Ten Years On
A decade ago in the summer of 2014, I was living in California and filled with thoughts of my Pennsylvania family and the lives of our ancestors. I knew that years before, my father,...
Tagged: Beechroots
Bolstering Beechroots with Hagenbuchs, Sheffers, Irvins, and Hymeses
As we approach the end of the tenth year of writing articles for Hagenbuch.org (yes, that will be 520 articles!), Andrew and I have discussed, “Where are we going from here?” The impetus of...
Our Family Tree: Five Decades of Progress and Counting!
After dealing with our family history for 55 years, I have noticed some things about our genealogical efforts compared to others. This is all about “no brag, just fact” as our Hagenbuch family research...
Eight Years On
I felt somewhat dismayed as I sat down to write this year’s retrospective of Hagenbuch.org. In the previous 12 months, only 300 names have been added to Beechroots, our database of family records. Last...
Alphabet Soup: Abreu to Zisch
If you have been reading the articles that Andrew and I have written over the past eight years, you know that I often reference my “paper records”, as I call them. I wrote about...
Discovery: The Sunday School Book of Henry Hagenbuch (b. 1833)
Our Hagenbuch family is full of mysteries. Some arise from our inability to know the thoughts and intentions of our ancestors, while others stem from fragmented historical records. Both complicate the process of telling...
Seven Years On
Just the other week, my father and I were talking about how we started Hagenbuch.org in 2014. He was working on his article the seven year itch, and we were tallying a number of...
Do What You Do (I Don’t Know What You Do)
When I was eleven years old, my parents purchased a video camera. Soon my sisters, cousins, friends, and I were making home movies. The films, with titles like The Detention Girl, had loose plot...
Six Years On
In the late 1970s, historian James Burke hosted a documentary television program called Connections. In each episode, he traced the history of a modern scientific marvel from its humble beginning to fruition. For instance,...
Getting to Know the Family—Through Social Distancing
We are going through a crisis at this time that we never could have imagined just a few months ago. Our visits with our children and grandchildren living in Yardley, Pennsylvania and Freeport, Maine...
