ROOTS & BRANCHES

I reflected in the “Roots & Branches” column a couple of weeks ago about how the house in which I live has reached a century of family ownership. As careful readers will note, one of my most faithful correspondents is Eric “Rick” Bender of New Mexico, who has deep Pennsylvania roots but not to a …

There are times when the different parts of your genealogical life just come together. And other times when you kind of forget what you know. In a recent project on which I was working involving records from the German state of Hesse, I had a need to identify the location of particular town named Rohrbach. …

When you’re doing your best to adhere to orders to stay at home, one of thing you can do is take stock of … well, what’s at home. For me that resonates all the more since I spent more than half my life—the first 18 years and the last 16—is my present home on a …

No researcher with German-speaking ancestry is able to avoid using church records in their genealogy. And, of course, why would any want to do so, given how rich with generational information these registers of baptisms, marriages and burials tend to be? While that’s a mostly rhetorical question—it does have the practical answer that some language …