ROOTS & BRANCHES

When I last wrote a “Roots & Branches” column about this “core collection” of German genealogy resources, I used the word “titan” for Roger P. Minert in a nod to his lifetime of work adding to the field.

What I realized now, with at least a half a dozen or so installments to go in this series, is that I may run out of superlatives before I’m done.

That’s because the topic of this column is the late Don Yoder (1921–2015), who might be called the “godfather of Pennsylvania German genealogy.”

When I wrote about him a decade and a half ago in Pennsylvania Heritage magazine, I dubbed him the “pioneer of crossovers”—“In many cases, Yoder was not the first to discover or develop particular Pennsylvania German genealogical methodologies, nor was he to become the most prolific practitioner of any of them.”

These “crossovers” included those between folk studies and genealogy, between family historians and academic historians, and between German and American researchers. Since German-speaking immigration to what’s now the United States can be broken down into two large waves—the colonial Pennsylvania Germans and the 19^th century’s German Americans—it would be accurate to say that Yoder has influenced virtually every prominent genealogist involved in documenting the First Wave.

Just listing the entire publishing output of Yoder’s work would span several columns—let alone detailing his prominence in developing scholarship about Pennsylvania German folk art and German-language Bibles … and pretty much everything Pennsylvania German related.

Many of his genealogy works were articles while he was editor of either the Pennsylvania German Folklore Society yearbooks or the Genealogical Society of Pennsylvania’s Pennsylvania Genealogical Magazine.

Collections of those articles were published as Pennsylvania German Immigrants, 1709–1786: Lists Consolidated from Yearbooks of the Pennsylvania German Folklore Society and Rhineland Emigrants: Lists of German Settlers in Colonial America.

Both these compilation volumes show off the methodologies that Yoder helped craft. There are extracts from manumission records found in different German states. There are advertisements for missing heirs. There are other court actions that document emigration.

To researchers. these types of records are golden if their ancestors are found … but also can be useful to say, “Well, what about similar documents from other areas? Can they be found, too?”

Whether “godfather” or “pioneer,” it’s undeniable that Yoder had incredible stature on the field. One of those prominent genealogists who he influenced was Annette K. Burgert, dubbed by some “the village finder.” When “Roots & Branches” returns to this series, she’ll be the next up in the dock.