How I Work

By Daniel Tills, founder of YpsiRoots

Genealogy research sounds simple. Find a name, find a date, build a tree. But the reality — at least the way I do it — is something quite different.

I am based in Castelbuono, in the Madonie mountains of northern Sicily. This is not a detail. This is everything.

In the cemetery

Castelbuono cemetery is one of my most important research tools — and one of the most complex. With at least twelve avenues of congregation chapels, each containing hundreds of lapidi stacked floor to ceiling, a single visit can take an entire day and still only scratch the surface.

I work methodically. Avenue by avenue. Chapel by chapel. My eyes scan up and down each wall, column by column, looking for names to jump out at me. There is no shortcut. The cemetery office cannot tell me where a specific family is buried — that knowledge lives only in the walls themselves, and in the hours I spend with them.

The private family chapels are easier — if the surname above the door is wrong, I move on. If it's right, I step inside and photograph everything. Some private chapels are locked with padlocks owned by living descendants — another avenue of research, another conversation to be had.But it's the congregation chapels that hold the greatest secrets. Hundreds of names. Centuries of families. Photographs of the deceased mounted on enamel plates — sometimes the only surviving image of a person who lived and died here long before cameras were commonplace.

Below the surface

Beneath many chapels lie underground ossuaries — where older remains have been moved over the decades to make room for new arrivals. These spaces are rarely accessible. The conditions are difficult. The inscriptions are often deteriorating, letters lost to damp and the passage of time.

But whenever an opportunity presents itself — a trapdoor left open, a caretaker willing to help — I go down. Because the names down there may never see the light of day again. And someone's ancestor deserves better than that.

Beyond Castelbuono

My research extends across the Madonie mountains and beyond — to San Mauro Castelverde, Petralia Soprana, Petralia Sottana, Gangi, Geraci, Pollina and further still. Each town has its own cemetery, its own archive, its own stories. I have spent full days driving across Sicily to photograph a single cemetery, searching for a single family.

Online research

When I am not in the field, I am at my desk — working through thousands of digitised civil records on Antenati, cross-referencing with Ancestry, FamilySearch, MyHeritage, Newspapers.com and a growing network of specialist sources. I hold professional subscriptions to the tools that matter.

But the records I find online are only half the picture. The other half lives in the cemeteries, the churches, the archives and the streets of these ancient Sicilian towns. That is where I work. That is what I bring to every case.