ROOTS & BRANCHES

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 …