ROOTS & BRANCHES

It’s a rare genealogist who isn’t at least a bit of a pack rat. I’m the type who goes through periodic “binge and purge” cycles, but somehow I come out of each “purge” with a little more mass of paper and books than I started the previous “binge.” And I’m imagining that will I continue …

Over the years, I’ve intentionally stayed away from doing heavy research on my Civil War ancestors. It’s always seemed that there’s such a great volume of information that it’s a rabbit hole into which I might fall … from which I might make my way back. Well, thank goodness for people such as Laurie Snyder …

In the “Roots & Branches” column published last week, we talked about how we are nearly always left with more questions than answers when we do genealogy. Some wags might say that family historians are never satisfied—the more they know, the more they want to know. Well, that’s fine in and of itself … and …

Last week’s “Roots & Branches” column summarized what the publicly available U.S. Census enumerations had to say about my longest-lived ancestor, great-great-grandfather Wellington B. Machmer. At the end I noted that it surprised me that his occupation was never listed as mason, even though I’ve been told credible family stories about him working as a …