ROOTS & BRANCHES

As “Roots & Branches” has taken a sporadic look at what to include in a “core collection” of German genealogy resources, there’s one author I’ve been dying to include.

And that would be Henry Z “Hank” Jones, the child actor who got interested in genealogy at the age of 8 and turned it into a second career.

Jones’ seminal works have involved the 1709-1710 Palatine families who came to upstate colonial New York, the first mass migration of German-speaking people to the America. In a project that has lasted half a century now, Jones and his team of researchers have found the European origins of about three-quarters of the 847 families who made up that movement of thousands of people

In addition to those who came to America, some families also were taken to Ireland, where they became the so-called “Irish Palatines.”

Jones’ two-volume set The Palatine Families of New York—1710 was finally published in the mid-1980s and won the prestigious Donald Lines Jacobus Award as “best genealogical work of 1986.” Jones himself was elected to the exclusive club of a few dozen family historians as a Fellow of the American Society of Genealogists.

In 1989, Jones co-authored a volume with noted Pennsylvania scholar Annette K. Burgert (spoiler alert: She’ll be the subject of a future “Roots & Branches” core collection column!) on the German origins of 250 families from the Neuwied/Westerwald region who arrived in Philadelphia from 1740 to 1753 entitled Westerwald to America.

A couple of years later, More Palatine Families, consolidating research updates to the original two-volume set, was released. It also included the European origins and American activities of many of the families who arrived in colonial New York, Pennsylvania, and New Jersey in the great second wave of emigration from Germany from 1717 to 1776.

Jones also put together a compilation called Psychic Roots: Serendipity & Intuition in Genealogy based on “Twilight Zone”-like experiences shared by more than 200 prominent family historians. Its popularity led to a sequel, too.

In 2002, Jones wrote Even More Palatine Families: 18th Century Immigrants to the American Colonies and Their German, Swiss and Austrian Origins, a three-volume set with the late Lewis Bunker Rohrbach. Once again, there were updates to the 1709-1710 Palatines, as well as some of the primary documents relating to them, and many more origins of other German immigrants.

After I met Jones but before I knew his full biography and how early he began doing genealogy, I kidded him that with his Palatine books he was beginning to sound like the old Frankenstein film series—Frankenstein Returns, Frankenstein vs. the Wolfman, etc.—and that he was going to have a publish a title I Was a Teenage Palatine.

Jones laughed but that title has gone unwritten.