ROOTS & BRANCHES

It’s a truism of life that “all good things come to an end.”

And so it is with the great deal that Genealogical Society of Pennsylvania has been offering its members with The Pennsylvania Genealogical Almanac.

The publication has been under preparation for a couple of years (yes, most diligent “Roots & Branches” readers will recall that your columnist was interim executive director at GSP when the offer was introduced) and is beginning the process of delivering the completed Almanacs to anyone who has been a member for part or all of the time period beginning March 2022 through the end of this month.

Which gives you a little more than a week for non-members to sign up and receive this $29.95 book as part of a $45 membership.

 After Sept. 30, the Almanac will be for sale while supplies last, and GSP members will receive a discount code.

I’m personally pretty happy to have helped put a guidebook such as the Almanac back in print. That’s because way back during my first stint as executive director of the Genealogical Society of Pennsylvania, I noted that a genealogy guidebook publication called the Pennsylvania Line had gone out of print.

Toward the end of that stint in 2003, I had gotten as far as putting together a table of contents for what I wanted to put in a publication I dubbed The Pennsylvania Genealogical Almanac. I even commissioned the legendary John T. Humphrey to write an article on Pennsylvania’s early church records—one of his many specialties—and dutifully held on to that article even after I left GSP and (later, much to my chagrin) after Humphrey passed a decade later.

Fast forward to 2021. Pennsylvania family historians were still without a guidebook, and I was back at GSP as interim executive director.

Various GSP board members and volunteers took my idea and made it better in all sorts of ways—Kathryn Donahue added much content; GSP President Valerie-Anne Lutz helped shepherd it after I left GSP; and Lutz enlisted Katherine Bucher and Rebecca DeLuca to better format and edit the draft I had produced before I left my GSP post earlier this year.

Among the many features are the following:

• Lists of books, societies and websites
• Online newspaper databases
• Rundown of many historical maps
• Data on geography such as Native American trails and land records
• Information on county formation and municipal outline maps
• “Church Records of Early Pennsylvania” by the late John T. Humphrey
• A  summary of major historical religious denominations
• Vital records details and Commonwealth history outline
• Summary of the published Pennsylvania Archives
• Overview of current and historical townships
• Resources for researching enslaved ancestors
• Maps and background on agriculture and coal
• DNA projects centering on Pennsylvania families

For folks who are not GSP members, sign up for membership on the GSP website, https://genpa.org/