike Botte who lives in NY and who grew up in Barile. (My great-grandmother is a Botte.) This may be the closest to true relation that’s been established simply from an e-mail. Mike’s cousin is the current mayor of Barile, who I will meet in July; so we’ll know soon. Much more on Mike and his extraordinary brother John in a future post.

So, ok, you get it. Online genealogy can be fun. But I am already seeing the underside of it. For one, it really does make you think hard about what family is. Genealogy is really about bloodlines, not family in the broader sense which includes step-relatives, foster parents, and illegitimacy. It charts gene propagation not family structure. In this way it is conceptually similar to The Genographic Project.

Also, you do come across people who treat genealogy with the same trainspotting zeal as online discographers. For example, finding a limited pressing of a Rolling Stones LP with a typo in the liner notes makes it more valuable; finding a misspelling on an emigration document might be a useful clue — but it might also be (and usually is) merely a massive pain in the ass. There’s a kind of genealogy buff I’ve come across that doesn’t really get this distinction.

Sunday May 20 was The Day of the Lucani when Italy celebrates all those of Basilicatan descent wherever they may live. Now, references to this “holiday” are mighty scarce and not altogether consistent, but the Internet says it exists. And I believe everything the Internet tells me.

In a stunning coincidence the day truly was of the Lucani for my parents and I. We set about a trek around the Chicago area to talk to older relatives on the Tolva side and to pilfer through their photos and documents. It was depressing in a way, because talking to these few living family members reminded us that we’d already lost the majority of the family history. There’s no one on that side alive from my grandparents’ generation. Why do you only become interested in genealogy once your primary sources are gone?

But memories remain and what we found is that sometimes those memories aren’t rosy. There’s a tendency — OK, I have a tendency — to romanticize the past and ancestors. Giuseppe Tolve, my great-grandpa and the man who came to America from Italy with his wife Grazia, has reached almost heroic status in my mind, for instance. But it turns out he was not what you’d call a great husband.

We’d long known that Grace died in childbirth with my great-uncle Paulie in 1920. However, the story of her burial were made clear to us this last weekend. The Botte family would not bury Grace in the plots owned by Giuseppe because of how he treated her during her life (details are sketchy, but the word “conniver” was tossed about — most think he was a philandering drunk). They buried her under her maiden name in the Botte plot. Ouch.

Decades later when my great-uncle Bill was near death he asked Paulie to donate his body to science. Paulie made some inquiries and was told that he would need to make backup arrangements in case science did not want Bill’s body. So, he thought, we can just use the empty plot next to Giuseppe, since Grace was never buried there. When Paulie contacted the cemetary he was told that this was not possible since “Mrs. Tolva” was buried right next to Giuseppe. But Paulie knew for a fact that Grace Botte was not buried with him. It turns out that one of Giuseppe’s girlfriends (perhaps a barmaid, perhaps someone he legally married) indeed occupied the original plot for Grace. Double ouch!

Also, we learned that the four (of seven) children young enough to be placed in an orphanage earned the nickname there “Boozy Tolvas” because whenever Giuseppe came to visit he was drunk.

Ah, family history. I suppose if you dig you have to be prepared for dirt.

But there were also gems. Such as locating the original naturalization document for Giuseppe from 1904. This is step one in determining our eligibility for dual citizenship with Italy. What we need to determine is if the line “renouncing and abjuring all foreign allegiance …” is the same as officially renouncing one’s citizenship. If so, we’re hosed. If not, I may be on my way to EU citizenship. Any lawyers out there deal with this sort of thing?