ROOTS & BRANCHES

Dick Eastman has become one of the leading lights of the world’s genealogy scene, in no short measure because of his “Eastman’s Online Genealogy Newsletter.”

The electronic newsletter – a free blog published daily and also collected as a “Plus Edition” for a nominal subscription price – recently celebrated its 21^st birthday.

Eastman notes that he sent the first newsletter out by e-mail to about a hundred people on Jan. 15, 1996.

In a way, Eastman’s blog is a key cyber “meeting point” for genealogists since he publishes news about everything in the world of genealogy, not exclusively about its online implications.

The newsletter has been sponsored at times my some of the heaviest hitters in the family history world (such as Ancestry and MyHeritage) but Eastman has always maintained editorial independence.

While he publishes articles daily, I prefer to get his weekly “Plus Edition” and devote some time to it when it rolls into my e-mail “in box,” usually on Mondays.

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I proudly claim Eastman as a friend of mine, the product of talks at conferences and their social events over the past 15 or so years (including the time when he, Steve Morse and I were the “Three Amigos” for special anniversary conference in Erie, PA!).

As such, “Roots & Branches” has turned up in the Eastman newsletter a few times and I occasionally decide that I need to give my own opinion agreeing or disagreeing with something that Dick has written.

What follows is one of the latter category (disagreement).

A few weeks ago, Eastman published an article headlined “Online Genealogy Dictionaries & Other References” and began the article with one of those sweeping generalizations that give me a chuckle: “The Web is fast replacing reference books. References to almost any information can be found online quickly.”

Now, while I occasionally say that I’ve been a genealogist long enough to have one foot in both the “Gutenberg” and “digital” universes of family history, I like to think that I’m no Luddite (Especially when you consider my last book, Trace Your German Roots Online, was entirely devoted to digital resources).

Included in his list of digital genealogy references were probably some fine works, but I naturally gravitated to one called “Glossar: Die Familie” that was billed as an “English-German glossary of terms frequently found in genealogy research.”

Well, it does have a fine section on “nichterlaubte Sexualbeziehungen” (German for “unauthorized sexual relations”) but overall it has maybe a couple of hundred entries.

This is compared to Ernest Thode’s classic book German-English Genealogical Dictionary (available from Genealogical Publishing Company for $39.95 in print or $27.50 as an e-book) with thousands of relevant entries culled from his long years of research experience and fluent command of both modern and archaic German.

Sometimes free is worth (only) that price.