ROOTS & BRANCHES

7 June 2025 Suggested headline: Engravings bring 1600s German towns to life You never know what type of knowledge you may pick up when you take a weeklong German genealogy course at an institute. I’ve reported previously in “Roots & Branches” and German Life on different books, websites, and resources I gained from taking the …

It’s become a truism in the Internet era that books about anything online are out of date before they’re even printed. So you can understand that I’ve been itching to update my book Trace Your German Roots Online, first published in 2016, for some time now. I’ll spare you all the machinations that prevented a …

“Now paging number one thousand four hundred.” Yes, this “Roots & Branches” column is No. 1400 since it debuted in the fall of 1998 as a weekly feature in the then-daily newspaper, The Patriot-News of Harrisburg, PA. Hard to believe that 27 years later, I’m still typing out a column on genealogy every week. Oh, …

As someone who’s just old enough to recall when Memorial Day was on May 30, not some floating date in late May to accommodate a Monday holiday, it sure seems like the holiday is coming around way too fast this year. Since I’m one of the many genealogists who live for visiting cemeteries, placing flowers …

Every so often in my 27 years of writing “Roots & Branches” every week, I think back a man who was briefly my newspaper colleague, the late Bill Lumpkin, who was sports editor for the Birmingham Post-Herald when I was a copy editor at the paper in my first job after college. When I was …

Have I mentioned that longtime “Roots & Branches” reader (and friend) Eric “Rick” Bender lately? Well, even though this Vietnam War veteran was just back from a visit to Indochina—including Angkor Wat in Cambodia!—he kept up with his reading had something to say about the recent column on fraktur, the Pennsylvania German folk art often …

If you’re a week-in and week-out reader of “Roots & Branches,” you’ll remember the name Lisa Minardi. Minardi’s the human dynamo who has turned Historic Trappe and its Center for Pennsylvania German Studies into a major repository and events center in the borough of Trappe in Montgomery County, Pennsylvania. Minardi is the executive director of …

For a “Roots & Branches” column being published just before the current Federal income tax deadline of April 15, it seems appropriate to talk about some things I’ve learned about taxes, some of which relate to their use as genealogical records. Admittedly part of my rationale for writing the column is that in addition to …

Genealogy has been a fairly large part of my identity for the last 40 years, but I still think it’s interesting the responses I get when I introduce myself as having a business “doing genealogy; that is, family trees.” So, herewith are the top 10 replies I get to that introduction: 10. “Oh, it must …

While we’re waiting to see if March lives up to its “go out like a lamb” reputation weather-wise, there’s also one other distinction that the end of the month will have.That’s the finale of a special discount for the International German Genealogy Partnership conference near Columbus, Ohio, to be held June 12–15.If you are registering …

Whether it’s animating photos or adding search capabilities to some of its databases, worldwide genealogy subscription service MyHeritage adds a lot of sizzle to the family history world with its innovations.One they announced a month ago called Ancient Origins has caught my fancy. Well, almost.Ancient Origins is a genetic genealogy product that complements MyHeritage’s DNA …

Back in the “old days”—you know, that time pre-COVID that was 5 years ago but seems like a generation!—a multiday conference with many simultaneous tracks of lectures meant making many on-the-spot choices for which presentations to attend and which to skip. There often were audio-only recordings of the presentations, but that didn’t include the fair …

Last week’s “Roots & Branches” talked about the research I’ve done on my own Pennsylvania German ancestry thought the lens of how many were enslavers. I found three direct-line ancestors to be enslavers who were among the largest real estate owners in my pedigree and talked about the details in a presentation for Historic Trappe …

When I was a teen-ager, one of my annual “buys” as far as books was the Guinness Book of World Records. I was fascinated by the tallest, oldest, shortest, biggest—all the superlatives that the book profiled. And ever since then, my ears always prick up when I hear someone’s feat has been recognized by the …

An occasional research and lecture topic of mine for the last couple of years has been what I call “The riddle of the Pennsylvania Germans as enslavers.” It started with hearing and reading vastly different assessments that tried to quantify the involvement of Pennsylvania Germans in enslavement, and gained momentum when I gave a webinar …

My friend and fervent “Roots & Branches” reader Eric “Rick” Bender of New Mexico often has some words to say about the column. When I noted a couple of months ago that one of my New Year’s resolutions was to learn more about what ethical uses of artificial intelligence there are to help with my …

It was about three decades ago that Elisa Scalise Powell, a Certified Genealogist of some note from the Pittsburgh area, passed the good word on to me at what a great annual conference the Ohio Genealogical Society put on. She also enthused about how many folks who came to the conference had Pennsylvania ancestors. Since …

If there’s one genealogy conference that I consider to be a “can’t miss,” it’s the biennial event that was started by the International German Genealogy Partnership in 2017 and has survived and thrived through the COVID-19 pandemic and the changing world that has wrought. This year’s edition is under the auspices of the IGGP Partner …

RootsTech, sponsored by FamilySearch. Org and clearly the world’s largest genealogy gathering, will offer some 200 speakers over three days in Salt Lake City, Utah, from March 6–8. A bunch of readers are likely to see where this is going: I’ll be one of those 200 speakers at the conference—which carries the simple theme of …

If you’re a regular reader of “Roots & Branches,” you’ll likely remember my reverence for the late Corinne Earnest, who was a leading authority on the illuminated certificates, usually of baptism, known as fraktur. She also frequently hounded auctions in search of family Bibles with registers and copied the information that often was found nowhere …

One of the most time-honored genealogy activities is a group trip to a repository. And one of the best practitioners of such an activity is the guy we call “Mr. Genealogy Tip of the Day” after the blog posts he makes under that name. He’s Michael John Neill, and I might as well get my …

It was a Facebook post last month that put me on the trail of one last Christmas present to myself. The post was touting a book titled The Pursuit and it didn’t take long to realize it had been written by a distant cousin about a mutual German immigrant family—in his case, his surname line!—that …