ROOTS & BRANCHES

I’ve been to New York state’s capital city of Albany a few items over the years, starting in 2004 when I went to my first National Conference of the Palatines to America.

That year I arrived just in time for a bus tour leaving for Schoharie County, New York, to take in the landscape where some of my Palatine German ancestors spent a decade before coming to the Tulpehocken region of Pennsylvania.

I was an exhibitor at the conference that year, having just struck out on my own as a genealogy freelancer. I distributed free German Life magazines to the registrants, representing the publication as one of its columnists.

What a difference 20 years makes.

Earlier this month, I was back in Albany and once again the city was hosting the PalAm national conference.

This time around, I had been invited as one of the conference’s speakers, and instead of giving away magazines, I was selling copies of my books, including a new collection of 20 years of my German Life columns called Tips and Tidbits for Tracing Germans.

But the best thing about the conference was renewing old friendships and gaining new ones, including some new cousins!

In the former category was Janet Reupert, who I’ve known for all of those 20 years and some more.

And the best representative of the latter was Paul Whitehouse, who may end up being a cousin in a bunch of ways.

He and I confirmed that we’re descended from the same Beidler immigrant (Johannes Beydeler) and his son Conrad, and Paul shared with me the work he’s done connecting land surveys and other information to map the homesteads around the line between Berks and Lebanon counties.

And then there was Richard Wade from the Centre County area, who came to the conference passing through on his way to Maine. I’ve seen Wade at numerous events over the years.

Best of all, I had the chance to chew the fat with one of my idols—retired Professor Philip Otterness, whose book Becoming German is the leading scholarly work on the German-speaking people who in 1710 became the first mass migration of the ethnic group to the Americas.

Otterness relied on the raw data collected by Henry Z “Hank” Jones Jr., who complied a total of seven volumes on the 800-something families in this migration.

One of Otterness’s presentations at the conference detailed archives ranging from England to Austria that had an impact on his work.

These folks and so many more made the event a wonderful gathering of like-minded souls.

Not unlike those early Palatines who came to America more than 300 years ago. They sought opportunity; today we seek kinship as their descendants.

A good time had by all!