ROOTS & BRANCHES

Last week’s “Roots & Branches” column examined the beginnings of my genealogical journey and my initial—and still!—goal of proving all my families back to the point of immigration.

As I pointed out in that column, one of the reasons that I’m still short of achieving that goal even after 40 years is the sheer volume of families when the immigration point for most of your ancestry is the first half of the 1700s.

The second reason is that without much initial intent on my part, I’ve made a name for myself in the world of German genealogy as an author, lecturer, and researcher.

I say “without much initial intent” because of course at some point I made the active decision to become a genealogy professional, and my life changed dramatically in 1999 when, first, I was elected to the board of the Genealogical Society of Pennsylvania and soon afterward was chosen to be the society’s executive director.

But in the second half of the 1980s, Laurel Miller, a giant of the Berks County genealogy world who was then editor of the Journal of the Berks County Genealogical Society, said she was stepping down as editor and (knowing I was involved in journalism at the time) pretty much told me to become her successor.

So from 1988 to 1992, I took up where Miller left off and benefited from her as a writer—and from her work for the Berks Register of Wills office, finding new records and getting estate files reorganized—and along with others produced some work of which I remain proud these decades later.

I also became historian of the Daub Family Reunion in Lebanon County and was the chief compiler of a hardcover book on the family that was published in 1993.

And while I was editor of the journal, a group from the Berks County Genealogical Society was asked to give presentations at what was then the Family History Center in Pottstown and—despite my deathly fear of public speaking at the time!—I agreed to talk about Pennsylvania Germans.

As I mentioned earlier in this column, I switched careers from newspapers to genealogy in 1999 with my staff job at Genealogical Society of Pennsylvania, which lasted four years and exposed me to the genealogy world beyond Berks and Lebanon counties.

I came out of that experience with further involvements in the larger family history community—speaking at national conferences, writing articles for the popular interest genealogy magazines of the time as well as occasionally appearing in scholarly journals.

All of which is to say—I did relatively little personal genealogy during this time.

Although I did discover the German hometown of my immigrant surname ancestor in 2010—a major milestone!—as well as finding several of my immigrant lines in the Rhineland town of Sprendlingen, including the family of the first ancestors of mine to live in the house where I now reside.

There’s even more to this journey, and we’ll get to that next week.