ROOTS & BRANCHES

I had just hit upon this week’s “Roots & Branches” topic when Facebook showed me a shot of Germanology Unlocked’s Katherine Schober rightfully crowing about the fact that Brigham Young University uses her two books as texts in their paleography course.

The irony of this is that those two books—Tips and Tricks of German Handwriting and The Magic of German Church Records—are on my “top shelf,” and that’s what I had decided to write about.

Ever since I reorganized my home library nearly two decades ago, I’ve had a particular arrangement to my genealogy bookcase, which I intentionally keep to one bookcase (OK, there are some large series like the Map Guide to German Parish Registers that are on an “overflow” bookcase!) so as not to have the library overrun the house as has happened to some of the genealogists who mentored me.

On this main bookcase, I keep my collection of maps on the very top, since I keep as many of them flat and they need the space.

Describing the shelves beneath, I’ll start from the bottom up:

• Closest to floor the big bulky, oversized books, including a few family histories.
• Next up is my collection of German genealogy reference books, end-capped (that is, standing the books on their sides to work more in) by the ones I use the most such as Annette Burgert’s and Werner Hackers.
• Next I have Pennsylvania books, starting with Lancaster and Philadelphia counties and then more general works. The end-cap on this shelf is the late John T. Humphrey’s Pennsylvania Births series.
• The shelf above that has my primary counties of interest, my home county of Berks and then Lebanon, where a fair bit of my research has focused.

Then we reach the “top shelf,” which is an eclectic collection of some of books I use the most as well as others I simply treasure either for how well done they are or my connection to their authors.

The end-cap books on the top shelf are Henry Z “Hank” Jones Jr.’s volumes on the 1709 Palatines of New York, which includes about a dozen of my families.

Next is my set of Pennsylvania German Pioneers, the published collection of the colonial ship and oaths lists on which so many of my ancestors appear.

I have a couple of well-done books by Nic Stoltzfus, German Lutherans to Pennsylvania Amish and In the Footsteps of My Stoltzfus Family.

Patricia Law Hatcher’s classic Producing a Quality Family History is there, too.

Also making the cut is Your DNA Guide—the Book by Diahan Southard (we’re still waiting for the movie).

There are some oldies such as Richard Lackey’s Cite Your Sources.

And, yes, I have copies of all four of my commercially published books there.

What’s on your top shelf?