ROOTS & BRANCHES

As your “Roots & Branches” columnist closes in on the year’s end, it seems fitting to leap ahead a little bit to what’s on tap for 2025.

Except for some occasional one-off presentations, my first trip of the year will be to the biggest conference of the year, the annual RootsTech in Salt Lake City, Utah, from March 6–8 at the Salt Palace convention center.

The 2025 edition of RootsTech will use the slogan of “What Will You Discover?” While a portion of the event can be accessed online, a good deal of the conference is only available in-person, including hundreds of classes in various formats, an expo hall with all the latest innovations and products, celebrity speakers on a main stage, and “Family Discovery Day” on the last day of the conference.

My personal involvement is trying to take advantage of those “various formats” for presentations:

• I’m going to be part of a panel discussion titled “Unlocking German Ancestry: Expert Strategies for Finding and Interpreting German Records” with Andrea Bentschneider, a top Germany-based genealogist, and Katherine Schober, the leading translator and owner of Germanology Unlocked. The discussion will cover a wide range of records, including church records, vital records, military documents, and passenger lists.
• In fast-paced format called “Power Hour,” I’ll be in a trio with Schober once again, plus leading immigration expert Rich Venezia to talk about “Germans, Coming and Going: Essentials of Exit and Arrival Records”
• I’ll be solo for a two-hour workshop titled “Using All the Tools for German Genealogy Online,” with will run the gamut of helpful websites—not just what they are but how to use them!

To register for RootsTech, go to the URL, https://www.familysearch.org/en/rootstech/

Then at the very end of April, I’ll be speaking at the Ohio Genealogical Society’s “Light Up Your Genealogy” conference at the Kalahari Resort in Sandusky, Ohio. I’ll be presenting there three times during the event, which runs from April 30 to May 3.

Registration for OGS can be found at the URL, https://www.ogs.org/2025-conference/

In mid-June, I’ll be travelling to Ohio again, this time for the biennial conference of the International German Genealogy Partnership in Columbus.

IGGP’s conference theme is “Celebrating Your German-Speaking Ancestors,” and will be held at the Nationwide Hotel and Conference Center, north of Columbus in Lewis Center, OH.

I’ll be presenting two new lectures, “Matching Villages with Church Records: A Methodical Approach” and “The Peculiarity of Pennsylvania Germans,” and expect to debut an all-new second edition of my book Trace Your German Roots Online is the conference’s exhibit hall.

Registration for the IGGP conference is available at a discounted rate through Feb. 28, and more information is available at the URL, https://iggp.org/2025-iggp-conference/

In mid-July, I’ll be on the faculty of an in-person GRIP Genealogy Institute (at the University of Pittsburgh from July 13–18) course on Pennsylvania land records. Registration for weeklong classes on everything from DNA to advanced German techniques will open on Feb. 4. Full information is available at the URL, https://grip.ngsgenealogy.org/

There are so many genealogy education opportunities in 2025 that it’s bound to be a banner year!