Published September 22, 2019
| 1 Comment | Leave A ReplySince the mid-2000s, the Pennsylvania German Cultural Heritage Center on the campus of Kutztown University has had a fall genealogy conference every other year, usually featuring three or four speakers.
The edition of the conference held earlier this month deviated from pattern of the previous seven conferences in two respects.
First, the Pennsylvania Chapter of the Palatines to America was brought on as a co-sponsor, which added to the ranks of the conference attendees (including a delegation from Ohio, the home base of the Palatines group).
Second, it added “ … and Culture” to the event’s title, which in the past had been simply “Genealogy Conference.”
To be sure, previous get-together usually had a single “cultural” topic along with several speakers on “straight-on” genealogy topics such as records or immigration.
In fact, in a genealogy world in which a fair number of hobbyists are difficult to motivate beyond collecting the names and dates of ancestors, having a program filled with only cultural topics comes with a certain amount of risk, but I’ll give you my personal impressions of what made the conference a success.
The first speaker was the Rev. Edward L. Rosenberry, who spoke on “Gustav Peters and His Publishing House.” Rosenberrry is a retired Church of God pastor who has authored a two-volume work for the Pennsylvania German Society on Peters, a prominent Pennsylvania printer in the 19th century.
Among the many details I gleaned from Rosenberry’s presentation was that Peters was the first Pennsylvania German printer to use color—starting as early as the mid-1820s—on the printed baptismal certificate forms (I have one of these Peters certificates, which I had assumed had been hand colored … which is a nuance I had wrong).
On a deeply personal level, he also gave me a lead on the whereabouts of a long missing certificate for a four-great-grandfather of mine, Johannes Kremer, that was created by the notable fraktur artists the Rev. Daniel Schumacher in 1777.
The keynote speaker, Mark L. Louden, the director of the Max Kade Institute for German-American Studies at the University of Wisconsin, gave a stirring talk titled “A Sturdy Linguistic Hybrid: Pennsylvania Dutch, Present & Past.”
Among my takeaways from Louden’s presentation was that I’ve likely been selling my ancestors short by saying that they didn’t speak English. “These people were bilingual or even trilingual,” Louden said (Even though Pennsylvania Dutch might have been the primary language of the home, they would have known enough English to get by in the larger world).
Jeffrey L. Marshall, president of Heritage Conservancy in Doylestown, gave a great primer on “Historic Preservation & Property Research.”
Marshall’s lecture was a plea to go beyond just the buildings when researching property—by using a bevy of genealogical records to bring out the details about the people who populated those buildings.
All in all, a day well spent learning many of finer points.
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For Sale
The Best of "Roots & Branches", Fifth Edition published July 2017, edited by Terri J. Bridgwater.
It contains a selection of columns from Beidler’s award-winning newspaper column (currently published in the Altoona Mirror), which is the only syndicated newspaper column on genealogy in Pennsylvania.
The book can be ordered online, or purchased directly from Jim when he speaks at a conference.
Brian Hartzell
5 years ago
Well done, Jim. Wish I had read your summary before I wrote mine for the Palatine Heritage e-newsletter. My report was pretty basic and nearly as well written as your journalistic version which is written in a Blog, first-person style that I usually don’t feel comfortable in using. I focused more on the heirloom seeds and recipes speaker. Heading to Arkansas for two weeks to work on getting my father’s house ready for real estate listing, then back to Ohio, arriving at Hilton Hotel in Dublin on 10/11 just in time for your presentations. See you and Terri then.