ROOTS & BRANCHES

It’ll be just few months until “Roots & Branches” celebrates weekly column No. 1,000 and next year will mark 20 years of existence.

I’ll save a bunch of nostalgia about the column itself for when it passes those milestones in due time.

But right now I’m struck by the fact that – while the column has been a significant part of my genealogical life – I’ve gone through about a generation and a half of family history since I first started investigating my ancestors in 1984 at the tender age of 24.

I say that because I’m estimating that the “average” genealogist (if there is such a thing!) probably begins researching around age 50, and here I am at age 56 already with more than 30 years gone by in the craft.

I’ve seen genealogy societies born – and die.

I’ve seen the Internet and DNA become essential genealogical tools.

I’ve seen genealogy friends pass on – many of them who seemed to go way before their time.

What will I see in the rest of my genealogical life? What do I want to tackle personally?

In the genealogical world in general, I’m sure that the pace of technological chance will only continue to increase, including more facets to DNA as tools in family history.

However, I doubt that DNA in and of itself will solve problems; I believe it will always need to be married with documents to be effective.

As far as what I want to tackle, my big project for this year will be completing a book on historical newspapers and their use by genealogists and historians.

It’s a dream project someone who was a first-career newspaper copy editor and, as with my first two commercially published books, I’m proving the truism that “if you want to find out how little you know about a topic, write a book about it.”

I’m learning interesting nuggets about my own family along the way, but mostly I’ve figured out that newspapers were the “social media of the 19^th and 20^th centuries,” with information that figures into just about any research project.

One of my mantras has become that if you haven’t found your ancestor in newspapers, it means you simply haven’t checked enough newspapers.

That’s because there were often multiple newspapers in a community and because news was also shared by newspapers of different communities.

Beyond that, of course, there’s my original goal from 30-something years ago: To find all my Old World ancestral villages. With most of my forbears having arrived in the 1700s, this would involve more than a hundred families if completed.

I’m hoping to find at least a few more … and visit them to have wonderful outdoor café meals in midst of ancestral history.