ROOTS & BRANCHES

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 …