ROOTS & BRANCHES

It’s easy to become jaundiced at the world we live in today.

But I’m a firm believer that there are “angels” all around … and sometimes we don’t even have to look very hard for them.

Last week the “Roots & Branches” column talked about how to most effectively research historical newspapers. Something left unmentioned was a visual way of looking at Chronicling America’s “US Newspaper Directory” to come up with a definitive list of newspapers to research.

It was left unmentioned because due to next March’s demise of the Adobe Flash program, this map visualization of the directory data “The Growth of Newspapers Across the U.S.: 1690–2011” is will likely no longer by accessible.

But thanks to the person who put this all together for the Bill Lane Center of the American West at Stanford University, Geoff McGhee, I have usable URL to share: http://westcenter.stanford.edu/projects/us-newspapers/index.html

It works best in the Google Chrome browser (once you enable Adobe Flash).

I’m told that what’s needed to make migrating “The Growth of Newspapers” map to a new platform a priority would be to contact the Bill Lane Center’s director, Bruce Cain, whose e-mail is bcain@stanford.edu.

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Recently an acquaintance from a genealogy group, Bob Greiner, helped solve a person’s mystery about her minister ancestor by finding serendipitously that the minister had studied at the Basler Mission in Basel, Switzerland.

Greiner had e-mailed with Yael Gsell, a trainee in the Basler Mission’s archive and library.

When I found myself researching another such missionary pastor, I took a shot to e-mail Gsell about him as well.

While she didn’t find the man for whom I was looking, she went above and beyond to give me a list of a couple dozen other missionary societies from the time period of the man for whom I was searching, along with websites for many of them.

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While my work for Legacy Tree Genealogists is mostly editing research reports produced by others, I do get a shot at searching and writing a few of my own, which often stretches my legs beyond my Mid-Atlantic comfort zone.

The same project as the one in which I contacted the Basel archives required naturalization and marriage license copies from Minnesota as well as a death certificate from Alberta, Canada.

All of the agencies involved produced the copies I needed with a minimum of time and expense, even during these fraught times!

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So, yes, there are angels all around. So many that we need to spend a second column on another one who has created a wonderful community where previously a lot of people were just scratching their heads.

This would be Katherine Schober, who has become the go-to German genealogy translator.