ROOTS & BRANCHES

What interests you the most about your ancestors? Is it simply just that they are your ancestors? Or does it go to something deeper than that? And if it does go deeper than that, well, in what directions does that depth of research take you? What about the ages at which your ancestors died? I …

For a long time my umbilical line—that is, the bottom line of the pedigree chart, tracing the mother’s mother’s mother’s, etc., line—was stuck on a third-great-grandmother who married a Miller, one of the most common surnames, even with the geographic area narrowed down to the Tulpehocken region of Berks County. My friend and correspondent Brian …

Due to a quirk of the calendar, Memorial Day weekend comes a little early this year. Are you ready, genealogists? While technically Memorial Day was specifically designed to remember those who’ve died while in the U.S. Armed Forces, long-time readers of “Roots & Branches” know that I’ve always taken a more expansive view of the …

I recall in my days as a beginning genealogist some decades ago that family history books—often just dry listings of names, dates, and occasional locations—would frequently punctuate a person’s individual entry in the book as “N/I.” “N//I” meant “no issue.” Which is a terse but somewhat fancier way of essentially saying, “This person has no …