ROOTS & BRANCHES

Over the years I’ve talked about the idea that sometimes you figuratively stare at a genealogy problem “straight on” for too long when you should be looking at it “From an angle.”What do I mean by all that? Well, let me give you a couple of those angles.One is in response to the annoyance found …

As your “Roots & Branches” columnist closes in on the year’s end, it seems fitting to leap ahead a little bit to what’s on tap for 2025. Except for some occasional one-off presentations, my first trip of the year will be to the biggest conference of the year, the annual RootsTech in Salt Lake City, …

My longtime friend André Dominguez of Lancaster County came to me for advice on tracking down a German immigrant to York County, Pennsylvania. The man for whom he was searching was named George Mohrline “but I have also found a possible alternate spelling Merlein,” Dominguez reported. Those spellings made me confident that German phonetics would …

Right up there with the No. 1 question I receive (“how can I find my German ancestor’s hometown?”) is curiosity about whether it’s possible to find living German relatives. Andrea Bentschneider, the Hamburg, Germany–based professional genealogist who runs the service she calls the German Genealogy Collective, will be devoting a free online “masterclass” to this …

I first encountered Barbara Granato more than a decade ago when I did an all-day series of lectures for the Central New York Genealogical Society and renewed the acquaintance at a New York State Family History Conference near Syracuse, N.Y., a couple of years later. Granato has some deep roots in Pennsylvania, including a prominent …