ROOTS & BRANCHES

Close to two decades ago, I first stopped by the library of the Pennsylvania German Cultural Heritage Center at Kutztown University.
The library had a copy of a card file originally compiled by the genealogy institute of the Palatine—showing the origins of thousands of immigrants—and Lucy Kern, the lady in charge of the library at the time, graciously let me spend a few days going through the cards because I literally had dozens of surnames that I wanted to check in the cards.
The hours doing this bore fruit when I found a card of man who was guardian of one of my ancestor’s children even though the guardian lived at a difference and across the Blue Mountain from my ancestor. This led me to the right village in Germany for my ancestor.
The only discomfort of the experience working at the library at Kutztown was that even then it had outgrown its space—it had a wealth of resources but a dearth of square footage.
That deficiency has been with the grand opening of the $2.4 million DeLight E. Breidegam Building as headquarters of the center. It’s dedicated to the memory of Breidegam, founder of battery manufacturer East Penn Manufacturing Co. in Richmond Township, Berks County.
The project was funded by the university, Kutztown University Foundation. and Breidegam Family Foundation. DeLight Breidegam’s son Daniel D. Breidegam was part of the dedication and thanked all involved for working to preserve Pennsylvania Dutch culture and heritage.
The state-of-the-art research library at 15155 Kutztown Road in Maxatawny Township houses a world-class research collection of books, manuscripts, photographs, documents, ephemera and artifacts acquired since the establishment of the center in 1991, said Patrick Donmoyer, site director.

Donmoyer said the center provides students, faculty, visiting researchers and the public with access to a unique collection showcasing four centuries of Pennsylvania German cultural presence in the region.
He’s hopeful to redoubled the publishing done by the center as well as use the enhanced facility for conferences.
The next step is organizing and cataloging and digitizing previously inaccessible portions of the collection, including thousands of books, manuscripts, documents and multimedia recordings, he said.
Some of that inaccessible collection consists of the immense personal library of the late Annette K. Burgert, who died in early 2021.
Burgert wrote many books and monographs during a two-decade span from 1983 to 2000 that brought together European and American information on immigrant families, documenting the origins of thousands of First Wave Germans.
Burgert’s volumes took an area—or sometimes a single village—and gave the connections in the European records (primarily church records but also a variety of other documents such as manumissions) with a variety of American primary sources, including church records, probates, land records and naturalization documents as are found.