ROOTS & BRANCHES

My first in-person memory of Rudolf “Rudi” Daub was when he arrived at Dulles International Airport in 1991.I had seen a photograph of him so we knew he looked like a quintessential German with a salt-and-pepper beard typical of a man who was then 54 years old.Of course, it seemed that every man getting off …

The conversation began as many such interactions do.I was at a weekly appointment and the man at the checkout desk said he’d noted my last name was the same as his grandmother’s.He also told me that he and his mother had visited the home of Conrad Beidler, an 18th century–vintage stone miller’s mansion in Robeson …

He’s no longer known only as “America’s Unknown Child” or simply as the “Boy in the Box.”He is Joseph Augustus Zarelli and he lived only four short years in the 1950s.When he was found in 1957 in what was then the semi-rural area of Fox Chase, on the edges of Philadelphia and far from the …

One of the most faithful Blair County “Roots & Branches” readers is Steve Kleiner. And one of the things I like about him is that he’s not afraid to speak his mind, especially when your columnist writes something about which Kleiner has more information. What I wrote a few weeks ago, in my two-part column …

Those of you who know me personally know that your “Roots & Branches” columnist prides himself in not being an early adopter—or sometimes an adopter at all—of the latest trends in genealogy. TV shows dealing with celebrity roots make me shrug my shoulders. Some advances in automating searches or animating photos of ancestors leave me …

I used last week’s “Roots & Branches” column to talk about what I deem core collections of published materials for Pennsylvania genealogical libraries, starting with collections that apply more to general genealogy and statewide.   A lot of materials, of course, are best viewed through the lens of Pennsylvania’s counties, although the caveat here (both …

Last week’s “Roots & Branches” column mused about the collections policies of Pennsylvania historical and genealogical libraries. Among the musings was the phrase “core collection,” particularly in reference to the Genealogical Society of Pennsylvania, the organization at which I’m currently interim executive director. In case you don’t think things “come full circle,” I recall in …

Fair warning to my readers that today’s “Roots & Branches” is another one of those that delves more into philosophy than practical application. But hopefully those of you involved history or genealogy organizations will come away with something of use.Perhaps the most distinctive feature of the figurative landscape of history and genealogy organizations in Pennsylvania …

Sometimes, you just have to “call your own number.”For those who aren’t football fans, it’s phrase used when the quarterback decides to carry the ball himself instead of handing off or passing to another player.In the family history world, I’m using it to say that I’m going to be the headline speaker for a virtual …

I make no pretension of being objective about Diahan Southard, the genetic genealogy specialist who trades as Your DNA Guide.From the first time I met her—when our exhibit hall tables were next to each other at an Ohio Genealogical Society conference about a decade ago—I found her engaging personality matched by her scientific knowledge and, …

Last week’s “Roots & Branches” column mentioned correspondence from my distant cousin Pernell Staudt, who was seeking information about a Shrader/Shradern/Schroeder family in the western Berks County area and the Lieb family there stemming from a Hans Michael Lieb who died in 1754, leaving a widow named Anna Margaretha who soon after married Johann Mathias …

Some people revel in what appears to be the randomness of life while others flatly opine “There are no coincidences.” Either way you slice it, email conversations I’ve had recently brought up some interesting intersections with both of the people reaching out to me. One was Roger Getz of Lititz in Lancaster County. His grandfather …

Close to two decades ago, I first stopped by the library of the Pennsylvania German Cultural Heritage Center at Kutztown University.The library had a copy of a card file originally compiled by the genealogy institute of the Palatine—showing the origins of thousands of immigrants—and Lucy Kern, the lady in charge of the library at the …

Just about a year ago, I took a contract position as interim executive director for Genealogical Society of Pennsylvania. I was both excited and a bit terrified at the prospect. I was humbled by the common interpretation of F. Scott Fitzgerald’s rejoinder that “There are no second acts in American life,” which GSP was for …

When I spent a column describing my probable itinerary for a trip to Germany a month ago to the “Roots & Branches” readership, there was one stop I left off the list because it was “iffy” at best. That was the village of Helmershausen in Thuringia, the hometown (in German, Heimat) of the Bardorf family, …

The maiden surname of one of my great-great-grandmothers was Dehart. And since that woman, Emma Rebecca Dehart, was (along with her husband Wellington B. Machmer) the first family member to inhabit my current home, I’ve always been a little more interested in the Deharts than my average ancestral line. With relative ease, I traced her …

Long before I volunteered to do a webinar titled “Pennsylvania German Enslavers: Initiating a Re-Examination” for the Historical Society of Pennsylvania last month, I knew that Joseph Hiester, my “first cousin, six times removed” who was a congressman and later governor of Pennsylvania, was an enslaver. Some years ago I had come across a copy …

When I volunteered to do a webinar titled “Pennsylvania German Enslavers: Initiating a Re-Examination” for Katy Barnes, the Historical Society of Pennsylvania’s genealogy director, I knew I was tackling a topic with the potential for fraught conversation. But with encouragement from both Barnes and Justina Barrett, the society’s director of education and programs, we were …

As you read this, I’m expecting to be either in my final preparations for or actually on my way to Germany for a sixth time—my first visit in a dozen years. After arriving in Frankfurt, I’m planning to see Rudi and Helga Daub, my longest lasting German friends, who I met when I was historian …

Some of the best experiences, I’ve found, come out of a “think on your feet” type of situation. Case in point: I was invited to speak at the Dillman Family Association’s 20th Anniversary Genealogical Conference, held earlier this month in the Harrisburg area. The Dillmans, let me tell you, are no average family association! They …

Last week’s column ended with that frequent rejoinder to do more research, in this case on the Strunck family from the German town of Sprendlingen. Diligent readers of the column will recall I had researched the Struncks in the early 2000s, and that the Sprendlingen Protestant church registers were a mess of ink splotches. I …

A few weeks ago “Roots & Branches” reviewed Edna Barnett Chelson’s Our Pennsylvania German Families book, the 600-page door-stopper that contains her genealogy life’s work. I remarked in the second column about the book that the Strunck family we have in common came from the town of Sprendlingen, which now lies in the German state …

A subject to which I never tire of returning is fraktur—especially the private decorative birth and baptismal certificates of the Pennsylvania Germans. While my personal collection of such items is small, they are among my dearest possessions, which is probably due to the influence of one person whom I miss dearly: the late Corinne P. …

A few years ago I took Henry Louis Gates and his TV program “Finding Your Roots” to task for his role in obscuring that actor Ben Affleck had ancestors who were enslavers. If the show had operated under traditional journalistic ethics, Gates would have been canned, but of course this was TV and ethics are …

When “Roots & Branches” reader and my fellow Altoona Mirror columnist James Eugene Wentz reached out to me earlier this year in an attempt to continue his long-sought attempt to verify his surname line into Germany, I had good news and bad news. The bad news first: Wentz wondered if I was still doing research …

Last week’s “Roots & Branches” column  talked about Our Pennsylvania German Families: A History and Genealogy of the Ancestors of Eva Minerva Baer Barnett Who Settled in Berks County, Pennsylvania, and Her Descendants by Edna Barnett Chelson. As I noted, this 600-page compendium has loads of good information on a variety of families, many of …

Is there a genealogist out there who’s going to turn down a free family history book? Well, not me … especially when it’s one that’s titled Our Pennsylvania German Families: A History and Genealogy of the Ancestors of Eva Minerva Baer Barnett Who Settled in Berks County, Pennsylvania, and Her Descendants. The offer came from …

As advertising gimmicks go, my invitation the other week from genealogy genetics testing firm Living DNA to find out my percentage of “Viking ancestry” was a pretty good one. Since I was already a Living DNA customer, having done the basic autosomal test some 3 years ago, getting my Viking on was only going to …

One of the first things I did when I started my professional genealogy career Some 30 years ago was teach a basic genealogy course at a local community college.  Keen observers of the “Roots & Branches” column will recall that I reviewed this long-ago effort a couple of years ago and found some elements held …

I’m not going to name names because that’s not the point. But I am going to make a few points that I hope program planners take into consideration when they are putting together genealogy events. First a bit of a disclaimer: at heart I am an old-school, in-person type of individual. While I have warmed …

That time-tested tradition for brides to have somethings old, new, borrowed and blue might be applied to the recent National Genealogical Society conference in Sacramento, California. Of course, you could well say the old part was simply having an in-person conference after two fraught COVID years of virtual events. And the new part was well …

Another Memorial Day weekend is here. Yes, I know it’s technically designated only to remember those who died while serving the U.S. military. Without demeaning those instances of “the last full measure of devotion,” to use Abraham Lincoln’s words, I think many of us have informally expanded that designation and use the holiday as a …

I’ve given a lot of advice over the years—much of it free, some of it unsolicited, often appreciated, but many times never acknowledged beyond a thank you. A burning question often remains: Did the person actually take the advice and (drum roll, please!) did it work out for them? Well, sometimes you do get validation …

Commercially published author David DeKok, who’s also probably the world’s leading authority on the mine-fire-plagued ghost town of Centralia, had a welcome surprise recently. A few months before the Pandemic ground the U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services to a halt, DeKok had ordered his grandfather’s naturalization file, documenting the arrival of John Kilian (1901–1995) in …

A little more than a week ago, I had my first opportunity to step beyond the virtual genealogy world since the Pandemic came crashing down more than two years ago. The Ohio Genealogical Society’s conference returned as an in-person event for the first time since 2019. I had the opportunity to speak at Great Wolf …

In the 20-something years that I’ve been writing this weekly column, I’ve taken a riff from an acquaintance of mine from early in my journalism career—Bill Lumpkin, who for years was titled sports editor at the now defunct Birmingham Post-Herald, my first stop after college. “Lump,” as a I recall, wrote three columns a week …

 By now Eric “Rick” Bender of New Mexico should be the proverbial “man who needs no introduction” to the readership of “Roots & Branches.” But of course there are always new readers so suffice to say that Bender has been a bit of a muse to your “Roots & Branches” columnist with many good comments …

If there’s anything I like more than doing genealogy presentations myself, it’s trying to assemble speakers for topics about which I don’t know nearly enough. One of those areas will be addressed when Genealogical Society of Pennsylvania holds a spring virtual seminar titled “Exploring Eastern European Genealogy” over two half days in early May. And …

The greatest family history scavenger hunt of the decade began on April Fools’ Day. For anyone who’s been under a genealogical rock for the last couple of weeks, when the clock struck midnight heralding the beginning of the day April 1, 2022, the 1950 U.S. Census—with data pegged to be accurate on that day 72 …

I’ve done some musing before on the concept of “who counts” as family. Over time, I’ve found more questions and fewer answers. For me, it starts with my father Richard Lee Beidler and mother Mildred Mae Hiester. I had disagreements with each of my now deceased parents now and again but I think overall we …

There are some types of people who only come around once in your life. The type who mentors without any sense of what’s in it for them. The type who never says no immediately even if that would have been the easier thing to do. And the type who’s not above telling you the unvarnished …

As genealogy conferences begin to claw their way back toward in-person normalcy, how to continue to serve a virtual audience has become a top priority for many. This includes the annual National Genealogical Society, which went virtual on the fly two years ago during the initial wave of COVID-19 and then held an all-digital conference …

I well recall my first visit to the Pennsylvania State Archives. It was sometime in the mid-1980s and I was relatively green to genealogy. I had been to a few libraries but not to a government archives. At first I was put off by the amount of security the State Archives required—photo identification, assigned to …

It’s taken me a lifetime to fully appreciate the absolute necessity for nuance. I could be talking about life itself, but “Roots & Branches” is devoted to genealogy, of course, so I’ll be limiting this discussion just to family history! I’ll admit that my default impulses often trend toward wanting to make something “cut and …

Last week’s “Roots & Branches” went over the basics of the upcoming virtual RootsTech conference, but there’s so much to talk about that it cries out for another column. First off, the event’s theme is “Choose Connection,” and that seems to be appropriate as we begin a third year with the shadow of COVID-19 hanging …

For at least a little while longer, one of the RootsTech conference’s many distinctions will be as the last large in-person gathering of genealogists when it was held at the end of February 2020. But far overshadowing that distinction—which seems likely to fall with several in-person events scheduled for 2022—is that RootsTech sponsor FamilySearch.org, the …

Earlier this year I was waxing nostalgic about becoming a bit of a gray eminence in the genealogy world. And in addition to taking a step back from a few posts to allow some younger folks to fill some posts, I also pride myself at making introductions. Probably my favorite one was that of Diahan …

Ireland’s a relatively small island—it’s about three quarters of the size of Pennsylvania—but the substantial waves of migration to America beginning in colonial times have created a population of descendants that dwarfs the size of other ethnicities in the U.S. in relation to the mother countries’ populations. There are estimated to be 43 million German …

A couple of months ago, I was invited to be a special guest on Doug Madenford’s “PA Dutch LIVE!” YouTube program. Madenford’s a German teacher in Centre County and one of the leading lights trying to preserve Pennsylvania Dutch culture and dialect. My appearance went live a little over a week ago. I mentioned I …

There are times—too many times—when social media is an unwelcome rabbit hole, wasting both time and interactions. But that wasn’t the case earlier this month when Linda Katz, granddaughter of a Jewish immigrant to Philadelphia, obviously checked out my profile information after I commented on a comment she had made. “You have a very cool …

In the most orderly of genealogy worlds, a scan of every single record would be available on the Internet and searchable by name from a database attached to the scans. We could well get to that orderly genealogy world someday—after FamilySearch pulled off the feat of digitizing all its microfilms in a decade when it …

I’ve liked the French term éminence grise (which translates as “gray eminence”) for some time even though I didn’t have a full handle on the phrase’s origins. The phrase has come to mean “someone who exercises power behind the scenes,” and I thought the “gray” part came from an implication that the person was older. …

It was just about a year ago when I reported on the passing of “German village finder” Annette K. Burgert and the news associated with it that her extensive library would be going to the Pennsylvania German Cultural Heritage Center in Kutztown. Now, another prominent genealogist’s library will be moving, a happening thankfully not made …

As I write the last “Roots & Branches” column of the year 2021, there’s a bit of “déjà vu all over again” as the country is grappling with another surge of COVID-19 … just as it was doing so when the year began. Long before the pandemic, much of genealogy has migrated to the virtual …