ROOTS & BRANCHES

Who doesn’t like a birthday? OK, I’ll admit as the number of my birthdays has stacked up into a seventh decade, I get a little bit less enamored with all-out celebrations. But when it comes to institutions, I think we’d all agree that “the more, the merrier” is a great way of looking at it. …

Last week’s “Roots & Branches” column focused on so-called “union churches.” I defined this phenomenon as “Two or more congregations of different religious denominations sharing ownership of a church building.” It was often found in the more rural areas of the mid-Atlantic among the mainstream Lutheran and Reformed denominations of the German-speaking people. While these …

There are few terms applicable to Pennsylvania German genealogy that tend to confuse beginner family historians as much as “union churches.” For example: “What’s that—a church that favored the North in the Civil War?” Well, no. My best shot at a definition would be “Two or more congregations of different religious denominations sharing ownership of …

When I recently researched and recorded a presentation on the 1798 U.S. Direct Tax, nicknamed the “Window Tax” because in part the assessment of that tax was based on glass windows in homes, it took me back to the days when I was researching the Daub family of Lebanon County. Immigrant Johan Daub lived in …