ROOTS & BRANCHES

My late grandmother once left me a note that I’ll always remember. On it were three simple letters: SPS. So, of course, being young and relatively dumb, I had to ask her what that stood for. To which she said: “Self-praise stinks.” All of which is a lead-in to the fact that this “Roots & …

Last week’s “Roots & Branches” column gave a shout out to several people who went above and beyond in helping me recently. But I needed to save an entire column for Katherine Schober of SK Translations, who is an expert translator of German-language documents handwritten in the old script that was used into the 1900s. …

It’s easy to become jaundiced at the world we live in today. But I’m a firm believer that there are “angels” all around … and sometimes we don’t even have to look very hard for them. Last week the “Roots & Branches” column talked about how to most effectively research historical newspapers. Something left unmentioned …

When I was a newspaper copy editor, there was always the near instant gratification of a daily product to show what you did that evening. When I became an author, though I tried to write for the ages—and the “lead time” was, of course, measured in months and years rather than days—I realized that like …