ROOTS & BRANCHES

It was about two-and-a-half years ago that I became interim executive director for Genealogical Society of Pennsylvania. There was a familiarity to the territory. I had been GSP’s executive director for four years in the early 2000s. Earlier this month, I finished that “interim-cy” and have moved back to being a freelance genealogical writer, researcher, …

A couple of year ago I had the honor of being the guest speaker for the 2022 Dillman Genealogical Conference and was impressed by the sponsoring organization, the Dillman Family Association. It was one of the relatively few instances in which I’ve given in-person presentations since the beginning of the COVID-19 pandemic, and maybe that’s …

Regina Kelly of Plymouth Meeting, Pennsylvania, didn’t know she was going to be tipping me off to a new way of looking for German records on the mammoth genealogy website FamilySearch.org. Kelly was using Genealogical Society of Pennsylvania’s FamilySearch Affiliate Library to access some records she couldn’t get from her home computer desktop (due to …

What’s a “Hep Cat?” That was the questions posed in comments on my Facebook feed after the Ohio Genealogical Society conference dubbed as such in promoting its upcoming annual event, which has been a consistent spring gathering for decades. Truthfully, I was a little late to the party, only becoming a speaker for the first …

I’ve spent the last couple of “Roots & Branches” columns talking about an open records lawsuit and I understand that some probably have been left with the impression that I’m a curmudgeon who’s in favor of keeping records from genealogists. Well, I won’t dispute the curmudgeon part. But, no, I’m not “in favor” of closed …

I’m from a generation that doesn’t think “move fast and break things” is the coolest slogan ever created. Last week’s “Roots & Branches” gave some of my thoughts about a suit involving New York professional genealogist Alec Ferretti, a director at “Reclaim the Records,” a group that specializes in suing government entities to force access …

It’s rare that genealogy makes newspaper headlines but the second half of December is usually a “slow news cycle” so I guess it’s not surprising that an article appeared on Christmas Day with a blaring click-bait title of “Ancestry.com says it owns copies of PA historical records.” That misstated the issue a bit—copies of the …

Off and on for more than a decade, I served on Pennsylvania’s State Historic Records Advisory Board or SHRAB and every few years we’d be briefed on plans for a new building to house the State Archives. But like the Easter Bunny and Santa Claus, those plans would get to a certain point and then …

I’ve probably not referenced my favorite genealogy book nearly enough in this column.And that’s probably because, technically speaking, late Charles H. Glatfelter’s 1980 book on the Lutheran and Reformed ministers and churches of the 18th century is not a genealogy book.Titled in full Pastors and People: German Lutheran and Reformed Churches in the Pennsylvania Field, …

Just a couple of weeks ago “Roots & Branches” shared some musings from relative genealogical newbie Laura Wolf. She’s been perusing the older columns and as someone with a background in social science research, she has loads of questions that I wish more budding family historians would ask (like how to better engage students and …