ROOTS & BRANCHES

When I started devoting a column now and then to what a “core collection” of German genealogy resources looks like, I though that some of the “Roots & Branches” installments might be about a single book and that others might deal with several concerning one subtopic of the field. But then there’s the bibliography of …

On a day last week that when the weather was predicted to included a snowy mist worthy of a mythological landscape—a legendary archivist took a bow into retirement. Jonathan R. Stayer, head of reference at the Pennsylvania State Archives, is that legend. Stayer got to the State Archives in the first half of the 1980s, …

Some genealogical learning experiences don’t start out as such. Recently I decided to go on the Centre Park Moonlight Tour of house in the Centre Park Historic District of Reading, an energetic city neighborhood with many Victorian-style homes and examples of other classic architectures. While I had been at a couple of previous events in …

A couple of weeks ago I took a step back to what a “core collection” of Pennsylvania German books looks like and promised to explore those resources in “Roots & Branches” sporadically over the next few months. Probably the most needed skill for those with Pennsylvania German ancestry is language. And, no, not for the …

When I began my genealogical journey in the 1980s, I benefited from a correspondence network of many Berks County genealogists who already had been plying the fields for years. One of those people was Beulah Stoudt Follmer, who at the instance of John Grimes (one of the very earliest people who had helped), wrote to …