ROOTS & BRANCHES

“Now paging number one thousand four hundred.”

Yes, this “Roots & Branches” column is No. 1400 since it debuted in the fall of 1998 as a weekly feature in the then-daily newspaper, The Patriot-News of Harrisburg, PA.

Hard to believe that 27 years later, I’m still typing out a column on genealogy every week.

Oh, the newspapers in which it appears have changed. After the Patriot-News unceremoniously cancelled the column in 2003, it was picked up by the Lebanon Daily News and the Altoona Mirror. It remains a weekend feature of the latter newspaper to this day.

Over the years, I’ve published reviews of new books and websites; previewed conferences; and highlighted many readers’ family history triumphs.

When the first column was printed, the Internet was just gaining speed as a genealogy tool. The website FamilySearch.org was debuted by the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints soon after “Roots & Branches” was started and, of course, became a game-changer.

The advent of genetic genealogy, which tends to dominate the conversation on family history today, was barely under way (I recall attending a lecture on DNA at a conference in 2000—when the practical application for genealogy was strictly limited to the Y and mitochondrial lines!—and thinking, “this is a nice novelty” … I may have understated that a bit!).

It was about a year later that I became executive director of the Genealogical Society of Pennsylvania, heralding my transition from being a full-time journalist to a genealogy professional.

That professional life has taken a number of paths. I’ve authored commercially published books; lectured around the country; worked as an employee for the globe-spanning research-for-hire firm Legacy Tree Genealogists; edited the quarterly Der Kurier for the Mid-Atlantic Germanic Society; and written for both scholarly journals and pop genealogy magazines. I became a German Life magazine columnist on family research and have kept that gig, too.

Through it all, probably my most faithful reader has been Eric “Ric” Bender of New Mexico, who has been a muse of sorts to me—giving me great feedback that many of you will recognize as turning into columns with lives of their own!

One of my mentors in the genealogy world was the late Schuyler C. Brossman, whose “Our Keystone Families” column appeared for decades in the Lebanon Daily News and Press-Journal of Middletown.

In fact, it was only after his passing that I proposed to write “Roots & Branches.” I never would have—I never could have!—competed with Brossman.

I recall reading one of Brossman’s “Our Keystone Families” installments celebrating a milestone—perhaps it was 1500 columns, I’m not sure?—and recall him writing that the column would “continue as long as possible.”

Now, as get closer to such a milestone myself, I feel the same way.