ROOTS & BRANCHES

Last week’s “Roots & Branches” column took a look at the efforts of FamilySearch.org, the free genealogy website owned by the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, to avoid a “dark archives” in which digitized images of records are simply plopped up on the Internet without further description. FamilySearch already has some 4.5 billion …

Just a couple of months ago, your “Roots & Branches” columnist trumpeted a reinvention of the Salt Lake City-based Family History Library into a repository of true global reach. The impetus for that column was a virtual get-together at which the top folks from the library revealed their plans, including starting a book look-up service, …

After more than 30 years doing genealogy, you might think I have all the answers. You’d not only be wrong, though, you’d way wrong—since I’ve come to the realization that in a lot of cases “answers” are merely vehicles for more questions. And, in many cases, my role is not to actually know the answer, …

I wrote some weeks ago in “Roots & Branches” on the upcoming online program from the Pennsylvania State Archives titled “Preserving Your Congregation’s History.” The program, part of the Archives’ Community History Dialog series inspire a variety of social communities to collect and preserve their own history, had more than a hundred attendees eager to …

When you come across an anomaly in genealogy—and, let me tell you, if you don’t come across anomalies, you’re not trying hard enough—it helps to check your assumptions about such seeming contradictions. In a recent social media conversation, a person asked about one of these situations—in this case a date for an ancestor’s birth that …