ROOTS & BRANCHES

It’s a committee of the National Genealogical Society that decides on nominees for the National Genealogy Hall of Fame.

I’ve been somewhat acquainted with their process for a couple of decades because during my four years as executive director of the Genealogical Society of Pennsylvania we helped make the case for two people who had been Fellows of the society, Hannah Benner Roach and Milton Rubincam.

The rules of this hall of fame make it even tougher than baseball’s (and that’s even with no steroids issues in the genealogy world!) since nominees must be deceased for five years and only one candidate is elected each year— and since the genealogy hall has only been around since the 1980s, there times when the successful nominee comes from the 19^th or early 20^th centuries.

So when I went to the board of the Mid-Atlantic Germanic Society in 2019 for their support in putting together a nomination for the late John T. Humphrey, I was practical that his entry into the hall might take several years.

But when Humphrey’s nomination was accepted on just the second try and announced at the recent National Genealogical Society conference, those of us affiliated with MAGS were ecstatic at Humphrey’s elevation to the hall’s elite company.

Humphrey is probably best known for compiling a mammoth multivolume series called Pennsylvania Births in which he put together baptismal and birth registers from more than a dozen counties in the state. He wrote several books, was a regular contributor to scholarly journals, and was on the National Genealogical Society for several years.

For MAGS, Humphrey was president and guiding light of the organization for more than a decade. When he died in untimely fashion at age 64 in 2012, he was the immediate past president and still contributing regularly to the society’s journal, Der Kurier, of which I was then the editor. I had been recruited by Humphrey a decade previously for that position.

Humphrey was a popular lecturer at conferences and unfailingly helpful to the hordes of attendees who would buttonhole him to answer questions at those events.

There was just once I saw him react after such an encounter with a bit of resentment—and it was after the attendees in question had left, so I’m sure they were none the wiser.

He was visiting my German Life magazine booth at a conference and two ladies made their way to the table and clearly they didn’t know who Humphrey was (let alone me, for that matter) because they started nattering between themselves in front of us to the effect of: “German research? That’s so easy … I just wrote to the pastor and he sent me everything I needed.”

As they wandered away, Humphrey deadpanned to me, “Yeah, so easy. I wonder why I’ve spent half my life working on my German ancestor if all I had to do was write to the pastor.”

Humphrey’s body of work and prominence in the genealogical community made him “hall of fame worthy” without a doubt. The question, given the hall’s one-nominee-a-year election policy, was when.

I’ll admit to being kind of happy that I was a driving force behind helping make it happen sooner rather than later. I doubt that I’ll ever have succeeded in a more worthwhile endeavor.