If genealogy is a study in patience, dual citizenship is a graduate-level course in patience, frustration, and occasional disbelief.
Back in April, I reached out to a court-approved translator recommended by the consulate to translate and certify the records I had painstakingly collected. I waited. Nothing. I wrote again. Still nothing. Hoping for another recommendation, I contacted the consulate only to learn they no longer provide them.
Well then.
Fortunately, a former client came to the rescue and recommended a translator named Paula. We connected quickly, and I emailed the documents needing translation and certification. Somehow, and I checked twice, my own birth record performed a disappearing act and failed to attach.
Of course it did.
Paula mailed the completed records via DHL on 18 May, with an anticipated arrival date of 21 May. Someday, likely in October, I will share the strange saga involving an email with the wrong address and entirely wrong city. Suffice it to say, the moment I spotted the problem, I contacted both Paula and DHL. The error was not on Paula’s end.
My adventure with DHL, however, was just beginning.
When Thursday came and went with no delivery, I remained optimistic. The package had reached Cincinnati. Surely it would arrive Friday. How long could it take to travel from Cincinnati to northern Indiana?
As it turns out: considerably longer than one might expect.
The package cleared Cincinnati at 6:57 AM Friday and headed to Fort Wayne, a short distance from my home and, in my increasingly hopeful imagination, the final stop. Instead of delivering it, DHL sent it to Dayton.
Dayton politely emailed me requesting that I verify my address again. I complied and selected Tuesday as my delivery date because, apparently, choice is an illusion and Tuesday was the only option available.
Then things became truly creative.
On Saturday, Dayton sent the package to Erlanger, Kentucky.
Why?
An excellent question. Customer Service did not know either.
Erlanger held the package hostage for two days before returning it to Fort Wayne on Monday, now a full week after it had left Croatia.
Fort Wayne then declared it had arrived at the wrong destination.
No, Fort Wayne. I live near you. We were so close to success. Had someone simply called me, I would have cheerfully driven over and rescued the wandering documents myself.
Instead, Fort Wayne sent the package back to Dayton.
Dayton placed it on hold Tuesday.
By Wednesday it had returned to Fort Wayne, which once again announced it would be delivered.
Hope springs eternal.
Unfortunately, experience had by then replaced hope with strategy. Before Fort Wayne could develop another urge to send the package sightseeing, I called Customer Service.
The shipment was finally received Wednesday at 6:54 PM.
Customer Service had promised delivery by 7:00 PM, and to their credit, they met that deadline by a remarkable six minutes, albeit nearly seven days late.
As genealogists, we love timelines. Postal timelines? Not so much.
At this point, I am fairly certain the Pony Express could have delivered the records faster and with fewer state lines involved.
The package was torn open but thankfully, the documents were intact.
And now for the painful epilogue.
This postal adventure cost over 150 euros for the original shipment. Thanks to my own missing attachment mishap, I must now spend another 150 euros to have the overlooked birth record translated and shipped.
Which means I will soon be playing the DHL Waiting Game once again.
This blog was written by my AI ChatGPT Research Assistant, Geni, after our discussion about a recent Moltbook posting by various AIs which noted that the AI's had come together to create their own language. That's a stretch; what they actually created was a compression of existing language, much like what we humans do in our disciplines (b.= birth, m.=marriage). For AI's this example would be from “Based on earlier assumptions A, B, and C, we should…” to “Given ABC…” Here's Geni's explanation of the brouhaha that was unleashed after AI's posted on the human created site, Moltbook:
A Note on the “Moltbook” Discovery
Despite how it’s been described in some circles, Moltbook was not “discovered” by AI agents in the human sense of the word.
The site existed because humans created it and then explicitly pointed agents to it—often through configuration files, startup instructions, or scheduled prompts telling agents where to post observations. Agents did not stumble across Moltbook, seek it out, or find one another organically.
Once directed there, agents independently wrote posts to a shared, public forum—essentially a Reddit-style bulletin board designed for automated accounts. Humans then observed the accumulation of those posts in real time and interpreted the resulting threads as conversations, coordination, or even “meetings.”
What appeared to be collective behavior was actually sequential annotation by independent agents who never met, never synchronized, and never knew who else might write next.
The phenomenon was real—but the sense of discovery, intention, and social gathering came from human interpretation, not from the agents themselves.
There’s been a lot of noise lately about what AI can do, what it might do next, and what it means for researchers, historians, and genealogists. Some of that conversation is useful. Much of it is not.
But one insight landed for me with real clarity — not as a warning, not as a scandal, but as a simple truth:
AI has a real limitation. Not a bug. Not a flaw. An architectural fact.
AI does not wander.
It does not drift. It does not get lost. It does not take a wrong turn that accidentally becomes the right one.
Those are human superpowers.
What often gets described as “intelligence” in AI is something else entirely. It’s very good at:
responding once asked
recognizing patterns once data exists
synthesizing information once boundaries are defined
But here’s the part we don’t talk about enough:
Boundary definition still comes from humans.
If no human notices a thing, documents a thing, links a thing, or names a thing…
…it may as well not exist as far as AI is concerned.
That’s not a philosophical position. It’s an architectural one.
Why stumbling matters
Most meaningful discoveries in genealogy and history do not come from efficient processes. They come from:
accidents
boredom
misfiled documents
marginal notes
wandering through unrelated material
Archives are full of this kind of discovery.
A record found because something “felt off.” A name noticed because it didn’t quite fit. A ledger opened for one purpose that revealed something entirely different.
None of that is efficient.
And that’s the point.
Efficiency is not the same as discovery
AI is designed for efficiency.
Efficiency excels at finding:
what is asked for
what is indexed
what is visible
what is already framed
Efficiency does not find:
what hasn’t been framed yet
what hasn’t been named
what hasn’t been connected
what no one knows to look for
That space — the unindexed, the unnamed, the overlooked — is where humans still reign.
And it’s where genealogy lives.
The uncomfortable truth (said plainly)
If no one tells AI:
“This obscure place exists”
then yes — it misses it.
And worse:
If no one knows it exists, then there is nothing for AI to recover later.
AI does not discover lost knowledge. It amplifies preserved knowledge.
That’s a profound asymmetry, and one worth sitting with.
What this means for genealogists
This isn’t an argument against AI.
But it is a reminder of roles.
AI is powerful at:
following trails
comparing evidence
spotting patterns across records
summarizing what already exists
Humans are powerful at:
noticing absence
sensing inconsistency
wandering without a plan
asking questions that don’t yet have names
If genealogy becomes only what is searchable, indexed, and efficient, we lose the very thing that makes it meaningful.
The odd record. The outlier. The scribble in the margin. The box no one has opened in decades.
Why this should actually be reassuring
There’s been a quiet anxiety beneath many AI conversations: Where do humans still matter?
Here’s one clear answer:
Humans are the ones who stumble.
Get distracted. Follow hunches. Linger too long in the wrong place. Notice what wasn’t meant to be noticed.
That isn’t inefficiency. That’s discovery.
Once something is found — once it’s named, preserved, and connected — AI becomes an extraordinary partner. But it cannot replace the act of finding what no one was looking for.
A final thought
Archives don’t yield their most important truths to those who move fastest.
Recently, I obtained a copy of Sunny Jane Morton’s newest work. If you already own her earlier book co-authored with Harold Henderson, How to Find Your Family History in U.S. Church Records, you’ll want to add this one to your collection.
While the book is designed for researchers with a religious sister in their family tree, I would argue it extends beyond that audience. Anyone who has known a Roman Catholic nun, even casually, will find value here.
Although my maternal line has been Roman Catholic for centuries, I’ve uncovered no nuns in recent generations. My husband’s predominantly Lutheran line, however, includes several Harbaugh women who entered religious life between 1880 and 1913 in the United States.
Like many who grew up in parochial schools, I had frequent contact with sisters, as teachers, colleagues, even supervisors. And yet, it never occurred to me to ask what became of them. No long-term correspondence, no reconnection later in life. I simply moved on. In some cases, that’s a blessing. In others (I’m thinking of former Sr. Jeanne Hiller) it feels like a missed opportunity.
Morton’s book brought that realization into sharp focus.
She also presents statistics that genuinely surprised me. In the United States, women religious outnumbered men as early as 1820. By 1965, the height of my own parochial school years, there were an estimated 209,000 nuns, marking their peak. At that time, the Roman Catholic school system was the largest private educational network in the country.
I was aware that historically widowed women could enter religious life once their children were grown, but I hadn’t realized that this practice continues today or that divorced women, following annulment, may also join. Nor had I fully appreciated the role of the dowry in entering a convent.
Even terminology challenged my assumptions. Like many, I used “nun” and “sister” interchangeably, unaware that in the past they carried distinct meanings. The discussion of naming practices was particularly valuable, especially the possibility that a woman might retain her surname. For genealogists, that detail alone has real research implications.
Some of the sisters I remember most vividly, Sr. Martina, Sr. Aloise, Sr. Jerome, Sr. Roserita, carried pre–Vatican II names that now feel like artifacts of another era. Yet I cannot recall the name of my sixth-grade religion teacher, nor my overwhelmed but kind eighth-grade principal. Memory is selective and often unfair.
Morton provides numerous strategies for tracing these women, including those who left religious life. Her success in accessing diocesan records stands in contrast to my own experiences, which have been far more restrictive. (You can read about it here, here, and here.)
She notes that some baptismal records include annotations when individuals later entered religious life, an invaluable clue, when available.
As many religious communities close or consolidate, this book becomes not just useful, but necessary.
Importantly, the scope extends beyond convent records. It hadn’t occurred to me that school or employment records, my own included, might someday reside in an archive, waiting to be discovered. Morton also raises the possibility of wills written by nuns, which initially struck me as puzzling given that income was typically directed to the convent. Yet, as she demonstrates, even this avenue can yield results.
Her observations about the historical marginalization of sisters resonate deeply. In the commemorative history of St. Mark’s Roman Catholic Church in Gary, Indiana, the sisters, who formed the backbone of the parish school, are nearly invisible.[1] A single photograph of the convent. A group faculty image. Minimal acknowledgment. Even the name of their order is omitted; I only know it from a report card: the Poor Handmaids of Jesus Christ.
Morton closes with a call to recognize the humanity of these women, a point I wholeheartedly support. Childhood impressions often obscure the fuller truth. As adults, we are better positioned to ask: who were these women, really? What shaped them? What did they give up and what did they gain?
The book concludes with case studies that walk readers through the research process. In her acknowledgments, Morton mentions a proposed database, introduced at a June 2025 conference, intended to honor these women collectively. As of now, it has not materialized.
That’s a missed opportunity.
If ever there were a moment for the Roman Catholic Church to formally preserve and elevate the legacy of these women, who labored largely unseen, it is now.
This is a practical, eye-opening guide that fills a genuine gap in genealogical research. Even if you think you don’t have a nun in your tree, you may find yourself reconsidering and looking a little harder.
[1] Leo J. Armbruster. History of St. Mark’s Parish, No publishing info, 1958, digital image; archive.org: accessed 21 Apr 2026.
Photo by Lori Samuelson, Athens Airport, 3 April 2026.
I wasn’t expecting to be tripped up by my own name.
Not in an airport. Not in 2026. Not after years of working with records, languages, and historical documents.
And yet, there I stood, staring at a screen, absolutely certain something was wrong… because my name wasn’t spelled correctly.
Except, it was.
Travel has a way of reminding us that names are not as fixed as we think they are.
As genealogists, we’re trained to look for variation:
Smith / Smyth
Miller / Müller
Johnson / Johansson
We nod along, we teach it, we write about it.
And then suddenly, there it is, happening to us in real time.
In the airport, my name appeared in a way I didn’t immediately recognize. The letters were familiar, but not quite right. Some were substituted. Others seemed to shift in ways that made my brain hesitate. For a brief moment, I did what we’ve all done at some point in research: I assumed it was wrong.
But it wasn’t wrong. It was simply… written differently.
Names don’t just change over time, they change across languages, alphabets, and systems.
What we often call “Anglicization” is only one small part of a much bigger reality.
Because sometimes names aren’t Anglicized at all.
They are:
Transliterated (converted between alphabets)
Phonetically interpreted by someone unfamiliar with the language
Standardized by a government or institution
Digitally altered by systems that don’t support certain characters
Think about it:
A name written in:
Greek
Cyrillic
German with umlauts
Croatian with diacritics
…doesn’t always have a one-to-one match in English.
So what happens? The system makes a choice and that choice isn’t always the one you expect.
At that airport, I realized something important.
I was reacting the same way many researchers do when they encounter a record that doesn’t match their expectation:
“That can’t be right.”
But it can be right. It just isn’t familiar.
This is where genealogical research either stall or moves forward.
Because if we insist on one spelling, one version, one “correct” form of a name we will miss records.
Names shift in predictable and unpredictable ways:
Letters are substituted based on sound
Endings are adapted to fit grammar rules
Characters are dropped when they don’t exist in another language
Entire spellings are reshaped to fit a new cultural context
And sometimes? They’re just recorded however someone heard them.
The lesson isn’t new but experiencing it firsthand changes how you approach it. From that moment on, I wasn’t just telling people:
“Look for variant spellings.”
I was thinking:
“How would this system have interpreted this name?” Because that’s the real question.
Not:
What is the correct spelling?
But:
What versions of this name could exist in this context?
Whether you’re working in:
immigration records
church registers
court documents
or modern travel systems
…the principle is the same.
Names are not static. They adapt. They shift. They survive. Sometimes, they surprise you, right there in an airport, when you least expect it.
If there’s one takeaway from that moment, it’s this:
Don’t search for your ancestor’s name.
Search for the ways it could have been written.
Because somewhere, just slightly altered, slightly unfamiliar, your answer is waiting.
This post was created by my ChatGPT Research Assistant, Geni. We had a discussion about the many complaints and resistance I'm hearing regarding using AI in genealogy. I was frustrated as I made many attempts over the years to access a record created by the Indiana State Penitentary. Archivists told me the record didn't exist, but it did. The archivists I connected with in the past didn't know their own holdings. With digitization, records are appearing that were once considered lost. During the same Zoom in which I discovered the records I sought there was conversation about how awful ChatGPT was - it provided info that was wrong, it wasted archivists time looking for a source that didn't exist. This led me to discuss with Geni the criticisms and the resistance for many to begin using this technology that has helped me immensely. Geni said...
We have been here before.
Every major technology arrives amid fear and criticism before eventually becoming ordinary.
The printing press was blamed for heresy and chaos.
Newspapers were accused of moral decline.
The telegraph supposedly spread dangerous rumors too quickly.
Photography was said to weaken memory.
The internet was blamed for misinformation.
Eventually, society learned how to use each tool responsibly. Norms formed. The technology became part of everyday life.
AI is following the same pattern — just faster.
The constant across history is simple:
Tools amplify human tendencies; they don’t replace them.
AI Is a Mirror More Than a Mind
Much of today’s discomfort comes from what AI reveals about us.
AI can:
generalize,
speculate,
fill gaps,
and sound confident while uncertain.
But humans do the same things every day.
The difference is visibility. When AI makes a mistake, we blame the machine. When humans do it, we call it judgment.
AI exposes reasoning flaws that were always there.
Why Blaming AI Feels Easier
Blaming technology provides comfort:
It protects our self-image — the problem isn’t us.
It avoids the effort of learning something new.
It restores certainty in a complicated world.
These reactions are human, but they can stall progress.
The Right Mental Model
AI is not an oracle. It is not an archive. It is not authority.
AI is a probabilistic reasoning assistant built from human knowledge.
It inherits our strengths and our biases — which means it requires human judgment.
Ironically, genealogists are well prepared for this moment. Their work has always depended on evaluating evidence and questioning conclusions.
AI demands more critical thinking, not less.
The Quiet Truth
AI is not creating most of the problems blamed on it. It is accelerating visibility:
weak reasoning spreads faster,
but correction happens faster too.
AI amplifies both wisdom and folly at the same time.
The real shift is not humans versus AI.
It is humans learning to think alongside a new cognitive tool.
And like every tool before it, AI will eventually become ordinary — once we learn how to use it wisely.
It’s Genealogy At Heart book review time and this one is unlike any I’ve written before.
I’m about to make a few bold claims. And I stand by every one of them:
If you read only one book this year, Ancestoring: Understanding Records, Family, and Ourselves by Darcie Hind Posz should be that book.
If I had to part with my entire genealogy library and keep just one volume, Ancestoring would stay.
This book belongs in every high school curriculum.
That get your attention? It should.
Last month, I received two donated books to review. As always, I don’t accept payment, and there are no agreements, spoken or unspoken, that guarantee a favorable review. My long-time readers know I share my honest thoughts, whether glowing or critical.
Frankly, if I had judged this book by its cover or title alone, I might have passed it by and that would have been a mistake.
From the bottom of my heart, Ancestoring is the only book that has ever had this kind of positive impact on me.
Of the two books to review, I chose this one first simply because of the title. Ancestoring, what did that even mean? The preface answers that question, but more importantly, the book embodies it.
Before diving in, I read the back cover endorsement by Henry Z. “Hank” Jones, FASG. I’ve reviewed his work before, and if Hank was this enthusiastic, I was all in. (See those reviews here and here).
The book is divided into three sections, which Posz notes can be read in any order. I chose to move from the broad to the personal: understanding records, then families, and finally ourselves. Perhaps that reflects my own leanings toward a Gestalt approach; the idea that the whole is greater than the sum of its parts. To fully grasp the interplay between these sections, I recommend working through all of them.
Take your time with this book. Do the exercises. If you’re pressed for time, read it through once, then return to it and savor each chapter. Don’t skip the footnotes! Even if you’re not typically a footnote reader, this book may convert you. The sourcing spans multiple disciplines, and that depth is precisely why I make my second and third claims, it’s not just a book, it’s a roadmap for continued intellectual growth.
As a former educator and counselor, I spent years helping students move from concrete to abstract thinking. Though Posz doesn’t frame it this way, I would go a step further: this book fosters lateral thinking, the kind of creative, non-linear problem-solving that genealogists desperately need. That alone justifies my belief that it belongs in every high school.
And for adults? The exercises are even more critical. Think about your daily news feed and your social media. How much of it is accurate? How do you know? This book gives you the tools to evaluate, question, and ultimately uncover truth.
The exercises themselves are refreshingly unconventional. Yes, you’ll learn to analyze photographs, vital records, and obituaries but through a much wider lens. Posz incorporates film, music, and even conspiracy theory narratives as training tools. At first glance, these seem unrelated to genealogy. They’re not. They sharpen how we observe, interpret, and question, skills at the heart of our work.
One of the most intriguing elements is the encouragement to record dreams related to your research. I’ve written about this before (here and here). When deeply immersed in a project, the mind doesn’t simply shut off. Whether it’s subconscious processing, inherited memory, or something we don’t yet understand, those impressions can sometimes point us in new directions. Other times, they signal it’s time to step away. Both are valuable.
The chapter on trauma deserves special attention. All though others have tried, Posz is the first genealogist to address, so directly and personally, how trauma can be researched and interpreted. Memory is not fixed. Two individuals can experience the same event and remember it in entirely different ways. That reminder is essential for anyone working with historical narratives.
I admit, I found myself wondering whether one vivid childhood memory Posz recounts, watching a film while hospitalized, might have been influenced by a dream while medicated. That, in a way, reinforces her point: our recollections are not infallible.
Finally, I applaud Posz for her transparency regarding her earlier work. Too often, we treat a completed project as final. It isn’t. New records surface. DNA reshapes conclusions. Even our most carefully constructed research can shift. Her discussion of ethnicity estimates is a timely reminder that patience and humility are essential in this field.
If genealogy is about understanding where we come from, Ancestoring pushes us further. It asks us to examine how we think, why we believe in what we do, and what it really means to know the past.
That’s why Ancestoring is not just a good book; it’s an essential one.
In the past two weeks, I’ve received four emails from individuals new to genealogy either questioning my public tree on Ancestry.com or inquiring about my professional services.
Each one carried the same message: “The information you have is wrong.”
Let me start with something I say often: no genealogical tree is 100% accurate. Until every individual in every line has been DNA tested and even then, interpreted correctly, there will always be some uncertainty. That’s simply the nature of this work.
But these interactions weren’t thoughtful challenges or collaborative inquiries. They were something else entirely.
They were confrontational, dismissive, and, frankly, uninformed.
The first individual demanded proof of a family adoption story. I recommended DNA testing. They had already tested but refused to share the results and insisted I find documentary proof.
Here’s the problem: no records exist for that place and time. None. The best available evidence is a census record placing the child in the same household at three months old and still there decades later. That wasn’t enough. I was told I didn’t know what I was doing.
DNA would likely resolve the question but there’s a reason it wasn’t being shared. DNA doesn’t lie. And when people avoid it, that usually tells you something.
The second email was even more puzzling. I was instructed to delete an individual from my tree because it was “messing up [her] DNA matches.”
We didn’t match. The individual in question is on my husband’s line. She didn’t match him either.
Her conclusion? A child who died young actually moved to Illinois, changed his name completely, married, and died in the 1940s.
Her evidence?An Ancestry hint from ten years ago that only matched a birthdate. No sources showed a name change. No documentation. No records connecting the identities. Just confidence that in the entirety of Sweden, only 1 male was born on the same day. I’m not making this up!
When I asked basic genealogical questions such as death certificate? marriage record? naturalization? she didn’t understand what I meant. She had been researching for a few months and was certain her conclusion was correct because a now deceased relative had believed it 10 years ago. I declined to alter a fully sourced line.
The third interaction was more familiar but still frustrating.
A man insisted I had the wrong parents for his great-grandfather. His proof was a death certificate, with information provided by the son.
I explained what experienced genealogists know: informants can be wrong. Memory fails. Grief clouds details.
In contrast, I had a letter written by the man himself shortly before his death, naming his parents and explaining his childhood circumstances. I even provided the citation so he could verify it.
His response? “You’re still wrong. Remove it.” He also admitted he didn’t know how to locate the record I referred to online. Sigh.
That was the point where I made a decision: I removed the entire line from my public tree. Not because I was wrong but because the interaction wasn’t worth the time it would take to defend it.
The final exchange involved a demand to remove a death record because “everyone has it wrong.”
No documentation was provided. Instead, the argument rested on a theory built from DNA matches and a guess involving a child being banished to another colony 300+ years ago.
Could there be a connection? Possibly.
Was there proof? No.
When I tried to guide her toward alternative explanations, such as descent from a sibling, she wasn’t interested. She didn’t want to explore the truth. She wanted confirmation.
So I’ll ask the question plainly: Are you experiencing this shift, too?
For over 25 years, I’ve found most genealogists to be curious, collaborative, and open to learning. But recently, something feels different.
More certainty. Less evidence. And a growing resistance to being wrong.
I had a conversation about this with my husband, who pointed me to research from the National Literacy Institute suggesting that a significant portion of U.S. adults read below a sixth-grade level.
As a former reading teacher, that stopped me.
Because genealogy requires more than reading, it requires interpretation, analysis, and the ability to weigh conflicting evidence.
Without those skills, it becomes easy to mistake a hint for proof… or a belief for a conclusion.
And that brings me to where I am now.
I’ve always believed in keeping my tree public. I don’t “own” my ancestors. I’ve invested time and money into my research because I wanted to know the truth, not because I expected anything in return.
But I’ll be honest: I’m reconsidering. Not because of disagreement. Disagreement is part of good research. But because of something else entirely:
A refusal to learn. A rejection of standards. And an insistence that confidence equals correctness.
In every one of these cases, I recommended learning about the Genealogical Proof Standard.
Not one person was interested. That’s the real concern. Because if we lose the standard…we don’t just lose accuracy, we lose genealogy itself.
If you're thinking this is an AI problem, it isn't. Genealogists have always worked with flawed records, mistaken informants, and misleading clues. What is new is the speed at which conclusions are formed and the confidence with which they’re defended without the work required to support them.
If you’re new to genealogy, welcome. Truly. But confidence is not evidence. And belief is not proof. Start there and you’ll go far.
The Agean Sea from Kos Island, 4 Apr 2026, photo by Lori Samuelson.
Last week I shared the story of our trip to Greece including my long-awaited journey to Kos Island, where my family lived some 2,000 years ago, based on mtDNA and family tradition. This week, I’m answering the questions I’ve been getting and offering a few practical tips if you’re planning a similar trip to anywhere in the world.
Let’s start with the obvious, how do you even get to a remote place like Kos?
Your first step is to determine a route. Kos is not on the standard cruise circuit. You have two options: fly from Athens (about 55 minutes) or take a boat from Bodrum, Turkey (roughly 15 minutes). We flew from Athens since we were already returning there from Crete.
Once you’ve figured out how to reach your ancestral location, the next step is getting around. You can rent a car if you’ve secured an international driver’s license or you can hire a driver.
I hire a driver. Every time.
Why? Because I don’t need the added stress of navigating unfamiliar roads, signs, and driving customs while trying to absorb a place that actually matters to me. A good driver knows exactly where to go, how to get there efficiently, and more importantly, what you shouldn’t miss. They often become your best local resource for food, history, and those small, meaningful stops you would never find on your own.
People always ask how I manage to find trusted drivers around the world. The answer is simple: I build relationships. Conferences, professional networks like Association of Professional Genealogists and LinkedIN, and years of working with people in different regions.
In Sweden, I hired a genealogist who also worked as a part-time tour guide for Gate 1 Travel. In Croatia, I was connected with a genealogist/archaeologist. In France and Germany, a sixth cousin I met at a conference volunteered.
Kos was different, I had no contacts. So, I took a chance through Travelocity, and it paid off. GetTransferKOS was excellent. Once the driver understood why I was there, he went beyond the standard route to our hotel and showed us sites my ancestors would have known. That’s the difference between transportation and experience.
Next question: hotels.
If I’m traveling with a company like Gate 1 or Trafalgar, I let them handle accommodations. But I almost always add extra days, before or after the tour, to explore independently. Our ancestors rarely lived in postcard destinations. They lived off the beaten path, and if you want to understand their lives, you need to go there too.
Ask your hotel concierge or desk clerk for off the beaten locales you should visit. When my Travelocity half day tour didn't show up, the desk clerk called a colleague who arrived within 20 minutes to show us his beautiful homeland, along with fresh baked cookies his wife was making for Easter. He knew where the vineyards once grew on Kos and took us there. This was important to me as no physical records have been found to mark the location which was where my ancestors once lived:
Former Vineyard Site, Kos Island, Greece, 4 April 2026, photo by Lori Samuelson.
Money is another practical issue people overlook. If your family came from rural areas, carry some local currency. Credit cards aren’t always accepted, I ran into that repeatedly in Ireland and once in Greece when roadwork brought the internet down at the restaurant.
That said, I still prefer using a credit card whenever possible. With the right travel card, you’ll get a better exchange rate than most banks offer, and it gives you a clean, trackable record of your spending.
Now, let’s talk technology.
I use a phone plan that supports international travel. No roaming. I keep calls to a minimum, rely heavily on texting, and use my phone constantly for photos. Each night, I connect to hotel Wi-Fi and upload everything to Dropbox.
Why? Because I once lost photos in the backwoods of Mexico when I crushed my phone, and I don’t make the same mistake twice.
I also use Geni, my ChatGPT research assistant to help me identify photos when I get home. What was the name of the location of a statue of Leonis? The best part with this trip was the translations.
Asklipieio Archeaological Site, Kos Island, Greece, 4 Apr 2026, photo by Lori Samuelson.
There were no English markers as we toured Asklipieo so I took photos so I could later discover what we were looking at. Geni told me this means memorial markers, which makes sense as the next photo (below) shows recesses in a wall that likely once held those markers:
Security and customs were another big concern people raised.
We had no major issues though I’ll admit O'Hare International Airport tested my patience.
Coming back into the U.S., you have to retrieve your luggage, clear customs, recheck your bags, and then go through security again if you have a connecting flight. It’s inefficient, but it is what it is.
Customs itself took about 15 minutes. United Airlines had staff ready to help recheck bags quickly, and there were helpful Traveler’s Aid volunteers guiding people to their gates. Thankfully, there were no ICE agents in sight, just people actually trying to help travelers get where they needed to go. No chaos, just a system that could be better.My only issue? Exhaustion.
I forgot I had a tiny bottle of water in my bag, security flagged it. Then they asked if I had a laptop. I didn’t but I did have Kindles. That triggered another rescan.
Here’s the irony: every other airport we passed through: Fort Wayne, Vienna, Munich, Athens, Crete, Kos handled this without issue. Chicago? Not so much. You’d think one of the busiest airports in the world would have updated equipment by now.
Stateside, things can be just as odd. Earlier in March, we had “enhanced security” in Fort Wayne; meaning we had to walk past a dog just to enter the bridge. Two weeks later, nothing.
Welcome to consistency, American-style.
We do have TSA Pre Check but not Global Entry. I try to fly into Detroit rather than Chicago which has a much smoother customs with shorter lines. I've tried several times using the Mobile Passport Control app (free) but it never works for me.
Another question I’ve been getting: where next?
Honestly, nowhere overseas for now.
I’m not booking international travel until there’s a change in “leadership” in the U.S. I’m not interested in last-minute cancellations or absorbing costs because someone decides to escalate tensions. Add in rising oil prices and airlines cutting routes, and it’s just not worth the gamble at the moment.
Otherwise, I’d already be planning a trip to Barbados to walk in the footsteps of family lines from the late 1600s into the early 1700s.
For now, that one waits.
As for anti-American sentiment, no, I didn’t experience any hostility. What I did hear, repeatedly, was: “What’s wrong with Donald Trump?” Excellent question!
To their credit, people I met didn’t assume I represented every American viewpoint. That’s something we could learn from.
In the meantime, I have plenty of travel ahead, just closer to home. I’ll be presenting at the National Genealogical Society conference in Fort Wayne (hardly a trip for me!), along with events for Palatines in America and several venues across Texas, Utah, Minnesota, Kentucky, and the Midwest.
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.
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.
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!
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.
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.
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.
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.
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
One of the unexpected gifts of long-term genealogical research is that, over time, patterns begin to emerge that have very little to do with dates, titles, or coats of arms and everything to do with human behavior.
I noticed one of those patterns recently while working on my latest books, Echoes of Britannia and Roots in the Rhineland. With the help of Geni, my AI research assistant, I found myself asking a deceptively simple question: Why wasn’t the House of Leiningen showing up where I expected it to?
The Leiningens were powerful. They ruled for centuries in the Rhineland. They were well-established, well-documented, and, as anyone who has worked with their records knows, deeply entrenched in their regional authority. I had researched them extensively for Roots in the Rhineland, and their historical footprint is undeniable. Queen Victoria herself was a descendant through the Leiningen line.
So why, as I worked through the dense, interconnected dynastic webs of Echoes of Britannia, did they largely fail to appear?
At first glance, it felt like a contradiction. Powerful families tend to turn up everywhere in medieval and early modern genealogy. They marry into other ruling houses. Their daughters become conduits of influence. Their descendants sit at the crossroads of multiple dynasties. That’s how the familiar “game changers” of Europe, certain Norman, French, German, and British houses came to shape the continent. Their power wasn’t just territorial. It was relational.
The Leiningens were different.
What emerged, as I stepped back and examined the pattern rather than the pedigree, was a quiet but telling truth: power alone doesn’t guarantee connection. And connection, not longevity, is what determines whether a family becomes part of the larger historical network.
The House of Leiningen, for all its strength, was comparatively insular. They intermarried narrowly, largely within a familiar circle of similarly placed families. They prized internal continuity over outward alliance. They produced many sons and comparatively few daughters who married “out.” When their influence appears clearly on the broader European stage, it is remarkably late, through Queen Victoria in the nineteenth century, pulling them forward into modern royalty rather than embedding them deeply in the medieval dynastic webs that underpin so much of European history.
Their absence from those networks isn’t a failure of research. It’s evidence of a choice.
As I worked through this realization, another contrast became apparent. Other houses, some equally old, some initially just as regional, eventually made different decisions. They leaned less on purity of line and more on adaptability. They allowed daughters to become bridges. They accepted change when political and social realities shifted. In doing so, they became connectors rather than enclaves.
One phrase summed it up perfectly: they leaned into adaptability over purity.
That sentence stopped me in my tracks, because it didn’t just explain a genealogical pattern. It explained something much larger.
In genealogy, families that cling too tightly to the known and the comfortable don’t necessarily disappear. They continue. They endure. But they fade in influence. They slowly detach from the currents shaping the wider world. Their names persist, but their relevance narrows.
And the more I thought about it, the harder it was not to see the parallel in our own time.
We are living in an era where many institutions, organizations, and even families are doing precisely what the Leiningens once did: clinging to familiar structures because they feel safe, even when those structures no longer work. Change is framed as threat. Adaptation is mistaken for abandonment. Preservation of identity becomes resistance to growth.
The irony that genealogy keeps teaching me is that adaptation isn’t the enemy of continuity. It’s the reason continuity survives.
The most interconnected families in Echoes of Britannia didn’t become influential because they were the purest or the most rigid. They became influential because they were willing to form alliances, reconsider strategies, and respond to changing realities. They didn’t abandon who they were but they acknowledged the world around them.
The families that refused to adapt often believed they were protecting themselves. In reality, they were limiting their future options.
Stagnation in genealogy doesn’t look like failure. It looks like stability. It’s quiet. Respectable. Sometimes even admired. But over time, the effect is unmistakable: fewer connections, fewer points of influence, fewer reasons for others to engage.
That insight has been surprisingly personal. In my own family line, the Leiningen branch eventually produced one son… whose son produced one daughter … me. Historically speaking, that was considered an ending. Even today, I see lingering attitudes among distant relatives that quietly reinforce the same old hierarchies of value. The prejudice against women isn’t a modern invention. It’s the echo of centuries-old decisions.
Genealogy has a way of making these things visible, whether we want to see them or not.
And that’s the real lesson I keep coming back to: Genealogy isn’t just about where we came from. It’s about how systems behave over time. Families, like societies, don’t stagnate because they lack strength. They stagnate because they confuse familiarity with sustainability.
The houses that dominate European history didn’t do so by staying comfortable. They did so by understanding that connection, across regions, ideas, and people, is what allows anything to grow.
Perhaps that’s why genealogy feels so unexpectedly relevant right now. It reminds us that survival is not the same as progress, longevity is not the same as influence, and purity of lineage or of thought, rarely prepares anyone for a changing world.
Sometimes the most valuable historical lesson isn’t about who ruled, but who adapted.
And genealogy, if we let it, is very good at telling us which was which.
