ROOTS & BRANCHES

In a world that proves more and more quickly the truth of the cliché “the only constant is change,” it’s needed to check in again and again about the websites and methods recommend for genealogists to use. An outfit I had not checked in with for sometime is the USGenWeb project. This project, started as …

My four-great-grandfather Peter Beidler died in his 30s of consumption. I knew his widow Barbara (maiden name Spohn) had married a George Merkel after Peter’s death. But what about the rest of Barbara’s life? For that I had no clue – until now. That’s because genealogical information about our ancestors sometimes comes to us in …

It wasn’t too many years after I began doing genealogy that the State Library of Pennsylvania endured some budget cuts and no longer had paid staff assigned to proctor its huge Genealogy and Local History collection. That was in the late 1980s and a patron named Ray Schott, a native of Pittsburgh who was retired …

I’m going to put my conflict of interest right out from the get-go on this one. I’ve known Shamele Jordon for going on 20 years. She’s a good friend and a better genealogist who specializes in technology and African-American topics. So, when I heard her kicking around the idea of doing a television program – …

In my 30 years-plus of doing genealogy, I always felt that Friedrich Winter or Winder of Tulpehocken Township, Berks County, was one of my best documented ancestors. I had his will – in which he gives his oldest son a “birthright” bequest of “my good wagon,” the equivalent of the family car in 1786. His …

A couple of weeks ago FamilySearch.org, the world’s largest free family history site, announced that use of many of its online collections will require a sign on. The genealogical world greeted the news with a collective sigh … with some putting an extra helping of “sturm und drang” into that sigh. As for me, I …

One of the most profound “good news, bad news” situations of German genealogy is finding an American record that mention a village of origin in the old country. It’s good news, of course, because so many people searching German roots are stuck with documents that say only “Germany” or the only slightly more helpful “Prussia.” …

If you’re not familiar with faithful “Roots & Branches” reader Eric “Rick” Bender from New Mexico, well, then you’re obviously not a faithful “Roots & Branches” reader. Bender was reacting to the column a couple of weeks ago in which I talked about my first trip to the Family History Library in Salt Lake City. …

I’ll be reporting on a number of things from my recent trip to Salt Lake City (via a wonderful weekend of lecturing in Denver, Colorado) in the next few weeks’ worth of “Roots & Branches” columns. There’ll be an update on the digitization status of the Family History Library’s huge cache of microfilmed records from …

SALT LAKE CITY – As someone who was a first-career journalist (and an “old school” journalist at that!), I do love the occasional times I can put a dateline on a “Roots & Branches” column. I’m not quite old school enough to have worked when datelines actually had dates (the original usage, in the days …

Jim Snyder of Hollidaysburg has been helping locate Blair County cemeteries for years as part of the county genealogical society’s Grave Name and Location Project. One of the saddest situations he has encountered is that of the Jeremiah Peck Cemetery in Taylor Township. Unfortunately, where the Peck cemetery was supposed to be, his team found …

I mentioned in passing a month ago in this column the wonderful presentation that Patrick Donmoyer, director of the Pennsylvania German Cultural Heritage Center, made at a genealogy conference at Kutztown University. The lecture was centered upon the evolution and meaning of German-language Bibles published in Europe and America and had some interesting takeaways for …

A few years ago, I received an e-mail from an author named Ann Marie Ackermann who was living in Germany and needed some research done at the Pennsylvania State Archives. The assignment was intriguing: Gottlob Rueb, the man for whom she was searching, had killed the mayor of a town in southern Germany before fleeing …

There are times in a genealogist’s life when you may well feel like you are not only documenting past ancestors but find yourself in “the history” of others in your family. I encountered this recently when I received a welcome e-mail from my cousin Ron Machmer. Of course, I’ve written a bit on the Machmers …

The generations living today are undoubtedly the most documented people “in” history. Well, at least for the moment, but not necessarily “for” history. Of course, I’m thinking about the ubiquitous “lunch shots” posted on Facebook but, seriously, is there anyone who doesn’t have a question they’d like to ask of a deceased friend or relative? …

A few years into my genealogical journey that began 30-something years ago, I had the false confidence of the average 20-something of thinking that I probably had a pretty handle on genealogical and historical knowledge. It’s only now from my 50-something perspective that I finally feel as if I’m getting a better handle on how …

This is the 1,000th weekly “Roots & Branches” column. If you do the math, you’ll figure out that this also means the column is entering its 20th years of publication in various newspapers. That 20-years mark brought to mind a 2013 article from the online magazine The Verge that was evocatively titled “Who am I? …

I’ve heard folkways involving what you eat called “foodways.” And as someone who definitely lives by my stomach, the foodways of my youth take on some extra importance. Of course, whee I talk about “the food of my youth,” the first thing that should be said is that I was widely said to be “sneaky,” …

You know you’re due for another one of those feelings of “how long you’ve been doing this” when seeing two articles about “crowd-sourced” indexing appear in one edition of the Eastman’s Online Genealogy Newsletter hits you with a wave of nostalgia. That’s because I remember genealogy indexing before crowd sourcing. Before computers, even. I remember …

OK, so I’ll admit that I sometimes get weary of the seemingly infinite designations such as French Fries Day or Quilt Week or Fruit Fly Awareness Month. Now, no offense is intended for the many more serious designations, and I do have to say that a recent electronic newsletter from the folks at Just a …

The global corporate genealogy wars became quite interesting earlier this month. MyHeritage, the Israel-based subscription site whose marquee items are its large number of worldwide family trees posts by users and its various search trademarks, bought Millennia Corporation, the makers of the popular Legacy Family Tree genealogy desktop software and well-attended genealogy webinar platform, Legacy …

As I write this, the first International German Genealogy Conference has just finished its run near Minneapolis. As you read it, the conference still will be a warm memory in the hearts of its nearly 700 participants, who came from four continents to attend the initial get-together. The conference was the first big project to …

Combining genealogy and DNA has been on an increasingly logarithmic path in the last 15 years or so. I have been mostly an outside observer to whole technology march (not just in genealogy – I’m pretty scrupulous about making sure my iPhone is at least one version – and maybe two! – behind the latest …

The symbolism often found engraved on tombstones – as well as their symbolic value as perhaps the closest “representation” of an ancestor before photography – has long endeared genealogists to the markers and graveyards. So it’s fitting that the upcoming “Genealogy Conference 2017” sponsored by Kutztown University’s Pennsylvania German Cultural Heritage Center has as its …

There’s something about old books with handwritten information in them that makes a genealogist’s ears prick up and take notice. Recently an e-mail came in to your “Roots & Branches” columnist from the Palatines to America, an organization oriented toward German genealogy, about how to market a copy of the Martyrs Mirror dating to 1814. …

Thomas Jay Kemp has had a varied career in the larger genealogical world, especially in the library portion of that world. He’s been in charge of the two largest genealogical libraries in the Northeast – the New England Historic Genealogical Society and the Historical Society of Pennsylvania – before becoming director of genealogy products at …

When the announcement hit the “social media-sphere” a week ago that FamilySearch was discontinuing its longtime service of providing rentals of the microfilms from its huge collection of worldwide records, my first reaction was one of nostalgia. Just a few years after I began researching my genealogy in the mid-1980s, I encountered a brick wall …

Memories are strange things. I’m at the “fifty-something” time of life when, on an increasingly basis, I often cannot quite recall exactly when something in the past happened unless I’m able to bracket it between two other dates … which triples the effort, if you get my drift (Since to figure out those bracketing dates, …

As I’ve spent a lot of time during the last year researching and writing a book about the uses of historical newspapers, I’ve come to a conclusion about what I call the most serious impediment to research about the past – “presentism.” I define “presentism” as believing (often unconsciously) that things in the past always …

Once again, I continue the tradition of using a phrase of a onetime colleague of mine, Birmingham Post-Herald Sports Editor Bill Lumpkin, when I have a bunch of ideas each worthy of a few paragraphs but not of a column. So, as I do a couple times a year in “Roots & Branches,” it’s a …

When it comes to popular music, I don’t think there’s anyone who can get an “earworm” faster than me. And that’s probably the whole secret behind the whole success of pop – the way it sticks with you, even when maybe you’d rather it not. But one of the things I treasure about my girlfriend …

There are a lot of “small world” moments in genealogy and the 38th annual Lancaster Family History Conference offered one of those moments. Among the sessions I was involved with at the conference was German cursive script workshop, one of the participants in which was Pernell Staudt, whose surname immediately had my attention. That’s because …

Give me a choice between text and a live phone call, I’ll text you every time since a text you can just send – whereas a call can often lead to “phone tag,” If you give me a choice between text and e-mail, I’ll e-mail because I learned the “home keys” many years ago and …

There’s been no more faithful reader of “Roots & Branches” than Eric “Rick” Bender, now of New Mexico but with long Pennsylvania roots. And now he’s turned to DNA to try and disentangle – and maybe even extend – those roots. Bender had tested with Family Tree DNA some years ago (in what must seem …

Occasionally when people find out that I’m a hard-core genealogist, they ask something along the lines of “So what’s more fun about it – the finding? or the searching?” (Well, at least this used to be a very popular question – now the response I get is often an observation about them having taken a …

“Distance programming,” usually called webinars in the genealogy world, has been a real growth in genealogy education during the last decade or so. For many local, regional and state genealogical societies, they have been a way to cut the costs of genealogical programming (since they don’t have to fly in, feed and lodge the webinar …

Last week’s “Roots & Branches” column talked about using German phonetics as a way to overcome spelling changes based on those phonetics. I also introduced my modest attempt at helping researchers diagram the gamut of surname spelling variations with the “phonetischen Namenkarte” or pNK for short. This same diagramming aid (which, as noted last week, …

I’ve touched on the importance of staying flexible about the spelling variants of surnames numerous times in lectures and in “Roots & Branches” installments over the years. I’m to the point that I can smile weakly when someone recounts to me family traditions such as “the two brothers had a disagreement and each decided to …

I wrote a column just a couple of months ago about the International Germanic Genealogy Conference that will make Minnesota the center of the German genealogical world at the end of July. The conference is running for a total of four days, with the leadership day scheduled for July 27 and presentations / vendors from …

A couple of weeks ago, your “Roots & Branches” columnist tackled the explosion of DNA testing in genealogy with the caveat that I know “only enough about DNA and genealogy to be very dangerous.” You can continue to attach that caveat to anything I write about DNA, but I feel compelled to write about it …

As regular readers undoubtedly have realized, there are times when your “Roots & Branches” columnist comes up with some definitive answers to the great genealogical questions of the day. Or at least thinks he does. But then there are other times that what’s offered by the column is far more modest. This is one of …

In courtrooms across the country, they call it the “CSI effect,” after the popular “Crime Scene Investigation” franchise of TV shows that create the impression that for every crime there is scads of forensic evidence waiting to be analyzed by cutting-edge scientific tools. In the family history world, it’s the “DNA effect” and it shows …

“Roots & Branches” rarely wades into political waters and, actually, even though the column will mention some folks in government, it’s merely for example and not meant as political. When Housing and Urban Development Secretary Ben Carson called African-Americans brought in bondage to North America “immigrants” with hopes and dreams. Now, technically, “immigrant” is defined …

Just about any time to you want to find an appropriately cynical quote about something that has gone awry, the late H.L. Mencken will come to your rescue. In the case of what genealogists call the Social Security Death Index (but to its producer, the Social Security Administration, is known as the “Death Master File,” …

Coming up in less than a month will be a conference catering to those with German ancestors in Maryland. That’s because the Mid-Atlantic German Society’s spring conference will feature Malissa Ruffner and Michael G. McCormick from 8:30 a.m. to 4:30 p.m. March 18 at the Double Tree by Hilton in Laurel, Maryland. Ruffner worked as …

It’ll be just few months until “Roots & Branches” celebrates weekly column No. 1,000 and next year will mark 20 years of existence. I’ll save a bunch of nostalgia about the column itself for when it passes those milestones in due time. But right now I’m struck by the fact that – while the column …

One of the things that gets a genealogist through wintertime is thinking about spring conferences. Just a few weeks away is a free conference sponsored by the Friends of the Delaware Archives titled “Beyond Bare Bones, Building Your Skills” and featuring for presentations by Thomas W. Jones on March 4 at the Delaware Public Archives, …

There are a bunch of things in today’s world that seem to shrink – how far a dollar goes or that most elusive of concepts known as “spare time.” But this installment of “Roots & Branches” is all about expansions. In a few columns last year, we’ve talked about the partnership organization putting together a …

I first encountered Dr. Jim Tibbitts some 25 years ago when he was the town doctor (charging something ridiculously old fashioned like $8 for an office visit) in Jonestown, where I lived at the time. Fast forward the quarter century and “Doc” is a widower and living in Cornwall Manor, getting along as comfortably as …

Dick Eastman has become one of the leading lights of the world’s genealogy scene, in no short measure because of his “Eastman’s Online Genealogy Newsletter.” The electronic newsletter – a free blog published daily and also collected as a “Plus Edition” for a nominal subscription price – recently celebrated its 21st birthday. Eastman notes that …

It was my dad, the late Richard L. Beidler, who first told me about the vigilante in the family. Of course, I’m using the phrase “in the family” extremely loosely. As I later learned from a long out-of-print book titled X. Beidler: Vigilante, the Montana pioneer John X. Beidler stated he was born in Mount …

“Roots & Branches” gave a shout-out to the late Floyd Hoenstine, one of the giants of Pennsylvania genealogy of the 20th century. Hoenstine (1895-1990) had been brought to mind when I went to a seminar at the Blair County Genealogical Society’s library, which is where his enormous rental library of genealogy books ended up some …

“This beginning is made in the name of the Lord.” So begins the translation of family information recorded by hand in a German prayer book by members of the Daniel Hiester family, collateral ancestors of my mother Mildred Hiester Beidler. In last week’s “Roots & Branches” column, I talked about how this translation was included …