ROOTS & BRANCHES

At the very beginning of my genealogical journey, I was armed with a few sketchy family trees written down by my mother and my Gramom (dad’s mother). What Gramom knew about her husband’s Beidler ancestry terminated with his grandfather Henry W. Beidler (1820–1871). When I made my first visit to the State Library of Pennsylvania, …

“But that’s a story for another column!” was what I enthused at the end of last week’s “Roots & Branches” column. That edition talked about my first foray into the reprint of Topographia Germaniae, the mid-1600s compilation of illustrations and descriptions of German towns, that I’ve recently bought.  I had used as an example of …

If you’ve been reading “Roots & Branches” the last couple of weeks, you’ll realize that the arrival of the post-Medieval gazetteer of German towns put me on a “Gruber jag” … that is, I found a couple of additional generations of my Gruber family, who came from the town of Sinsheim near Heidelberg in the …

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It’s become a truism in the Internet era that books about anything online are out of date before they’re even printed.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 …