ROOTS & BRANCHES

Centuries of emigration have planted Germans on every continent on earth.

And most of those continents will be represented at the International German Genealogy Conference in Sacramento, Calif., from June 15-17 at the Hyatt Regency Hotel. The conference theme is “Strike It Rich! with Connections 2 Discoveries.”

Hundreds of attendees have already registered for the get-together, which is hosted by the Sacramento German Genealogy Society and a consortium of Germanic genealogy societies across the Golden State.

There’s an opportunity to register at a discount price available for just the next week (through April 15) at the URL, https://iggpartner.org/

Registrations after that will be available on a space available basis only.

This will be the second biannual conference held under the umbrella the International German Genealogy Partnership, following up on the enormously successful 2017 event in Minneapolis, Minnesota.

The Partnership comprises more than 100 organizations around the world, with a mission “to facilitate German genealogy research globally as the internationally recognized federation of German genealogy organizations.”

All the activities associated with the conference have been crafted to suit the “Connections 2 Discoveries” theme.

On “discoveries” side of the theme, there are more than 60 individual lectures—including headliners such as Roger P. Minert, Fritz Juengling and Michael Lacopo—as well as nightly small group social times, a translation room and luncheon talks with marquee speakers.

And for the “connections” portion, every conference-goer should be able to find either a distant cousin or someone with a relative in the same area of Germany or perhaps even the exact village.

Helping facilitate those connections will be sponsors such as Ancestry.com, FamilySearch, MyHeritage and FamilyTreeDNA and many other vendors and exhibitors, including Leland Meitzler’s Family Roots Publishing.

Your “Roots & Branches” columnist needs to disclose two conflicts of interest at this juncture. First of all, I’ve been a cheerleader for the Partnership since I first learned about it four years and was recently named to its board of directors.

Secondly, I put together a sponsorship that includes fellow conference speakers Katherine Schober of SK Translations and Diahan Southard of Your DNA Guide, as well as backing from German Life and Family Tree Magazine. I also chose this venue to mark the conference debut of The Family Tree Historical Atlas of Germany.

In addition to everything going on at the conference, there are also walking tours and day trips available before and after the event to highlight the full Sacramento region.

With speakers and attendees coming from the around the world, the conference’s “connections” and “discoveries” themes will be right within the grasp of the conference-goers.