ROOTS & BRANCHES

When “Roots & Branches” reader and my fellow Altoona Mirror columnist James Eugene Wentz reached out to me earlier this year in an attempt to continue his long-sought attempt to verify his surname line into Germany, I had good news and bad news.

The bad news first: Wentz wondered if I was still doing research for hire (as I had referenced in one of my columns about a project I’d handled years and years ago) and that answer was no.

But the good news is that I knew where to send him, and that was my former employer Legacy Tree Genealogists, for whom I worked primarily as an editor from 2018 to 2021.

While I was confident that Legacy Tree would do a thorough job for Wentz, truth be told is that one of the primary reasons I had gotten out of doing research-for-hire work was that in genealogy only the effort is guaranteed … no professional genealogist can (or should!!) create records if it turns out none exist to be found.

And that job gets tougher when the client is someone such as Wentz, who along with his cousin Mary Wentz-Hammel had already produced a doorstop of volume on the family’s history.

Just as he shared a summary of Legacy Tree’s findings in a Mirror column last week, Wentz was kind enough to show me the report details, and it was indicative of what more and more genealogy is about today: Analysis!

Whether it’s a case involving DNA supplementing documentary research or Wentz’s situation (in which most types of genetic genealogy would not be effective) purely involving a paper trail, genealogy now puts much more emphasis on analysis of records and proper use of indirect evidence as proof.

And this is what Wentz’s researcher did so well, including navigating spelling variants of the name as distant (but valid phonetically) as Vence and Vance.

No one record was a “smoking gun” of direct evidence leading from Wentz’s brick wall ancestor Daniel born about 1809; but the researcher sifted through documents such as censuses, deeds, and wills and created charts of those documents that, when taken together, proved the trail from Daniel to two generations named Phillip and found the link to the older Phillip’s father Adolph in Germany.

Wentz indicated his satisfaction in his column and though my angle as a professional is different, I come to the same conclusion that this was a job well done.

My only nitpick would be that I wish the researcher either had done (or recommended, if out of time) that the original 1795 York County will of Phillip Wentz Sr. be obtained to compare the signature on it with the 1752 oath of allegiance signature of Johann Phillipp Wentz, the man who is presumably identical to the testator of the will.