ROOTS & BRANCHES

Life in the Pandemic world of 2020 and 2021 has caused many dislocations along with opportunities. Something on the opportunity side of the ledger is July’s virtual conference of the International German Genealogy Partnership, the early bird discount deadline of which will be Wednesday. Already hundreds have registered for this event, which I am co-chairing …

A highlight that debuted at the recent mega-conference RootsTech Connect was MyHeritage’s Deep Nostalgia, a technology for animating photos that was licensed from D-ID, a company specializing in video re-enactment using deep learning. MyHeritage integrated this technology to animate the faces in historical photos and create high-quality, realistic video footage, and releasing it during FamilySearch’s …

I’ll call Brian Miller an “Internet cousin” of mine since we’ve only met virtually. He occasionally shares information not only about family we have in common but also about other searches he makes and the hypotheses that result. “I am researching my great-great-grandmother, Anna May (Bender) Tolbert (1868–1938),” Miller wrote recently. “Her death certificate indicates …

I started using genealogical assets collected by the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints more than 30 years ago, just a few years after beginning my genealogy quest in the mid-1980s. First it was a database called the International Genealogical Index, then accessible on microfiche cards, which led me the church’s microfilms that at …

It was little more than a year ago when I last mentioned Annette K. Burgert in this column. At that time, I was working my way through what constitutes a “core collection” of Pennsylvania German genealogy resources and I called Burgert “a real-life water dowser for finding the European villages of origin for immigrants.” This …