Greece: Tourist and Genealogywise

 

A sculptural gathering of the twelve Olympian gods, seated and standing in hierarchical order, evokes the structure of divine authority on Mount Olympus. At the center sits Zeus, surrounded by the major deities who governed every aspect of ancient Greek life—from war and wisdom to love, the sea, and the harvest. Unlike mythological battle scenes, this composition presents the gods as a unified, if complex, family—ordered, powerful, and ever-present in the Greek world. Photo by Lori Samuelson 25 Mar 2026, Acropolis Museum, Athens, Greece.

I’ve been getting quite a few messages asking about our recent trip to Greece, so I decided to put together a two-part blog with some background this week, and next week I’ll share recommendations if you’re planning your own adventure.

A week before our March departure, we received an email from our travel agent, Gate 1 Travel, telling us our cruise ship was stuck in the Strait of Hormuz. Translation: your trip might not happen.

Three days later, they gave us two options: cancel and get a full refund, or accept a revised itinerary: four days in Crete.

We went.

I refuse to let bullying politicians dictate whether I get to walk in the footsteps of my ancestors.

The trip itself? Smooth, except for the weather, which seemed determined to test our resolve. Intermittent downpours followed us as we climbed mountains in the cold. Where was Zeus when we needed him?

Storm clouds over the Parthenon, 25 March 2026, Photo by Lori Samuelson.

We made our way through Athens, climbed the Parthenon, continued on to Olympia, then Delphi where I picked up a cough that I chose to ignore, and on to Meteora. From there, back to Athens and a short flight to Crete.

And that’s where things got… strange.

I swear our hotel room in Crete was haunted. The first night, I had vivid, unsettling dreams. When I woke, my side of the mattress was halfway off the bed. I had to wake my husband to help fix it.

The next night? His turn. Same thing, odd dreams, followed by a thud as he hit the floor. His mattress was halfway off as well.

We’ve been married over fifty years. This has never happened. Not once.

Sahara Dust Storm before it got worse - seriously! Photo by Lori Samuelson, Crete, 1 April 2026.

Then came day three: a Sahara dust storm. Apparently they happen about three times a year, but this one, on April 1st, of all days, was next level. Nature’s idea of an April Fools joke.

Housekeeping had left our balcony door open.

We came back to a room coated in fine orange dust. My cough worsened, my eyes started itching and watering, and breathing became… challenging. My husband? Completely fine.

So now we know; I’m apparently allergic to the Sahara. Who knew?

Sahara Dust Storm when it went to white out? (red out?) conditions, Photo by Jim Samuelson, Crete, 1 Apr 2026.

Here’s the part that still gives me pause. Had we stayed on the cruise, we were scheduled to be in Santorini that same day. Cruise ships can’t dock there, so passengers rely on ferries and with that weather, those ferries wouldn’t have run.

We would have been stranded. No hotel. No luggage. No backup plan.

So… should I thank those bullying politicians?

Nope. Still not doing it.

One of the highlights of the trip was meeting a probable cousin at a small taverna in Crete. She’s a student at the University of Crete, originally from Kos and she looked exactly like me fifty years ago. Same dark hair, same eyes, same build. It startled my husband more than a little. She is even majoring in an area I did.

Maternal genetics don’t mess around even though I'm unable to prove we're cousins.

The next day we flew to Kos Island, where I had booked a half-day tour through Travelocity. The company happily charged my credit card back in December and then never showed up.

Fortunately, the staff at the Kos Aktis Art Hotel stepped in and found a replacement: a wonderful guide from UniKos Tours.

He took me to what had once been vineyards, very likely the same land my family worked generations ago. Today, it’s a gypsy camp. The residents didn’t mind me taking photos, which felt like a small but meaningful connection to the past.

From there, we visited the Asklepieion of Kos, walked the mountainside associated with Hippocrates, stood beneath the tree where he is said to have taught, explored two medieval castles, stopped at Aphrodite’s temple where the sky promptly opened up and drenched us and found a perfect place to watch the sunset from a mountaintop.

It was, in a word, extraordinary.

Our return home, however, was anything but.

Parthenon at Night. Photo by Lori Samuelson 25 March 2026.

By then, my cough had worsened and my eyes were constantly watering. We spent a sleepless night in the Athens airport before flying to Munich (2.5 hours), waiting two more hours, then enduring a 9.5-hour flight to Chicago. After that? Two hours navigating customs and security, then sprinting to catch our final 30-minute flight to Fort Wayne. We made it with 23 minutes to spare.

Then came the 40-minute drive home.

Happy Easter.

Easter Monday was spent going from doctor to doctor in Auburn. No one had seen a “Sahara dust storm victim” before, which didn’t inspire confidence. My physician child kept telling me to just ask for allergy meds, but no one would listen. I kept getting sent somewhere else.

I finally landed in an eye doctor’s office, someone who actually knew what they were looking at, and I’m now on the mend.

Several locals have told me they’d never travel the way I do, for fear of getting sick.

I’d do it again tomorrow.

Life is what you make of it. Fear doesn’t take you anywhere worth going.

Next week, I’ll answer some of the questions I’ve been getting about traveling to places a little off the grid.

An Island Without a Name

Photo by Lori Samuelson 4 April 2026

Did you guess where I traveled? It was Kos Island, Greece.

I’ve gone back in time, way back, to a place where my ancestors lived nearly 2,000 years ago. This journey didn’t begin with a record set or an archive, but with a story passed down by my grandmother. She said our family once left an island to the south, around the time of Christ. They were vintners. There were too many people. The land was dry. They left because they had to. She didn’t know the name of the island, only the reason they went.

For years, that story lingered as just that: a story. But when mitochondrial DNA entered the picture, something remarkable happened. My mtDNA traces directly across Kos Island, an island whose name my family has carried, in one form or another, since at least the 1200s, when I first find them documented in their later home in Croatia. Even more compelling, historical research confirms that Kos was overpopulated and experienced periods of drought roughly 2,000 years ago. The pieces fit, not perfectly, but persuasively.

What fascinates me most is not that the story was complete, but that it was true enough. Family stories rarely preserve dates, place names, or precise routes. What they do preserve are motives: hunger, pressure, hope, survival. In this case, the story of farmers leaving an unnamed island aligns with both genetic evidence and environmental history. That’s not coincidence, that’s migration memory.

This is why I never dismiss family stories outright. Even when details are missing or blurred, they often contain a core truth waiting to be tested. With the right tools, DNA, geography, climate history, and records, we can sometimes confirm far more than we expect. Migration leaves footprints not just in documents, but in names, occupations, and the quiet persistence of who we are.

What's Old is New

I attended an interesting lecture on a man named Edwin Butterworth. He died young, about 35, in a small village in Great Britain. I was not aware that the famous Baines historian hired local folks to gather information for his works. Baines was a non-conformist so he had difficulty gaining access to many of the English churches. He was a man of considerable means as he owned newspapers so he used his money to hire people to dig into the local records. One of those men was Edwin Butterworth. I absolutely love this quote he wrote in a letter to Peter Whittle, Editor of the Preston Chronicle published in 1836:

"The sons of this 'degenerate age' have I fear too little taste for the interesting details of Antiquarian publications. It is a well founded complaint that the majority of books now published are flimsy, slight and too imaginative. Works abounding in matters of fact useful knowledge and pure style are few. Utility is sacrificed to the rage of things for specious nothingness. This is an era of brief ostentation not of standard excellence - periods more brilliant in elaborate literature than the present have occurred in English history."

Umm, so I guess things haven't changed much since 1836?! If you are finding your family's eyes glaze over when use try to tell them about your awesome genealogical find - know that you aren't alone. Edwin felt the same way nearly 200 years ago.

I will be heading off on an adventure for the next two weeks so no blogs until I return. Happy Hunting!

How Did Medieval Europe Communicate Without Modern Technology?A Genealogist’s Reality Check

 

AI Image

While researching the dynastic connections for Volumes 3 & 4 of Echoes of Britannia, I kept having the same reaction over and over again: Wait… they were connected to where?

Britain was tying into Iberia.
Then Italy.
Then Hungary.
Then Byzantium.
Then Slavic territories far beyond anything that felt intuitively “British.”

I knew the Vikings went everywhere,  that part wasn’t surprising. But what caught me off guard was just how deeply Saxons, Normans, Franks, Iberians, Italians, Hungarians, and Byzantine-linked elites were woven into Britain’s ruling families. These weren’t isolated marriages or rare diplomatic curiosities. They were part of a broad, sustained network.

Which raises the obvious question modern minds struggle with:

How did this actually work?
No phones. No email. Limited literacy. Slow travel. Dozens of spoken languages.

And yet, it worked.

Genealogy, once again, forced me to rethink my assumptions.

1. There Was No Single Spoken Language But There Was a System!

The medieval world did not rely on one universal spoken language. What it relied on instead was a layered communication system, where different languages served different purposes.

At the center of that system was Latin.

From roughly the ninth century through the late Middle Ages, Latin functioned as the administrative glue of Europe. It was the language of:

• diplomacy
• treaties
• royal charters
• marriage contracts
• ecclesiastical records
• legal proceedings

If something mattered across borders, it was written in Latin.

That doesn’t mean kings and queens sat around conversing fluently in Latin over dinner. It means their administrations could communicate seamlessly even when rulers themselves spoke different vernaculars.

This is an important distinction genealogy makes visible: rulers did not need to be literate if their systems were.

2. The Clergy Were the Communication Network

In a world without technology, communication was human and the most mobile, educated humans were clergy.

Priests, monks, bishops, and notaries:

• were trained in Latin
• moved between courts, monasteries, and dioceses
• served as scribes, translators, advisors, and diplomats
• maintained correspondence across thousands of miles

A bishop in England could correspond with a monastery in Italy or a royal court near Hungary with little difficulty because they shared the same educational foundation.

This clerical network is one of the most underestimated forces in medieval connectivity. It never truly collapsed, even in times of political chaos. Genealogy doesn’t always spotlight it because clergy leave fewer descendants but their documentary footprints are everywhere.

3. Vernacular Languages Were Not the Barrier We Imagine

Another modern assumption genealogy dismantles is the idea that language differences must have made communication nearly impossible.

In reality, elite multilingualism was normal.

Consider:

• Norman rulers spoke Old French, governed English speakers, and relied on Latin documentation
• Scandinavian elites blended Old Norse and Old English
• Iberian courts operated in early Romance languages alongside Latin and often Arabic or Hebrew
• Byzantine elites used Greek internally but communicated externally through Latin-trained intermediaries

Royal and noble children were frequently raised multilingual. They were fostered in foreign courts, educated by clerics, and married into households where new languages were learned as a matter of survival.

When a British noblewoman married into Castile or Lombardy, she didn’t arrive linguistically isolated. She arrived with tutors, chaplains, ladies-in-waiting, and clerks who maintained continuity while adaptation occurred.

4. Marriage Was a Communication Technology

Genealogy makes one thing clear over and over again: marriage carried infrastructure with it.

A dynastic marriage wasn’t just a bride and groom. It was:

• an entourage
• translators
• administrators
• cultural intermediaries

Courts didn’t become multilingual accidentally. Marriage imported language, customs, and political intelligence.

This is one reason Britain’s links to Iberia, Italy, and the Slavic world feel so sudden when viewed casually but look entirely logical when traced through families. Every marriage was also a conduit.

5, Trade Routes Were Information Routes

It’s impossible to separate genealogy from geography and this is where the Vikings stop being the “exception” and start being the illustration.

Trade routes across:

• the North Sea
• the Baltic
• the Mediterranean
• major river systems like the Rhine and Danube

moved more than goods. They moved ideas, norms, stories, political knowledge, and people.

England wasn’t at the edge of Europe. It was part of a maritime and river-based world that connected Britain to Byzantium more reliably than many inland regions.

By the time dynasties intermarried, the world they were entering was already familiar.

Byzantium Only Feels Distant Because We Were Taught It Was

For modern audiences, Byzantine connections often feel the most shocking. That’s largely because our historical narratives split “East” and “West” far earlier than medieval reality did.

In the medieval mind, Byzantium was:

• Christian
• imperial
• diplomatically engaged
• genealogically relevant

Byzantine elites used Greek internally and Latin externally. They intermarried with Slavic, Hungarian, and Western ruling houses. These connections didn’t feel exotic at the time, they feel exotic now because modern history textbooks simplified them away.

So Was There a Common Language?

Functionally, yes — Latin.

Practically, it depended on context.

Administration and law: Latin
Religion: Latin in the West, Greek in the East
Court life: local vernaculars and French
Diplomacy: Latin
Daily life: regional languages

This layered system worked because everyone understood its rules.

6. Why This Matters for Echoes of Britannia

Volumes 3 & 4 of my book didn’t uncover anomalies. It uncovered how Europe functioned.

Britain was not shaped in isolation. It was shaped through:

• marriage networks
• clerical communication
• trade routes
• multilingual courts

What feels astonishing now is only astonishing because modern narratives falsely emphasize fragmentation. Medieval Europe was plural but integrated.

7. The Larger Genealogical Lesson

Technology didn’t create connectivity.
People did.

Systems built on education, mobility, and shared administrative languages connected continents long before cables and satellites existed.

Genealogy reminds us of this quietly and persistently. Every marriage record, charter, and dynastic link tells the same story: the medieval world was more interconnected and more functional than we were taught to believe.

And once you see it, you can’t unsee it.

RootsTech is on the Horizon!

 

I’ll be heading to Salt Lake City for RootsTech, and if you’re attending in person, I’d truly love to connect. I’ll be presenting Voices That Vanish; Capturing Family Stories That Matter on 5 March at 9:30 AM in Room 155 EF, and you’re warmly invited to join me.

I also have a second session, What They Didn’t Write Down, available as a pre-recorded presentation available on 3/4 at 9:00 AM Mountain Time; please be sure to check that out as well.

Looking ahead, I’m becoming more intentional about meeting readers and fellow genealogists face-to-face, whether I’m presenting or simply attending. Conferences are as much about conversation as they are about lectures, and I hope this is the beginning of more informal, meaningful connections. If you see me at RootsTech, please say hello, I’d love that.

A Tech Lesson Learned The Hard Way

 

AI Image

Oh, technology. You love it when it works and you despise it when it fails.

I recently had a failure that stopped me cold, even though I was absolutely certain I had done everything right. I’m sharing what happened so you can avoid making the same mistake.

My number one rule has always been to back up. And I do. Religiously. But sometimes, even that isn’t enough.

I was working on Volume 5 of Echoes of Britannia when I realized it had grown too large and really needed to be split. I saved Volume 5, made a copy on my desktop, and renamed that copy Volume 6. Then I opened Volume 5, deleted the material that would live in Volume 6, saved, and closed it. Next, I opened Volume 6, deleted the material that belonged in Volume 5, saved, and closed that file as well.

That evening, I saved both files to Dropbox and to a standalone external hard drive.

All seemed right with the world. Sure.

Three weeks later, while working on Volume 8, I became confused about a pedigree and reopened Volume 6 to double-check a spouse. That’s when I noticed something was wrong. The footnote I was looking for was gone. In fact, nearly three-quarters of the footnotes in Volume 6 were missing.

I refused to panic. Surely it was just the way Word had loaded the document. I closed it without saving and reopened it.

Nope. Still gone.

No worries, I told myself. I’ll just open the Dropbox version.

The footnotes were gone there, too.

That actually made sense, every night I saved over the same files. But Dropbox keeps deleted versions for thirty days, right? Except…there was nothing to restore. Why? Because I hadn’t deleted the file. I had saved over it using the same filename. The old version was overwritten, not archived.

At this point, panic started to creep in but I reminded myself I also saved everything to a standalone hard drive. Surely that would save me.

It didn’t.

About a week and a half earlier, I had uploaded the entire folder to the drive, overwriting those files as well.

Now I was panicking and I knew I wasn’t thinking clearly. So I did the sensible thing: I turned to Geni, my trusty ChatGPT research assistant.

After I explained the situation, he calmly told me the truth: there was no way to recover what was lost.

Then, cheerfully, he added that it wasn’t so bad. I’d written it once, so I could write it again.

OMG. No. That was the last thing I wanted to hear.

Let’s just say you were lucky you weren’t at my house at that moment. I railed against the universe. How dare this happen when I had been so careful, so diligent, so responsible?

And then, right in the middle of that fury, it hit me.

Geni might have the footnotes.

Here’s something I didn’t fully appreciate until that moment: he did. Almost all of them.

As I wrote these volumes, I frequently turned to Geni with a skeleton narrative and uploaded my research finds. My prompt was always the same: “Write a short, tight, engaging narrative with Chicago-style footnotes from the information I provide, with no subheadings or conclusions.”

Using the chat search feature, I was able to locate most of those narratives. Rebuilding the footnotes wasn’t instant but it was possible. It took three full days to reattach everything, but that was infinitely better than starting from scratch.

Eight narratives were missing footnotes. Geni explained that saved chats can sometimes be lost during system upgrades, which may account for those gaps. He also gently pointed out something else I shouldn’t be doing: I tend to write very long chats. The longer the chat, the more likely parts of it may become difficult to retrieve later.

Lesson learned.

I now know that when I save files to Dropbox or to an external drive, I must rename them every time so they don’t overwrite earlier versions. Backups only work if the history survives.

AI has been a wonderful partner in my genealogy work over the past two years, but it never occurred to me that it might become the one place where my work still existed when everything else failed.

Add this to the list of reasons why I love AI.

Palatines of America Conference

Registration opened for the 2026 Palatines to America National Conference, to be held in Lancaster, Pennsylvania, June 19, 2026. Early registration discount is available until April 15. The conference has activities and tours planned in addition to many presentations by genealogy experts on subjects related to German migration, military service, occupations, Revolutionary War experience, Amish and Mennonite research, and more. I’ll be presenting two talks – Palatinate Pathways:  From One Homeland to Many American Homes and From Soldiering to Civil Life. See full details at https://www.pennpalam.org/cpage.php?pt=19