I am going to post things that I have found to be helpful to me as I started out, and hopefully you will benefit from the information too. Frankly, I would have loved to have had all this in one place 8 years ago!

I welcome any additions to this information that you may want to share.

I find that using a computer program to store your data is indispensible. You will be amazed at how fast you accumulate relatives you never knew about - even without winning the lottery!

Being somewhat thrifty, I chose to use Personal Ancestry File which is FREE from the LDS website www.familysearch.com. I have found it to be very good at organizing data, and very user friendly. You will have to find one that works for you.

My Rant: I do not patronize companies that profit off the work of casual researchers such as myself. (Broderbund, the publisher of Family Tree Maker does this.) I very much dislike finding my own personal information being sold on CDs and posted on websites of unknown people. Researchers who purchase these CDs often assume that everything on these discs is correct, which it is not, and publish the information they obain, further spreading misleading information. OK, I am climbing off the proverbial soapbox now.

I did not get too far into my research when I discovered that it would be a lot easier to divide my research data to keep the file sizes down. I have our maternal side and paternal side in separate files. To divide any further than that may cause a problem when you merge the files in the final product, especially if you have relatives intermarrying. Again, you decide what works for you. I divided my files when I had about 600 individuals, and now that I have 3000+, I am really glad I chose to do so.

My biggest mistake was not keeping good records of my sources. In the beginning, I thought, "I'll remember where this came from." WRONG! A few years have since passed, and now I can't remember what was on tonight's dinner plate, much less from which parish I obtained a particular record back in 1999. I have gotten better about detailing EXACTLY where a piece of information came from, i.e., stating that an age of a person was derived from the obituary of "John Doe" - and where this obit is stored in my files. I cannot stress the importance of these details enough!

Speaking of files - how does paper manage to accumulate like this! I keep copies of everything I find, if possible, to verify and double-check - there are many reasons to do so. I have a huge collection of sacramental records from various parishes in St. Louis. I am constantly amazed at how much I missed the first 30 or so times I looked at them. As I find new branches of the family, I go back to the records and always will find several things to add to my data file. Also, I find it is easier to copy the page and read it later than to try to try to read on the microfilm reader for hours on end. Yes, this does incur some expense, but in the long run, it is worth it. You save your eyesight!

Storage of these papers is another issue. For me, it is easiest to keep sacramental records organized by type: baptism, marriage, death, etc. I have several 3" three ring binders, and each is dedicated to a particular type of record. Each book's pages are numbered separately, and the page number of a particular record is recorded in the source field for the particular data. So, if I am looking for a marriage record of a particular person, the marriage field will indicate on which page in the marriage book I will find it the record. The page numbers are not important, there is no real order to the records, I just number them as I obtain them. I have been in the process of indexing these for a long time - and it will be an ongoing process.

Articles, pictures and other things that reference one particular person are filed in a drawer with one or more folders for each surname in my database. People on whom I have located a lot of information and/or pictures have their own folders. The folders are color coded by family lines - I have 8 separate colors of folders, 4 colors for the maternal side and 4 for the paternal side, so that each of our grandparents' family data would be stored in the same color folders. This might be taking it to an extreme, but the visual clue of color helps when you are dealing with several hundred folders.

This system has worked for me so far - and would work better if I would file things on a regular basis. Letting the paper pile up makes the task overwhelming! This is my New Year's resolution every year, and it hasn't happened yet!

Again, these are my methods - madness included! Develop your own as you go along.

The Immigrants from Cuggiono and other nearby villages

Researching Cuggionesi in St. Louis

Now, let's get to researching our Cuggiono families.

One of my first questions was "Why did these people leave Italy?" I have been told that the Cuggionesi people left Italy because they were hungry. Most of them were laborers in farms or other businesses owned by someone else, and there was no way to better their family situation. They heard that in America, there were opportunities galore and that a person could actually own their own home!

So, they saved their meager earnings and bought a ticket on a ship. The ship lines caught wind that there were many Italians leaving the area, and "set up shop" in Cuggiono. Often, the person selling the ticket to a emigrant would determine whether the person went to the North America or to South America, usually Buenos Aires.

The greatest majority of the Cuggionesi entered the US through either Castle Garden or Ellis Island and initially traveled in the 1880-1925 time frame. Often, the men would come first and secure employment, and then send for the wife and children, if he had left them behind. Single men were often part of an arranged marriage that was "concocted" back in Italy by the families, and his wife would just show up here!

Now that we have them "crossing the pond", let's touch on where they settled. The largest concentrations of Cuggionesi could be found in St. Louis, Missouri, Herrin, Illinois, and Detroit, Michigan. Other areas that had a good number were Westville IL, Joliet IL, eastern Canada, Minnesota and Wisconsin, and I would guess that some probably stayed in New York too. I know that there are other areas, but these are the ones that come to mind, and are logical to take a look at when trying to research your family.

My research has been primarily in St. Louis as this is where the family I am researching settled. As such, I will build the first researching page for St. Louis. Much of it can be adapted to researching in other cities with minimal effort.