ROOTS & BRANCHES

I’ve known Andy Hochreiter mostly as a top-notch DNA genealogist who write a column on the subject in the Mid-Atlantic Germanic Society’s Der Kurier quarterly journal. Hochreiter has researched his own surname ancestry well into Germany but was interested in a Georg Hochreitter who arrived in Philadelphia aboard the ship John and Elizabeth in November …

The first mass migration of German-speaking people to America consisted of 847 families arriving in New York in 1710. For more than half a century, Henry Z “Hank” Jones Jr. has been their faithful chronicler, to the point that many of us simply call that migration “the Hank Jones Germans.” He wrote the two-volume set …

Years and years ago, prowling around the trunks in the attic of what was then my parents’ home—now my home and this year celebrating my family’s full century in the house!—I found a pair of what I’d call “cameo photos.” They were of an older man and woman and bore the same stamp on their …

Over the years, my tastes in alcohol have made the rounds from beer to wine to occasional mixed drinks. But I’ve never been a whiskey guy, which is probably why there’s a bottle of Maker’s Mark bourbon whiskey of unknown vintage on the top shelf in the home I inherited from my parents. We’ll come …

As studious readers of this column know, my first career was as a newspaper copy editor. Truth be known, I’d been a reporter on my college newspaper and a reporting intern for the summer of between my sophomore and junior years of college. But when I interned on the copy desk between my junior and …

For a decade, Genealogical Publishing Company has printed laminated, four-page primers in a series called “Genealogy at a glance,” many written by leading researchers about topics for which their expertise is well known. Truthfully, some of these “quick sheets”—topics of which range from all sorts of ethnic genealogy to repositories to particular records groups—are better …

Last week’s “Roots & Branches” column covered some best practices for recording the place names of ancestral events. The nut of it all is that it’s often wise to record place names as they were when the event being recorded occurred, with a parenthetical addendum showing the present-day identification of the place. It was noted …

Names of individuals—especially surnames—are a genealogist’s “stock in trade.” Well, if they are the “inventory” of family history, then you might say that place names are the “packaging” of that stock we work with in doing our pedigrees (Likely in some future column I’ll get into how the times and eras of our ancestors are …

My frequent correspondent Eric “Rick” Bender always has great comments and ideas from his own research. But now he’s expanded his market by encouraging a friend to share a tale that could be titled “you never know what you’ll find in a newspaper.” The friend is Susan Brandt Graham of Albuquerque, N.M., and she shared …

When you’re a genealogist, it can be said that you have an affection for cemeteries that others may find to be a bit off. I’ll take my lumps on that score. I found cemeteries to be fascinating even before I was a genealogist. In part that was because growing up I lived within walking distance …

Correspondence between average people is one of the backbones of social history, but it’s often the case that such letters are not preserved or stay in private hands and not available for researchers. At least as far as “Second Wave” German immigrants are concerned, there’s a great movement afoot called “German Heritage in Letters,” which …

Another “Roots & Branches” column on newspapers? Yes, another column on newspapers! That’s because I recently learned about a new project from the folks who run Chronicling America, a leading website with free, searchable scans of millions of pages from historical newspapers. A joint effort of the Library of Congress and the National Endowment for …

My high school classmate Pete Engel is an absolute wizard when it comes to things mechanical, especially car engines. As a matter of fact, he occasionally posts photos on Facebook of the screwy situations he runs into fixing vehicles that have obviously neglected by their owners. Well, I probably should place an asterisk next to …

I enjoy getting genealogy questions. As you might think is natural, I enjoy them more when I know the answer … and a lot of times knowing the answer is dependent on having a fairly specific question being asked. One such question came from Katherine Schober, my colleague who is the expert German transcriber/translator and …

Especially since there’s still an 18th century house he built that’s still standing, my fifth-great-grandfather Conrad Beidler is one of the ancestors get quite a number of inquiries about. For instance, recently Dave Madary of Lititz, Lancaster County, reached out and wrote, “I was looking into the Beidler homestead and saw your name associated with …

It’s always enjoyable to get inquiries from longtime “Roots & Branches” readers, especially ones such as Thomas R. Liszka, an associate professor emeritus of English from Penn State Altoona. His most recently question has pointed up an anomaly of U.S. naturalization history that’s worth sharing. “I just ran across an anomaly,” Liszka related. “My great-aunt …

I celebrated a major find in last week’s “Roots & Branches” column that came courtesy of a newspaper obituary pinpointing the burial place of Lebanon County immigrant Johann Daub. This was pretty important to me, since when I was more of a greenhorn genealogist in the 1990s, I had merely guessed in which cemetery to …

In last week’s “Roots & Branches” column, I made another return to the Daub family, which had been a major brick wall for starting in the 1980s, not long after I had been researching my genealogy. It took a lot of indirect evidence to break the brick wall and I’m sure I’m neither the first …

I don’t think there’s any genealogist who doesn’t like solving a mystery regarding an ancestor. Take Mimi Reed from State College. She wrote to me recently about the deposition for a Revolutionary War pension given by her George Fister, which mentioned guard duty at the Tile Church in Windsor Township, Berks. County. “I have searched …

Last week’s “Roots & Branches” column groused a bit about how information my late mother’s surname line has been mangled in American publications for more than a century. Which is a shame because the Germans have had the Hiester / Hüster line figured out well back to the 1500s, using a variety of records, some …

“But it’s better to have that recollection verified by documentary proof.” So read the coda to last week’s installment of “Roots & Branches.” And whether it was the whim of deity or pure coincidence, an example of what happens when anyone relies on less than “documentary proof” was delivered into my hands. By way of …

A photo that has come down in my family – truthfully, I believe it’s the oldest photo showing my direct-line ancestors that can be conclusively dated – was taken in 1897 and bears the title “Our Home” and the imprint of the “United States View Co.” Shown in the photo are a pair of my …

Much like just about everything else in the world, the universe of genealogy conferences has been affected by COVID-19. This past spring and now in the summer, many scheduled in-person events were cancelled entirely. But the team at the New York Genealogical and Biographical Society—called “the G&B” by those in the know—was not caught flatfooted …

Last week’s “Roots & Branches” column explored the answers to an inquiry made by Dirk Weissleder, my friend and fellow International German Genealogy Partnership board member, who was seeking systematic listings of some major U.S. record groups. Weissleder is engaged in trying to research some 40 families with his surname who came to American between …

My friend and fellow International German Genealogy Partnership board member Dirk Weissleder, a German and international family history leader, gave greetings to his American colleagues during last week’s Fourth of July holiday by posing questions on U.S. research. The nut of his inquiry was quintessentially German: asking for where and how to find systematic listings …

There’s a great Facebook group called “Berks History Buffs” that I recently joined, mostly to lurk but occasionally to weigh in on solving some interesting questions raised by those in the group. Michael Emery posted a few weeks ago seeking help. “I recently purchased this photo that was taken by Cyrus Blatt of Bernville about …

My late grandmother once left me a note that I’ll always remember. On it were three simple letters: SPS. So, of course, being young and relatively dumb, I had to ask her what that stood for. To which she said: “Self-praise stinks.” All of which is a lead-in to the fact that this “Roots & …

Last week’s “Roots & Branches” column gave a shout out to several people who went above and beyond in helping me recently. But I needed to save an entire column for Katherine Schober of SK Translations, who is an expert translator of German-language documents handwritten in the old script that was used into the 1900s. …

It’s easy to become jaundiced at the world we live in today. But I’m a firm believer that there are “angels” all around … and sometimes we don’t even have to look very hard for them. Last week the “Roots & Branches” column talked about how to most effectively research historical newspapers. Something left unmentioned …

When I was a newspaper copy editor, there was always the near instant gratification of a daily product to show what you did that evening. When I became an author, though I tried to write for the ages—and the “lead time” was, of course, measured in months and years rather than days—I realized that like …

A well-known designation for people who came of age during World War I is the “Lost Generation,” for whom the catastrophe of that globe-spanning conflict left their spirits stripped of the 19th century’s credo of never-ending progress. A group of American expatriate writers living in Paris during the 1920s was looked upon as the epitome …

 A couple of months ago “Roots & Branches” commented on the “easy come, easy go” aspect of genealogy conferences in the midst of a pandemic. In addition to all the dislocation caused by the Coronavirus, it has been a silver lining to see genealogy groups, both big and small, rise to the occasion of bringing …

You never know what rabbit holes you’re going to fall down into when you do genealogy. Last summer I finally joined the “DNA generation” of genealogists by taking several tests, including the autosomal one from AncestryDNA. After a little initial playing around—including breathing a sigh of relief that a paper trial “first cousin, once removed” …

Tom Liszka, an emeritus English professor at Penn State’s Altoona campus, had some interesting questions that he posed to your “Roots & Branches” columnist about immigration during the late 19th and early 20th centuries. Now those of you who’ve been hanging around the “R&B Bar & Grille” for awhile know that I’m pretty conversant with …

I get occasional review copies of books from publishers such as F. Edward Wright’s Heritage Books imprint, which includes a large catalog of church and vital records. One of the more recent efforts, Early Church Records of Dauphin County, Pennsylvania ($22, 140 pages), came me the other day and it seemed like a good time …

I reflected in the “Roots & Branches” column a couple of weeks ago about how the house in which I live has reached a century of family ownership. As careful readers will note, one of my most faithful correspondents is Eric “Rick” Bender of New Mexico, who has deep Pennsylvania roots but not to a …

There are times when the different parts of your genealogical life just come together. And other times when you kind of forget what you know. In a recent project on which I was working involving records from the German state of Hesse, I had a need to identify the location of particular town named Rohrbach. …

When you’re doing your best to adhere to orders to stay at home, one of thing you can do is take stock of … well, what’s at home. For me that resonates all the more since I spent more than half my life—the first 18 years and the last 16—is my present home on a …

No researcher with German-speaking ancestry is able to avoid using church records in their genealogy. And, of course, why would any want to do so, given how rich with generational information these registers of baptisms, marriages and burials tend to be? While that’s a mostly rhetorical question—it does have the practical answer that some language …

I’ve attended nearly all the annual National Genealogical Society conferences over the last 20 years. A fixture, a “North Star” if you will, of those conferences—someone who was already a legendary figure when I started going to them—was Robert D. “Bob” McLaren, who passed away recently There are some folks who “play dress up” for …

I generally write “Roots & Branches” about one week ahead of when it “goes live,” so there have been rare instances in which it has become outdated during that lag time. Likely you know where I’m going with this. Like just about everything else, the Coronavirus is stalking the genealogy world. Specifically, live genealogy events …

I consider it to be one of the perks of being a columnist—in addition to this weekly “Roots & Branches” column I also have different bimonthly column in German Life magazine—to receive mail, now mostly electronic but occasionally through the post office, from readers. And as careful readers of this and the magazine column know, …

For some 40 years, possibly the annual biggest spring date on the Central Pennsylvania genealogy calendar was the Lancaster Family History Conference. This year, that event has been rebooted as “Family History Heyday” from 8:30 a.m. to 4:30 p.m. May 16, sponsored by and to be held at the Lancaster Mennonite Historical Society, 2215 Millstream …

There are sometimes when I get a real kick out of how items end up being displayed on my Facebook feed. Like when there are consecutive comments from a high school friend, a colleague from a former job, a college buddy, and then a genealogy acquaintance … people who’ve never met in the real world …

When it comes finding precise background information about German-speaking genealogy in any of Earth’s far-flung places, there’s one book I know to pull from my shelves to help me. As I remarked in the tail end of last week’s “Roots & Branches” column, this installment of what constitutes a “core collection” of Pennsylvania German genealogy …

A couple of weeks ago “Roots & Branches” examined the legacy of Annette K. Burgert, an expert at finding the European villages of origin for Pennsylvania German immigrants. Today, as we continue to work our way through what constitutes a “core collection” of Pennsylvania German genealogy resources, it’s time to talk about an expert documenting …

I’ve heard of 24-hour races before. Two prominent ones are held in Le Mans, France, and Daytona, Florida. But I’ve never heard of a 24-hour endurance marathon in genealogy lecturing. Until now! But that’s what by MyHeritage and Legacy Family Tree Webinars have whipped up with their free “24-Hour Genealogy Webinar Marathon” coming up next …

As “Roots & Branches” continues to work its way through what constitutes a “core collection” of Pennsylvania German genealogy resources, it was promised that the next column would feature another giant in the field who is like a real-life water dowser for finding the European villages of origin for immigrants. This “village finder” is Annette …

When I last wrote a “Roots & Branches” column about this “core collection” of German genealogy resources, I used the word “titan” for Roger P. Minert in a nod to his lifetime of work adding to the field. What I realized now, with at least a half a dozen or so installments to go in …

Michael John Neill and I met some years ago when we were both serving on the board of the now-defunct Federation of Genealogical Societies, the defunctness of which should be a reflection of neither of us. We became Facebook Friends and seem to have a similar sense of humor and I guess because I hit …

As “Roots & Branches” has taken a sporadic look at what to include in a “core collection” of German genealogy resources, there’s one author I’ve been dying to include. And that would be Henry Z “Hank” Jones, the child actor who got interested in genealogy at the age of 8 and turned it into a …

One of my current genealogy lecture offerings is titled “Online German Church Registers, Duplicates and Substitutes.” The presentation is equal parts giving a rundown the burgeoning number of German church records that can be found on the internet and delineating the different iterations of those records and why that matters. It’s that latter delineation—which applies …