Published July 17, 2023
| 1 Comment | Leave A ReplyThe subject of “What do I do with all this research after I’m done with it?” is something that plagues genealogists from casual hobbyists to the most esteemed of professionals.
Henry Z “Hank” Jones Jr. is among the latter.
And while in my time in the smaller (and then larger) genealogy community, I’ve seen some exits that would be ranked among the good, bad, and ugly even among some of the field’s top people, I can’t find any that can top what Jones has done in the last couple of years as he reached the plateau of age 80 and decided that even a genealogist whose works and lectures are still in demand is entitled to retirement.
Let’s look at the “Jones playbook.”
First of all, a couple of years ago, Jones published his final book, The Palatine Families of New York—1710: A Supplement, in which he returned to his original study of the 800-something German-speaking families who settled in upstate New York and eventually spread through the mid-Atlantic area.
This included a number of families to came to the Tulpehocken region of Pennsylvania beginning in the 1720s (spoiler alert: a number of them became my ancestors).
The supplement collated the many pieces of new information on these families that Jones and researchers working for or with him had found since his original publication about the families more than 30 years ago.
Then last year, Jones donated his library for use by the New York Chapter of Palatines to America at the Germantown (N.Y.) Library. The New York Palatines paid to have this huge library shipped from Jones’s home in California across the country (The donation was so complete that when I queried Jones recently about a particular historical incident he reminded me that he no longer had any of his books!).
And, finally, a huge searchable database of scans from Jones’s most significant works has just gone live on Ancestry.com, “Palatine Immigration to Ireland and US, Hank Z Jones Collection 1654–1878.” on their worldwide site. “Ancestry spent almost two years putting together a sophisticated search engine to make all the material even more user-friendly,” Jones said.
The link to the collection of 10 volumes—a total of 5,990 pages of documented data—is this URL, https://www.ancestry.com/search/collections/62327/
The German genealogy community owes a great debt of thanks to Jones for the way he has transitioned into retirement by circling back to his original works to supplement them, and making his voluminous materials available both online and off-.
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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.
Marie Peer
10 months ago
His work and one of his referrals led me to the German home of one of my 1709 Palatines to New York via London. I’m so thankful for his work and for how he shared information!