ROOTS & BRANCHES

It’s become a truism in the Internet era that books about anything online are out of date before they’re even printed.

So you can understand that I’ve been itching to update my book Trace Your German Roots Online, first published in 2016, for some time now.

I’ll spare you all the machinations that prevented a second edition of “TYGRO”—pronounced “tie-grow,” my shorthand for this book—from happening sooner and instead give a shout out to my publisher, Masthof Press of Morgantown, PA, who have previously printed for me compilations of “Roots & Branches” and my German Life magazine columns as well as a variety of “quick sheets” and other print products.

In addition, I’ve known the patriarch and matriarch of the family-owned business, Lemar and Lois Ann Mast, since practically the beginning of my involvement in the larger genealogy world—getting close to 40 years!

This was the first time I did a full-length book with them containing substantial new material, and it was a great experience.

Now that the book has reached its final processes, I had a chance to reflect on the most important updates in the book, especially since (despite the long time between editions) there will be the inevitable questions from prospective buyers—starting at the International German Genealogy Partnership conference in just a couple of weeks!—asking “Well, what’s new?”

Something that new seems old but is still new to TYGRO is MeyersGaz.org, since that electronic version of the leading geographical dictionary of the Second German Empire debuted not long as the first edition. Among the “step-by-step” demonstrations in the book is using MeyersGaz to connect villages to their church parishes.

As was profiled last year in this column, the German Genealogy Resource Map, the tool from a collaboration between German and American genealogy societies, is detailed.

Several chapters were created virtually all new, including more background on the all-important church records, as well as websites where you can find immigration information on both sides of the Atlanic.

 For dealing with spelling variations due to difference between German and English pronunciations, a copy of what I call the phonetische Namenkarte (pNk for short) for deducing the spelling variants for places and names will be included in the new volume.

Because of many changes and improvements to some of the major websites, chapters dealing with them were overhauled, including references to FamilySearch’s full-text search capability and its rebooted library catalog. Much new material was added to the descriptions of Germany-based sites Archion.de and Matricula.eu (for Protestant and Roman Catholic records, respectively) as well as Compgen.de, the massive German site.

Finally, there has been a explosion of web-based professional services in the last couple of years. Such outfits as Germanology Unlocked, the German Genealogy Collective, and the German Genealogy Headquarters are profiled.

A lot of these new and updated sites have come about in just the last couple years, which makes me believe that German genealogy online is continuing on an upward trajectory.

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Readers can order their copies of  TYGRO’s second edition directly from Masthof at the URL, https://www.masthof.com/products/trace-your-german-roots-online