ROOTS & BRANCHES

I’ve been on record as saying that the first two weeks of October have more activities scheduled than any other time of the year, but this time around I think I even outdid myself!

On Oct. 5, I managed to double-book myself with two events that Saturday, which thankfully were within walking distance of each other in Philadelphia.

I was helping Genealogical Society of Pennsylvania run an exhibit table for one of Historical Society of Pennsylvania’s 200^th anniversary events, fair called “History on the Street.”

The event was a huge success, with more than 4,000 people estimated to have stopped by. HSP’s Genealogy Director Katy Bodenhorn was kept busy doing 1950 U.S. Census lookups—the only time she was flummoxed was when she tried every sort of search for a lady who then finally announced that she’d only been born in 1954.

For GSP’s table, I had a rolling PowerPoint titled “Who’s Been in the Neighborhood?” and we found a receptive crowd that bought memberships and GSP’s new guidebook, The Pennsylvania Genealogical Almanac.

One Superman change of clothes later, I was part of an academic panel on Pennsylvania German enslavers for the conference of the Slave Dwelling Project at the Museum of the American Revolution.

This was the project’s first conference outside of the South, and it was evident from the program that there are many stories of the enslaved in the North that have been ignored or actively suppressed. As I noted during the panel discussion, many of today’s genealogists have evolved from only being interested in their direct-line ancestors to branching out not just to collateral relatives but also to do research on any members of their ancestral households—including enslaved persons.

Then in the middle of the next week, I spent a pleasant afternoon at the Blair County Genealogical Society’s library in Hollidaysburg, where I had not visited for several years.

This underrated library is truly a gem! While, as one would naturally expect, it has more materials on Blair County than any other, the library has also has large collections of everything from church and cemetery records to high school yearbooks from other Central Pennsylvania counties such as Bedford, Huntingdon, Cambria and Somerset as well as Cumberland, which is the eventual “mother county” of all those others.

Finally, I had the chance to represent GSP for part of the Pennsylvania Historical Association’s conference in Johnstown. Once again, the new Almanac was popular, and I had a chance to reconnect with Randall Miller, the editor for Pennsylvania: A History of the Commonwealth, the second edition of which will be published by Penn State Press in the coming year.

I’ve had the opportunity to write the chapter on genealogy for both editions of this work—finding so much I either didn’t know (or thought I knew too well!) the first time around.

All in all, a blitz of two weeks that were well worth the hustle and bustle!