ROOTS & BRANCHES

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 and colleague in the German genealogy space, Joseph Blake “Joe” Everett.

Let me tell you, he would have been worthy of an “Unforgettable Joe Everett” profile.

According to his obituary, Everett died on Aug. 26 of heart failure after “a joyful afternoon at Deer Creek Reservoir,” a lake in Wasatch County, Utah.

He’d moved around as a military dependent—was born in Germany and graduated high school in Maryland, before studying at Brigham Young University in Utah.

He married and stayed in Utah (while he and his wife raised six children), cutting his professional teeth as Russian cataloger at what was then the Family History Library in Salt Lake City.

Everett, 53, worked in a variety of capacities for both FamilySearch and Ancestry.com, before landing his dream job as the Family History Librarian at BYU. He also found time to mentor and teach genealogists through many conferences and lectures; many people responding to his death noted his patience with beginning family historians.

Something I didn’t know about Everett was his love of singing. He participated in the Utah Baroque Ensemble and the Mapleton Chorale for several years—he won Mapleton’s Got Talent for his rendition of “You’ll Be Back” from Hamilton.

My favorite memory of Everett was in 2023 after the wind down from the International German Genealogy Partnership conference in Fort Wayne, Indiana. We went to dinner with two other folks and started trading stories about Ancestry.com.

Some years before that, I had seen Ancestry went live with a major cache of searchable records, what it calls the “Hamburg Passenger Lists.”

In addition to the actual embarkation records, Ancestry also included scans of a browse-only database of handwritten indexes to those searchable records, which can be invaluable if a date of departure is known but the person is unfindable in the actual lists in a search due to a misreading of bad handwriting.

When these went live, I knew instinctively that the upper management at Ancestry—none of whom would know anything about genealogy even if a 20-generation pedigree chart fell on them—would not have realized the value of these separate indexes and therefore wouldn’t have bothered scanning them unless a real genealogist in the trenches held their feet to the fire.

So, when I started doing the math on the time period in which Everett had worked at Ancestry, I said, “Wait a sec, you must have been the one who made sure Ancestry put up those handwritten indexes!?”

His response: No long speech, no bragging, not much expression at all. Just a faint, modest smile, and nod.

Unforgettable Joe Everett.

Joe probably would’ve softly scoffed at being called that, and that makes him all the more worthy of it.