ROOTS & BRANCHES

It was little more than a year ago when I last mentioned Annette K. Burgert in this column.

At that time, I was working my way through what constitutes a “core collection” of Pennsylvania German genealogy resources and I called Burgert “a real-life water dowser for finding the European villages of origin for immigrants.”

This time, it’s with sadness that I share the news that Burgert, a true “village finder” for so many immigrants, died earlier this month.

Burgert wrote many books and monographs during a two-decade span from 1983 to 2000 that brought together European and American information on immigrant families, documenting the origins of thousands of First Wave Germans.

It didn’t take long into her publishing career for her talent to be recognized. In 1990, she was elected a Fellow of the American Society of Genealogists, a designation earned by only 50 living genealogists at a time.

Burgert’s volumes took an area—or sometimes a single village—and gave the connections in the European records (primarily church records but also a variety of other documents such as manumissions) with a variety of American primary sources, including church records, probates, land records and naturalization documents as are found.

Her fulcrum is the passenger lists and Oaths of Allegiance published in Pennsylvania German Pioneers, since this is the transition between Old and New Worlds. What she found is that many immigrants traveled in packs and therefore the list might lead to the village of origin for many families.

While I felt I knew her fairly well over some 30 years, including that she was a nursing school graduate before she became a genealogist, her obituary and tributes made to her on the website of the funeral home that handled her arrangements told me so much more.

I didn’t know she served for decades on advisory boards for the International Order of Rainbow for Girls.

I didn’t know she was a member of the Order of the Eastern Star, although given that this is a group for women that is a sister organization to the Masonic orders for men, and that Annette and her husband spent their final days in a Masonic home, I could have guessed that.

And I didn’t know that her immense home library was donated to Pennsylvania German Cultural Heritage Center on the campus of Kutztown University.

That latter revelation heartened me—that the volumes she’d collected will continue to benefit genealogists in the future.

As a matter of fact, the center was one of the entities to which memorial gifts were designated (those wishing to contribute, donations go to—Attention: Lucy Kern; Heritage Center Library, Pennsylvania German Cultural Heritage Center, Kutztown University; 22 Luckenbill Road; Kutztown, PA 19530).