ROOTS & BRANCHES

As I reported in “Roots & Branches” a few months ago, I had come back to one of my personal genealogy lines, the Rathmacher family, and thought that I’d need a trip to Salt Lake City’s FamilySearch Library to solve the brick wall I was in. The background: Some two decades ago, I had traced …

In helping an individual who had compiled a lot of information about his First Wave German immigrants from a variety of internet sites, some of them without a lot of (or no!) sourcing, I came upon a seminal example of which no iteration of a record set should be ignored—even ones that over time have …

As a boy, one of my favorite monthly magazines was the Reader’s Digest, and often there were biographical articles titled “Unforgettable [insert name of biographical subject].” Well, recently as I was waiting for a ride (that never came, as it turns out) to a restaurant, I was startled to find the obituary of my friend …

Last week’s “Roots & Branches” talked about the somewhat lost art of repository research in the days when digital is all the rage. What got me wistful was an upcoming invitation to speak at the monthly meeting of the Blair County Genealogical Society in Hollidaysburg on Oct. 15 on “Exploring Pennsylvania’s State Archives and Library.” …