ROOTS & BRANCHES

I enjoy getting genealogy questions. As you might think is natural, I enjoy them more when I know the answer … and a lot of times knowing the answer is dependent on having a fairly specific question being asked. One such question came from Katherine Schober, my colleague who is the expert German transcriber/translator and …

Especially since there’s still an 18th century house he built that’s still standing, my fifth-great-grandfather Conrad Beidler is one of the ancestors get quite a number of inquiries about. For instance, recently Dave Madary of Lititz, Lancaster County, reached out and wrote, “I was looking into the Beidler homestead and saw your name associated with …

It’s always enjoyable to get inquiries from longtime “Roots & Branches” readers, especially ones such as Thomas R. Liszka, an associate professor emeritus of English from Penn State Altoona. His most recently question has pointed up an anomaly of U.S. naturalization history that’s worth sharing. “I just ran across an anomaly,” Liszka related. “My great-aunt …

I celebrated a major find in last week’s “Roots & Branches” column that came courtesy of a newspaper obituary pinpointing the burial place of Lebanon County immigrant Johann Daub. This was pretty important to me, since when I was more of a greenhorn genealogist in the 1990s, I had merely guessed in which cemetery to …