ROOTS & BRANCHES

Last week’s column on Find A Grave generated a bunch of responses and, as always, your “Roots & Branches” columnist learns some valuable things. The crux of the column was that in some cases those creating Find A Grave memorials do so by ingesting online obituaries and create the memorials within hours of a person’s …

There are likely few genealogists who don’t know about the Ancestry.com-owned website Find A Grave, which started as a way for people to share inscriptions from and photos of, well, graves … gravestones, in particular. But a not so funny thing has happened on the way to the website becoming a sort of “one stop …

 Last week’s “Roots & Branches” column included the welcome news about Dirk Weissleder that he had shared recently. He’s the chair of the German genealogy umbrella organization DAGV and the second vice president for the International German Genealogy Partnership and has become the first German to be elected as general secretary of the World Federation …

German-language translator Katherine Schober, who trades as SK Translations, has been quickly developing a well-deserved reputation as a “go-to” person for translating genealogy documents. And now she’s making a name for herself in the curriculum field by creating courses that aim to let students get inside her knowledge of the language and especially the old …

Over the last 20 years, I’ve been on virtually every side of the desk for genealogy conferences. I’ve been a rank-and-file attendee. I’ve been a speaker. I’ve been a vendor. I’ve co-chaired a national conference. I’ve planned programming. So when I tell you that lecturing at the Montana State Genealogical Society’s 30th annual conference earlier …