ROOTS & BRANCHES

SALT LAKE CITY – As someone who was a first-career journalist (and an “old school” journalist at that!), I do love the occasional times I can put a dateline on a “Roots & Branches” column. I’m not quite old school enough to have worked when datelines actually had dates (the original usage, in the days …

Jim Snyder of Hollidaysburg has been helping locate Blair County cemeteries for years as part of the county genealogical society’s Grave Name and Location Project. One of the saddest situations he has encountered is that of the Jeremiah Peck Cemetery in Taylor Township. Unfortunately, where the Peck cemetery was supposed to be, his team found …

I mentioned in passing a month ago in this column the wonderful presentation that Patrick Donmoyer, director of the Pennsylvania German Cultural Heritage Center, made at a genealogy conference at Kutztown University. The lecture was centered upon the evolution and meaning of German-language Bibles published in Europe and America and had some interesting takeaways for …

A few years ago, I received an e-mail from an author named Ann Marie Ackermann who was living in Germany and needed some research done at the Pennsylvania State Archives. The assignment was intriguing: Gottlob Rueb, the man for whom she was searching, had killed the mayor of a town in southern Germany before fleeing …

There are times in a genealogist’s life when you may well feel like you are not only documenting past ancestors but find yourself in “the history” of others in your family. I encountered this recently when I received a welcome e-mail from my cousin Ron Machmer. Of course, I’ve written a bit on the Machmers …