Looking at a document with fresh eyes -- #genchat homework

Hello everyone from snowy Colorado!

This weekend while my husband was at work I decided to tackle my homework assignment from Friday night's #genchat discussion.  The task was this:  go back to an old document that you thought you had all the information from and look at it again -- try to find new information that was maybe missed.  I decided to do that with the ship manifest records that I have found in regards to my husband's Foglio family (see my previous post about Antoinette Foglio).  

I pulled all the ship manifests I had that chronicled the back and forth travels of this family between the US and Italy between 1913 and 1932.  First thing I did was put them in date order.  The next thing I did was to make an Excel spreadsheet detailing all the information from these manifests -- I thought this would be the easiest way for me to see patterns and compare info from one manifest to the other.  

Then I delved into the records and looked at every line of information and that is when the magic happened!!!  The first thing was that one of the children was born in Italy and not the US as I had originally thought -- and it gave me the town he was born in.  I also found my husband's great grandmother's name which when I originally found the record, I skimmed over for whatever reason but I found it this time!  Another item I keyed in on was Immigration Visa numbers....a lead I want to follow up on and see what kind of application they had to fill out, if any, in order to obtain this.  Finally, making out the Excel spreadsheet -- while I know was probably very nerdy -- gave me a much tighter timeline of when this family unit was in the US and when they were in Italy. 

I was so excited about all these finds I did some serious happy dancing!  Of course as it seems to happen with me, I have more questions now!  I think I will be taking some serious time each time I pull out an ancestor's file to look over what I have already to see what I may have missed on the first pass.  I know not every record will yield these kind of results, but I have a feeling I will find more than not!  I hope you will take the time to look over what you have already collected!  Let me know in the comment section if you made any discoveries while looking at a document for the second time....or third......

Happy hunting!!