ROOTS & BRANCHES

A happy coincidence came together for me this year to revisit a couple of my previous writings about Pennsylvania genealogy.

For a couple of years, I had known that a second edition was due for Pennsylvania: A History of the Commonwealth, a book from Penn State Press and the Pennsylvania Historical and Museum Commission first published two decades ago. There was a chronology history as well as chapters “ways to Pennsylvania’s history,” of which my genealogy chapter was one.

I also was approached by Family Tree Magazine that they were redoing their state guides series in the magazine, for which I had written a four-page survey of Pennsylvania research about 15 years ago.

Two things are always evident when you come back to previous works after a bit of time.

First you realize how many things have changed as far as records accessibility and other aspects of genealogy.

Then the second thing hits you—how could I have been that certain about things that either were considerably more nuanced than I originally wrote or weren’t so at all? (I take grace in this latter consideration from no less than the late Russell F. Weigley, Temple University professor and editor of the 300^th anniversary history book on Philadelphia, when I moan a bit about a piece I had just turned in: “You’ve only done something wrong if you don’t see things you’d like to change.”)

The more complicated effort was revising the chapter for the Pennsylvania history book, since revisions were supposed to be kept to a certain percentage of the original text, and there were things such as DNA to cover that just weren’t a thing back 20 years ago.

I also tried to highlight a greater diversity of records as well as giving more information about finding information about more difficult-to-find demographics such as pre-liberation women and Blacks.

For the “Pennsylvania Research Guide,” it was more adjusting to the pleasant realities that many more records have become accessible:

• Changes to the state’s vital records laws enabled birth (after 105 years) and death certificates (after 50 years) to become public records and these are now available on Ancestry.com
• FindMyPast.com spearheaded the digitization of many of state’s Roman Catholic records, only a tiny fraction of which previously had been available for research.
• A large database of church records originally microfilmed by the Genealogical Society of Pennsylvania and the Historical Society of Pennsylvania is now on Ancestry.com, as is a big collection of probate records collected by what’s now FamilySearch.org.

The second edition of Pennsylvania: A History of the Commonwealth won’t be available until next year but, the “Pennsylvania Research Guide” is free on the Family Tree Magazine website at the URL: https://www.familytreemagazine.com/pennsylvania-genealogy/

A  downloadable PDF version of the “Pennsylvania Research Guide” can be purchased on the site.