ROOTS & BRANCHES

It was some six years ago when “Roots & Branches” reader and adoptee Holly McGroarty of Clearfield was first looking around for information on her birth family. With the deaths of her adopted mother and stepfather in the last couple of years, McGroarty’s interested in finding out more on her birth Elizabeth Hull, who was …

One of the best things a genealogy speaker can do is listen. Especially when thinking about topics for the future. And especially in our current world in which much family history programming is delivered in a virtual environment, it pays to the fully engaged with what is being said. I found this to be the …

S. Nicholas “Nic” Stoltzfus has authored an inviting family history titled German Lutherans to Pennsylvania Amish: The Stoltzfus Family Story (Morgantown, PA: Masthof Press, 2019; order from Masthof.com). The family’s story is a compelling one. While they came to America as persecuted Amish headed by immigrant Nicholas Stoltzfus, just a few decades deep in Europe …

It’s not uncommon that I find ideas for columns either at or through publications of the Lebanon County Historical Society. And that’s only somewhat fitting because that society’s archives is the first place I researched when I started doing genealogy back in the mid-1980s. At the time, I lived in Harrisburg and had off Sundays …