ROOTS & BRANCHES

As the end of summer approaches, genealogists have interesting opportunities to participate in the New York State Family History Conference.

First, your “Roots & Branches” columnist’s mandatory “conflict of interest” statement: I’m going to be a speaker, both virtually and in person at this conference.

Yes, I said “virtually and in person” because event sponsor New York Genealogical & Biographical Society is again providing a hybrid experience that runs in total from Sept. 3 (when the on-demand, pre-recorded presentations will go live) through Nov. 16.

The in-person conference will be held Sept. 19 and 20 at the Old Dutch Church in Kingston, New York. All of the in-person conference presentations will be livestreamed and will be available online until Nov. 16, too.

You can join the NYG&B staff, researchers, genealogists, and all those interested in family history for New York’s largest statewide family history conference, led by more than 20 of the top voices and experts in the field. This year’s conference has the theme of “Echoes of New York.”

Between the livestreamed presentations in Kingston and the on-demand sessions you can watch at your own pace, there will be more than 35 sessions and events, all for less than $10 a session.   

The conference’s keystone address will feature Yvette Hoitink from the Netherlands, who will talk on “Global Access to Our Shared Heritage” at the beginning of the conference on Friday morning and then replayed Friday evening, too.

Among the 20-plus presenters who will lead sessions and answer questions, including Skip Duett, Annette Burke Lyttle, Pam Ricciardi Paschke, D. Joshua Taylor, Pamela J. Vittorio, and Jane E. Wilcox, and more.

Vittorio will talk about “Side by Side: Boatmen of Dutch and African American Ancestry on the D&H Canal.” This profiles the Delaware and Hudson Canal, completed in 1828, between its terminus points in Honesdale, PA, and near the conference site in Kingston.

Duett’s presentation will anchor the conference on Saturday afternoon with the topic “Reconstructing Your Ancestor’s Neighborhood: A Western New York Case Study,” a great takeaway for the event’s participants to then use afterward.

And your “Roots & Branches” columnist?

Well, on Friday (Sept. 19), I’ll be presenting in Kingston the following topics:

• “Beyond the Frontier: A New Netherland Family’s Migration to Pennsylvania” about my own Dehart family, my only 17^th century immigrant family.
• “New York’s ‘Palatines:’ Diverse Origins, Mid-Atlantic Dispersal,” which traces the first mass migration of German-speaking people to North America.

And part of the on-demand package will include my lecture, “Getting Best Use of Ancestry’s Hank Jones Database,” which talks about the great boon for researchers of that first mass migration of German-speaking people and those who followed them.

For more about the conference, go to the URL,  https://www.newyorkfamilyhistory.org/nysfhc/about