An Amazing Genealogy Resource for Baselice

Updated and Improved!

On 2 Jan 2023 I finished a COMPLETE inventory of every available Baselice vital record on Italy’s Antenati website. It spans 1809 to 1942, with gaps. This new spreadsheet is updated with:

• Updated links to each book of Baselice documents on the Antenati website
• The name of each person’s father. If it’s a birth record for Adamo Leone, the son of Giovanni, you’ll find this: Adamo Leone di Giovanni
• Document numbers

If you find a name in the spreadsheet and want to see the document image, go to the link for that register and page through to the right document number.

For help with using the Antenati website, see my instructions at: https://family-tree-advice.blogspot.com/2017/05/how-to-use-online-italian-genealogy.html

Here is the inventory file:

http://www.forthecousins.com/files/Baselice-Vital-Records.xlsx

Contact me with any questions.

Welcome to Baselice

This site is dedicated to the families of the small town of Baselice, in the province of Benevento, in the region of Campania, Italy. Baselice is a hilly town, a bit hard to get to, but when I finally made it there in 2005, I felt a strong connection to my grandfather, Adamo Leone, and all of his roots. I’ve devoted a few years to documenting the family relationships of the town by viewing the microfilmed documents at my local Family History Center.

I invite all Baselice residents and descendants to use this site as a meeting place and reference library. In a town of approximately 2,000 people, where families have remained in place for dozens of generations, everyone is related somehow.

My 2018 Visit to Baselice

Thirteen years ago I drove a little ways through Baselice to get to the cemetery. Two weeks ago I walked through town, went into two churches, spoke with some residents, and fell in love with the town. And of course I visited the cemetery again.

I truly love this town.

So Much Info, So Little Time

I don’t want you to think I’ve abandoned the Families of Basélice. There just wasn’t much more to add. Until now.

Some of you may already be following my Fortify Your Family Tree blog, which I add to three times a week. That site is all about encouraging everyone to follow genealogical best practices to make their family tree as reliable and detailed as possible.

While writing that blog, I’ve discovered some new things relating to Basélice. I mentioned the online Benevento Archives here in February, and I’ve been downloading every available birth, marriage and death record to my computer for further study.

My initial research used vital records from 1809-1860, but now I can go a bit further.

My plan is to create a massive spreadsheet with all of the raw data so anyone can search for what they want, click to link and see the original document.

This will take a long time, but I’m very passionate about it. Until then, I encourage you to visit Fortify Your Family Tree to keep up with my latest finds and recommendations.

A Must-Have Resource for You

Hello, Baselice descendants. I have launched a separate blog where I’m basically spilling my guts on family tree research practices. It’s called Fortify Your Family Tree at https://family-tree-advice.blogspot.com.

I want to share with you the best thing that’s happened to the Internet for Italian Americans. The entire province of Benevento has posted birth, marriage and deaths records online for us to grab. They generally cover the years 1809 through 1942 with various years missing, depending on the town you look at.

All of my ancestors came from four towns in Benevento, so I’ve been going WILD downloading indexes and then grabbing records for my ancestors. I also intend to replace my Baselice documents with these higher quality copies.

The Benevento Archives site is http://antenati.san.beniculturali.it/v/Archivio+di+Stato+di+Benevento. When you get there you have 3 choices:

1. Stato civile napoleonico generally covers the years 1809-1815. Select your town’s name and then choose from births (nati), deaths (morti), and marriages (matrimoni). You will see all of the years available. Look at the end of the birth records in any given year for an index. If you’re lucky, deaths and marriages may have an index, too.
2. Stato civile della restaurazione covers 1816-1860.
3. Stato civile italiano covers 1866-1914 in Baselice, but in my other ancestral town of Colle Sannita, they also have 1936-1942.

When you look at a document, click it to open a viewer that lets you see it much better. Then right-click that image to save it to your computer. This morning I grabbed birth records for several of my great great grandparents from Colle Sannita. I’m in genealogy heaven!

Getting Really Productive

I’ve been taking a disciplined approach to my research lately, and it is paying off huge dividends. While this applies more to my own family tree than to my Baselice tree of people born no later than 1860, I feel it is a tip well worth sharing.

In short, I’m now working with a plan: documenting what I have, seeing what I need, and getting as much of it as possible.

It began two years ago when I wrote a program called Census Taker (it’s free, but it will only work on a Windows XP or Windows 7 computer) and generated a list of everyone in my tree who should be found on any U.S. census from the beginning through 1940. So I’ve got a Word document of names with their birth and death dates (if known) and a string of census years during which they are likely to have been alive. (Note: The Census Taker software does not produce an alphabetical list, so I had to do that manually. If I were a better programmer, I’d do a few more things to my program.)

I’ve also got an Excel file that I call my Document Tracker, which is an alphabetical list of everyone in my tree for whom I have any documentation. Then there are columns for the types of documents, including birth/marriage/death certificates, censuses, draft registration forms, immigration and naturalization records, etc. The last column is what I still need to find.

So, I am now going through the alphabetized list of who’s-on-what-census, doing a search on ancestry.com, and noting everything I find in my Document Tracker. Then I fill in the what-I-still-need-to-find column, and delete the person from the who’s-on-what-census list.

Since I started using this plan (what I have, what I need, what I can find), I’ve added scores of census forms, new family members, verified birth and death dates, and fixed any missing documentation or lack of sources from my early days of genealogy. Each time I sit down and use this approach, I beef up my tree substantially.

My Iamarino tree, which includes 12,000 or more people from the Baselice tree, is getting close to 19,000 people. Even without the Baselice names, that’s a huge tree! But better still, it’s well documented. I add each image (census form, ship manifest, draft card, etc.) to each person to whom it applies as a photo.

So how about this for a New Year’s resolution: No more scattershot name-grabbing happy-to-find-more-people genealogy. Develop a plan and reap the rewards!

Happy 2015, everyone!

Finding and Fixing Errors

I’m not sure if I’ve mentioned this before, but there is a significant amount of human error involved in these vital records from the 1800s. The most common error happens when a child dies very young, and the next born child of the same sex is given the same name. For example, let’s say Maria Leone dies as a baby in 1815 and another girl is born to the same parents in 1816. She will also be named Maria Leone.

The error occurs when Maria gets married and the civil servant accidentally pulls the birth record for the deceased Maria instead of the newlywed Maria. Before I realized this was a possibility, I had a number of dead toddlers married with children! All you can do is go with logic and write it off as a human error.

I was reminded of this phenomenon a few days ago when I decided to use the new, improved error finding report in Family Tree Maker. There are many options from which to select, such as a marriage date occurring after a death death, a birth date occurring before the child’s mother is 13 years old, or a birth date occurring more than one year after the child’s father has died.

After running this report, I revisited my raw data file (a simple text file of every fact I collected from the Baselice documents) and made several corrections to my Family Tree database. There are still a number of clear errors, but I don’t know if I will be able to find the definitive truth. One example is a man that I had to make older because his parents’ birth and death dates are documented, and they would have been either too old or far too dead to have him. But making him older made him too old for his own children. So something is wrong; perhaps a generation is missing.

Many times I believe the error happens because the entire population of the town used such a small number of names. Every family has an Angelamaria, for example. So perhaps I’ve given a child to the wrong couple—a couple with the exact same names as another couple.

I will continue to revisit the error report and my raw data, and hopefully make correct assumptions. Meanwhile, here is a link to the latest database containing a staggering 15,970 people!

The Reason We Do What We Do

These guys are the reason I took on this massive project. They are my Uncle Noé Leone and his brother, my grandfather, Adamo Leone. Two Baselice boys.

When I had to choose a name for my personal web domain, I thought about why I spend so much time on genealogy. “For the cousins, of course!” So I chose www.forthecousins.com. But here’s the man whose unknown past spurred me to tackle this research project: my grandfather, Adamo Leone, seen here with his brother Noé (my grandfather is on the right).

Have Your Found Your Ancestors?

Immediately after my last post I started a new job that has taken me away from my genealogy hobby. But lately I’ve had a bit of free time, so I’ve been enhancing my non-Baselice tree, adding facts and documents that were missing, such as census forms and ship manifests.

I recently posted a note on a Facebook page devoted to Baselice (https://www.facebook.com/groups/700487333325608/), letting people know about my extensive Baselice database. I got a few Likes (mostly from my cousins in America), but no inquiries yet. My dream is to have someone come forward and share their knowledge of the people who were born in Baselice after 1860.

I also posted a request for advice on how to find out if my grandfather’s brother, Noé Leone, died in World War I. I only know that he did not die in Baselice.

So, while I wait for these couple of seeds to sprout something, I was wondering if any of you have discovered solid links to your ancestors in this database. Let me know.

The Leg-work Is Done!!!

So, was it worth more than five years of my life spent squinting at microfilm and entering data into my computer to get 16,375 names of people, almost all of whom are related to me through blood or marriage?

YES! It was!

I have finally finished transcribing every vital record (birth, marriage and death) from my grandfather Leone’s town of Baselice, Italy, between 1809 and 1860. Only by gathering every single fact and entering it into a database like Family Tree Maker could I tell who was related to me. The town never had much more than 2,000 residents at any time, and the vast majority of them were related, albeit distantly.

My one regret is that I was eager to export all of my relatives from my overall Baselice Family Tree file into my personal Iamarino Family Tree. Since I did that before finishing this project, for the past year I have had to make any edits, additions, and corrections to both files. I can’t remember why I didn’t realize that was going to happen.

Go to the Family Trees page on this blog to download the Baselice GEDCOM file for use in your own family tree software. If you have membership at Ancestry.com, the tree is there in a nicer format at http://trees.ancestry.com/tree/61798328/family.

If you have relatives from this town but do not have Ancestry.com membership, email me at diannohama@optimum.net and I believe I can send you an invitation that will allow you to see it.

So what’s next? I am continuing to fine-tune the tree. I’ve found a number of discrepancies in the documents that have to be resolved, plus I am tracking down some of the families that moved to neighboring towns. There are documents for them available on FamilySearch.org.

I want to let the Comune of Baselice and current residents know that I’ve done this work. If you have any ideas for publicizing this work, let me know. I hope we’re related!

Working on the Final Reels of Microfilm

Last summer when I moved out of my Pennsylvania home, I put this research project on hold until I finished relocating. Now I am home in New York, and I’ve ordered the last four reels of Baselice microfilm. They are on permanent loan at my nearest Family History Center. The reels cover the years 1824-1843, and I hope they will fill in many gaps in my family history.

My strategy with the last of the film is to go straight to each index—the listing of people included in each set of birth, death and marriage records—and scan them for the last names that are most important to me: Leone, Iamarino, Iammucci, Pisciotti. In a Notepad file on my laptop, I type in the person’s name and what I can glean from the index. Then I back up and find the individual documents, taking down all of the pertinent information.

Lots of times I will see an irresistible last name, like Pallotta or Bozza, and I’ll take down that information because I know it will somehow be a relative of mine. I have followed this format for 1824-1839 so far and will continue tomorrow.

When I’ve finished grabbing the most exciting people from the indexes, I will go back and take down information for absolutely everyone, as I have in the past.

After each session’s notetaking, I return home and plug the information into my Family Tree Maker file to see what I’ve learned. One of the best new discoveries was that a Leonardo Pisciotti about whom I had gathered information, turned out to be the brother of my great great grandmother Caterina Pisciotti.

Each time I update my tree, I synch it with the version I keep on ancestry.com. A bit less often I will update the GEDCOM version that I keep on the free RootsWeb site.

It seems, now, as if I really will finish this project some day, and then I’ll exhaust every measure to share it with other descendants of Baselice.