ROOTS & BRANCHES

It’s just a little more than a month until one of the rites of passage into spring in the Pennsylvania genealogical world – the Lancaster Family History Conference.

Stretching from March 28 to 30 when pre-conference trips and workshops are included, the main event on March 30 will be held at Farm and Home Center, 1383 Arcadia Road, Lancaster, PA, and features “The Legal Genealogist” blogger Judy G. Russell as the keynote speaker.

Russell is a genealogist with a law degree who writes, teaches and lectures on a wide variety of genealogical topics, ranging from using court records in family history to understanding DNA testing.

She’s a Colorado native with roots deep in the American South on her mother’s side and entirely in Germany on her father’s side.

Russell holds a bachelor’s degree in journalism with a political science minor from George Washington University in Washington, DC, and a law degree from Rutgers School of Law-Newark. She has worked as a newspaper reporter, trade association writer, legal investigator, defense attorney, federal prosecutor, law editor and, for more than 20 years before her retirement in 2014, was an adjunct member of the faculty at Rutgers Law School.

In addition to Russell’s keynote talk, which is titled “ ‘No Person Shall . . . Gallop Horses in the Streets’: Using Court Records to Tell the Stories of Our Ancestors’ Lives,” she will also speak on records access and American divorce records at the main conference, which is sponsored by the Lancaster Mennonite Historical Society.

Other Saturday presenters and topics will include: Pennsylvania State Archives head of reference Jonathan Stayer (“Colonial Ship Lists and Naturalization Records”), Gerald Smith (“Using Ancestry.com”), Richard Konkel (“The Scotch-Irish: Their Origins in the British Isles and Their Impact in South Central Pennsylvania”), and Jean Kilheffer Hess (“Learning to Listen: Oral History Interviewing How-to”).

March 28 will feature two field trips to Lancaster County research sites (the county archives and LancasterHistory.org’s library) as well as a DNA roundtable.

March 29 will have a timely workshop titled “The New DNA Reality—Forging the Path Between Discovery and Privacy” led by Darvin Martin, an introduction to the Lancaster Mennonite library as well as three-hour workshop presented by your “Roots & Branches” columnist titled “Working with German Script and Fraktur Font.”

Registration is limited (and requires a separate fee) for the all of the field trips and workshops, which are held (or begin at) the Lancaster Mennonite Historical Society, 2215 Millstream Road, Lancaster, PA.

The March 30 main event will also feature a variety of vendors and exhibitors.

More information and registration is available at the URL, https://www.lmhs.org/events-2/history-conference/