ROOTS & BRANCHES

If you’re a regular reader of “Roots & Branches,” you’ll likely remember my reverence for the late Corinne Earnest, who was a leading authority on the illuminated certificates, usually of baptism, known as fraktur. She also frequently hounded auctions in search of family Bibles with registers and copied the information that often was found nowhere …

One of the most time-honored genealogy activities is a group trip to a repository. And one of the best practitioners of such an activity is the guy we call “Mr. Genealogy Tip of the Day” after the blog posts he makes under that name. He’s Michael John Neill, and I might as well get my …

It was a Facebook post last month that put me on the trail of one last Christmas present to myself. The post was touting a book titled The Pursuit and it didn’t take long to realize it had been written by a distant cousin about a mutual German immigrant family—in his case, his surname line!—that …