When I returned to my family tree after leaving it largely untouched for almost ten years, I expected to spend a considerable amount of time correcting old information, adding missing people and organising the documents I had accumulated.
I did not quite expect what it has become.
Over the last few weeks, and particularly during the intensive work I have been doing recently, genealogy has stopped feeling like the construction of a tree and started feeling much more like an investigation.
There are now enquiries moving through several countries. I have been examining civil records, death certificates, Soviet documents, old photographs, property records and family papers. I have contacted municipalities, archives, hospitals, lawyers and other institutions. One document leads to another institution; one name leads to another village; one date raises another question.
The investigation currently stretches through Germany, Italy, Brazil, Moldova, Ukraine, Turkey and Montenegro.
And the deeper I go, the less this feels like collecting names.
It feels like looking for people.
Germany: the deepest branches so far
My paternal German side is currently the most developed part of my ancestry.
Several branches already extend well into the eighteenth century, particularly through Schleswig-Holstein and families such as Berendsen, Brömel, Erichsen, Nissen, Götz, Jacobsen and Hänsel.
There is something particularly interesting about researching this part of the family now that I am living in Europe again.
When I worked on genealogy years ago, many of these places were simply names appearing on a computer screen. A village in Germany was a geographical fact attached to a birth or marriage.
Today it is somewhere I may actually be able to visit.
I can potentially stand in the village where an ancestor was born, visit the church associated with a marriage, walk through an old cemetery, investigate municipal and church archives, and perhaps identify streets or properties mentioned in historical records.
That changes the character of the research. Geography becomes tangible.
Italy: the branch that still needs much more work
My Italian ancestry remains considerably less developed, and this is one of the areas where I know I still have a great deal of work ahead.
Through my mother, Lorenza Sandra Teresa Dotta, the family leads through names including Dotta, Ravera and Pochetto, eventually taking me from Brazil back across the Atlantic to Italy.
During the last few weeks I have started approaching Italian municipalities directly.
Some have already responded.
There is a peculiar feeling in receiving an official document from an Italian comune containing the name of somebody from my family. To the municipality it is, understandably, an administrative record. To me it can be the evidence that confirms a relationship, establishes a birthplace or provides the names required to unlock another generation.
A few lines in a civil register can move an entire branch of the tree backwards by decades.
There is still much more to discover in Italy, but for the first time in many years I am geographically close enough that archival research does not necessarily have to end with an email.
If necessary, I can eventually go there.
Brazil: investigating the family I thought I knew
Brazil presents an interesting contrast.
These generations are geographically and historically much closer to my own life. One might therefore expect them to be easier to reconstruct.
That is not always the case.
I have been investigating the Dotta and Bório families, searching for civil and legal records and trying to establish precisely what happened rather than relying exclusively on family recollection.
That has meant looking at births, marriages, separations, divorces and deaths. It has also meant contacting institutions and people who may still hold fragments of information.
Some of the questions have become surprisingly practical.
If somebody died in a particular hospital, for example, who became responsible for the body afterwards? Who collected the person's belongings? Who had access to the home? What happened to the documents that were there?
Those questions matter because somewhere there may still be a box containing certificates, letters, photographs or other family papers.
To somebody cleaning an old house, such things may appear to be obsolete paperwork.
To me, one of those papers might answer a question that has remained unresolved for decades.
Moldova: Soviet documents, villages and old photographs
Expanding the tree to include Viorica's family has opened a completely different field of research.
Here the investigation involves Moldovan families, Soviet-era records, Cyrillic documents, Romanian and Russian forms of names, patronymics and local history.
I have been working through the Grozav family and its ancestral branches, including families such as Madan, Federiuc and Demciuc.
Even something as apparently simple as a person's name requires care. A Romanian form, a Russian transliteration and the spelling used in a Soviet document may not be identical. A patronymic can provide evidence of a father's given name, but it has to be interpreted in the context of the document that produced it.
The research has therefore moved into local municipalities and archival sources.
Requests are being made not simply for one certificate, but with the hope of establishing earlier generations: parents, grandparents, marriages, deaths, residences and related family members.
Then there are the photographs.
I have been processing old Grozav family albums page by page. Wherever possible, I extract individual photographs while preserving clues from the original album page.
A handwritten year beside a photograph can be extremely valuable. The apparent ages of the people, their clothing and the other photographs surrounding them may help narrow the period. Several photographs on one page may belong to the same family event.
And occasionally I find myself looking closely at a face photographed seventy, eighty or perhaps a hundred years ago and asking a very simple question:
Who are you?
The unsettling part is knowing that somebody once knew the answer perfectly well.
The person who placed that photograph in the album probably knew the name, the relationship and the story behind it. Perhaps everyone in the family knew.
Then one generation failed to write it down.
Another generation disappeared.
And a person slowly became an unidentified face.
Turkey: following the Atioğlu family backwards
The ancestry of Dario and Melissa has introduced another major direction: Turkey.
Their father, Cevat Atioğlu, gives us the starting point for investigating the Atioğlu family around Adapazarı and Sakarya. From the documentation already available, the next objective is to move backwards through his parents, Lütfü Atioğlu and Şefika, and then into their respective families.
The questions are the same fundamental questions that appear throughout genealogy:
- Who were their parents?
- Where and when were they born?
- Where did they marry?
- Where did they live?
- When and where did they die?
- Where were they buried?
- Can earlier generations be identified in historical population records?
To pursue those questions, the research has expanded towards institutions in Sakarya, historical and academic resources and the Turkish archival system.
But there is another question behind all of these.
Where did this family come from before Turkey?
Montenegro: investigating a family memory
There is a possible Montenegro connection in Cevat's family history.
At this stage I deliberately describe it as a possible connection.
This distinction is becoming one of the most important principles of the entire project.
Family stories are valuable. They may preserve information long after the original documents have disappeared. But recollection, tradition and documentary evidence are not the same thing.
I do not want to enter Montenegro into the family tree merely because a family story suggests it.
I want to know whether it can be demonstrated.
That means looking for migration, residence, population or other historical records and considering the possibility that names may have changed in spelling or form as people moved between languages and administrations.
The investigation has therefore reached Montenegro as well.
Perhaps nothing will emerge.
Or perhaps a single record will eventually explain why Montenegro remained in the family's memory.
Genealogy as detective work
The common thread through all these countries is that almost nothing exists in isolation.
A death certificate identifies a hospital.
The hospital may identify who became responsible for the deceased afterwards.
That person may have received personal belongings.
Those belongings may have included family documents.
A marriage record identifies parents. Their names lead to another municipality. A birth record there may identify another pair of parents and suddenly another generation becomes visible.
A patronymic in a Soviet document may confirm a father's name.
A handwritten year beside a photograph may establish when somebody was alive.
A Turkish population record might eventually provide the evidence needed to investigate the Montenegro story.
This is what has made the work of the last few weeks so absorbing.
It is not a linear process.
It is a network of evidence.
The people behind the rectangles
There is another aspect of this work that affects me more as the tree becomes larger.
Genealogy software inevitably reduces human lives to structured information.
A rectangle contains a name.
Then come birth, marriage and death.
Lines connect parents to children.
It is useful, but nobody experienced life as three dates inside a rectangle.
Between those dates were decades of ordinary existence.
These people woke up in the morning. They worked. They worried about money. They fell in love. They argued. They raised children. They became ill. They travelled. They lost people they loved. They made decisions whose consequences eventually reached generations they could never have imagined.
Some left Europe and crossed the Atlantic for Brazil.
Others lived through wars, border changes and governments that no longer exist.
Some left dozens of records.
Some left photographs.
Some left almost nothing except a name written in a register.
Yet eventually all of those lives converge into the people living today.
There is a race against time
The more I investigate, the more conscious I become that genealogy also involves a race against disappearance.
Paper deteriorates.
Photographs are thrown away.
Houses are emptied.
Cemeteries change.
Archives can be damaged or lost.
And, most importantly, the people who remember eventually disappear.
The loss of family knowledge can happen astonishingly quickly.
One generation looks at an old photograph and knows everybody in it.
The next recognises two people.
The following generation recognises nobody.
Four people who once had names, personalities, relationships and entire lives become four anonymous faces on an old piece of photographic paper.
Somewhere, another document is waiting
What makes this period of the investigation particularly interesting is that there are now enquiries moving simultaneously in different directions.
Somewhere in Italy there may be another Dotta, Ravera or Pochetto record.
Somewhere in Brazil there may still be a collection of family papers whose importance nobody has yet recognised.
Somewhere in Moldova there may be a register capable of taking one of the Grozav ancestral branches back another generation.
Somewhere in Turkey there may be a record that tells us more about Lütfü Atioğlu and Şefika and finally identifies the generation before them.
And perhaps somewhere in Montenegro there is a document that will explain why that country survived in the family's memory.
I do not know whether all of those documents still exist.
I certainly do not know whether I will find them.
That uncertainty is part of the investigation.
But every document recovered gives a name more context.
Every photograph identified gives a face back its name.
Every generation established with evidence pushes the boundary between family memory and forgotten history a little further into the past.
That, I think, is becoming the real purpose of this project.
Not collecting the greatest possible number of names.
Not producing the largest possible family tree.
But trying to recover something about the people who lived before us — people who worked, travelled, struggled, loved and raised families, and whose decisions ultimately made our own lives possible.
Most of them could never have imagined that generations later somebody would be sitting at a computer, writing to an archive in another country and trying to reconstruct their lives.
But that is exactly what I am doing.
And for a little while longer, at least, someone is looking for them.
Where relevant, factual and regulatory references were checked against the sources cited in the article. AI assistance does not replace professional legal, regulatory, financial or technical advice, and the final selection, interpretation, opinions and conclusions presented here remain my own.
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