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 …