ROOTS & BRANCHES

It’s either my blessing or my curse—or probably a bit of both!—that for reasons unknown to me that some of the genealogy topics to which I’m most attracted as a researcher are ones that don’t resonate as deeply with other family historians.

Take historical newspapers. Oh, sure, every genealogist uses them now that so many are digitized—at least to find ancestors’ obituaries. But my book The Family Tree Historical Newspapers Guide is the only one of my commercially published books no longer in print.

And then there’s church records. Perhaps its indicative of the religious atmosphere today in America—many people are extreme one way or another, either fervently religious or wanting nothing to do with religion, period—but it seems many family historians are “meh” on using religious records even though, during the last few centuries, they offer perhaps the most widespread documentation of the lives of the common people in America.

Faithful readers of “Roots & Branches” likely recall that I’m on the faculty of the course “Using U.S. Church Records for Family History” coordinated by Sunny Jane Morton in the weeklong July in-person session of the Genealogy Institute of Pittsburgh or GRIP.

Perhaps due to what I outlined above, it has stunned me that there are seats still available for this course that every genealogist needs!

I’ll be doing a session on the churches and records of the Germans in America, and one of things that I like about GRIP is that the individual presentations are 75 minutes rather than the single-hour lectures typical at conferences.

That’s because I have so many different denominations to cover as well as an extended methodology for putting together a “hit list” to make sure that researchers look at all available records—which may be found in a number of forms beyond congregational registers.

So for the many genealogists with German ancestry, this lecture will introduce them to new material, but there are loads of other church record topics to be taught by Morton herself as well as her all-star team that includes such heavy-hitters as Deborah Abbott and Judy G. Russell.

In addition to presenting my session, I’m looking forward to auditing the entire course since many of the other topics—everything from religious law and case studies—will help me with my research going forward.

That’s because even those ancestors who might not have been religious at all will likely be mentioned. “Even if they didn’t attend regularly, or didn’t believe everything that was preached, their names and genealogical details may still appear in the church’s records,” Morton noted.

 The weeklong course will also include learning to write with a fountain pen to appreciate the handwritten records or previous centuries; a record scavenger hunt; and even a field trip to a local church archive!

“Using U.S. Church Records for Family History” runs from July 14–19 at LaRoche College north of Pittsburgh. Registration for GRIP is available at the URL, https://grip.ngsgenealogy.org/