ROOTS & BRANCHES

I’ve written quite a number of “Roots & Branches” columns telling people that one of the best ways to make sure your genealogy is as complete and credible as possible is to find the local experts—ones who sometimes only know one particular township or borough, but know their territory and the people who lived there.

In Pennsylvania, the good news is that virtually every county has a historical society, most have genealogical societies, and there are a fair number of organizations on the municipal level, too.

The bad news? Well, just try to find them. At one point not too long ago, the county “GenWeb” pages were a helpful clearinghouse; truthfully, they can still be an adequate starting point, even though a lot of them have turned static due to lack of volunteers.

But another alternative—one that’s not new but is constantly updated—is Stephanie Hoover’s online “Directory of Pennsylvania Genealogical & Historical Societies,” a listing of contact information for more than 300 such groups around the state.

Hoover is a central Pennsylvania author and researcher. In addition to historical and genealogical research, she has written the following in the “true crime” genre: The Kelayres Massacre: Politics & Murder in Pennsylvania’s Coal Country, The Killing of John Sharpless: The Pursuit of Justice in Delaware County, and Philadelphia Spiritualism and the Curious Case of Katie King.

She bills her directory as “the largest, most current and accurate directory in existence” and if there’s a bigger one, I haven’t seen it. Hoover recommends using an Internet browser’s “find” function to search for both county ad town/township names to find all possible societies.

For each entry, Hoover’s directory shows the names and addresses of the societies as well as e-mails when known. In cases where the society has a website, the society’s name is a clickable link to that site.

The first instructive thing is that nearly half of the entries do not list a website. While certainly there are some that simply haven’t reported a website to Hoover to list in the directly, there are many smaller societies on the list that likely exist on a “shoestring of volunteership.”

But the people behind these tiny organizations could well be the ones who have the knowledge that would break through a brick wall of yours!

In addition to the society directory, Hoover’s site also has a number of guides to Pennsylvania research, with topics ranging from maps to offices at the courthouses to checklists of records to be searched.

You can find the “Directory of Pennsylvania Genealogical & Historical Societies” from a list on Hoover’s Pennsylvania Research website at the URL:

http://www.pennsylvaniaresearch.com/free-pennsylvania-research-reference.html