ROOTS & BRANCHES

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 …