ROOTS & BRANCHES

I’m no Luddite. But I am still, at least in part, a Gutenberg man. Give me the choice of reading something on a screen or printing it out and—if I wasn’t dissuaded more and more by “consider the environment” rejoinders—my preference would be to print it out every time. It’s just the way I roll …

When it comes to DNA and genealogy, I generally try to stay at least one step behind the news to give me time to absorb it. I also wait to get a read from my friends—people such as Diahan Southard, Blaine Bettinger, Angie Bush and Judy Russell (and many others!)—who are gurus in this field …

One of the more intriguing things about my first career in newspapers was that we called the newspaper library “the morgue.” Likely this came about primarily because it was the repository of actual obituaries as well as old newspaper clippings from which future obituaries would be compiled about the area’s prominent people. He computer age …

I wrote in “Roots & Branches” two weeks ago—in the first of what now has become three columns on the website Find A Grave— “I continue to have difficulty wrapping my head around the psychology of someone who would be such a clod as to intrude on people’s grief by hastily putting up a memorial …