ROOTS & BRANCHES

There was a collective sigh from many in the family history community when the National Genealogical Society announced at last year’s conference in Richmond, Virginia, that the 2024 event would be fully virtual. After two COVID-19 years of virtual-only NGS conferences in 2020 and 2021—the former of which was turned on a dime from in-person …

It was about two-and-a-half years ago that I became interim executive director for Genealogical Society of Pennsylvania. There was a familiarity to the territory. I had been GSP’s executive director for four years in the early 2000s. Earlier this month, I finished that “interim-cy” and have moved back to being a freelance genealogical writer, researcher, …

A couple of year ago I had the honor of being the guest speaker for the 2022 Dillman Genealogical Conference and was impressed by the sponsoring organization, the Dillman Family Association. It was one of the relatively few instances in which I’ve given in-person presentations since the beginning of the COVID-19 pandemic, and maybe that’s …

Regina Kelly of Plymouth Meeting, Pennsylvania, didn’t know she was going to be tipping me off to a new way of looking for German records on the mammoth genealogy website FamilySearch.org. Kelly was using Genealogical Society of Pennsylvania’s FamilySearch Affiliate Library to access some records she couldn’t get from her home computer desktop (due to …