ROOTS & BRANCHES

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 …