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

What Genealogy Teaches Us About Adaptability and Why It Matters Now

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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.

Smart Roots: Hands-On AI for Family Historians

I’m pleased to share that I’ll be presenting a workshop at the National Genealogical Society Conference: WS01 Starting Smart with AI: Hands-On Tools for Family Historians, and I’d love for you to join me.

This session is designed to be practical and immediately useful, focusing on real examples, hands-on tools, and strategies that help family historians integrate AI thoughtfully into their research and workflow. Whether you’re just getting started or looking to refine how you use these tools, you’ll leave with ideas you can put into practice right away.

If you’re interested in attending, you can register using my personal referral link and code below:

🔗 https://whova.com/portal/registration/LEUZPBaoRt-vaFngte8X/?refer_code=plqof
🎟️ Referral Code: plqof

I hope to see some familiar faces in Fort Wayne, Indiana on 26 May, 9:00 AM–12:00 PM. Feel free to share this with colleagues or anyone interested in genealogy, research methodology, or practical AI applications.

Concluding a Narrative Writing Project

 

AI Generated

At 5:51 p.m. on 1 February, I finished the final narrative for my latest work, Echoes of Britannia.

It was a genuinely momentous moment. For the first time, I have written a narrative for every ancestor I can currently identify. That mattered to me more than I can easily explain. I wanted to leave my research to my descendants in a way that restores my forebears’ humanity after generations of being flattened into little more than names and dates inside a software program.

Treating their lives seriously mattered. Some of them made choices I wouldn’t have made. Some lived in ways that feel foreign or uncomfortable to modern sensibilities. But they deserved to be acknowledged. If not for them, I wouldn’t be here. None of us would.

I wanted to record their lives in a durable format, so I chose to present these stories as bound books. Actually, ten bound books. Yes, I did get a little carried away.

When I began sketching ideas last March for a book about my husband’s and my British ancestors, I had no idea how much research I had accumulated over the years. And, in all honesty, some of it was utter garbage. Early on, I trusted unsourced online trees. Some “sources” later turned out to be incorrect or wildly speculative. Pruning my tree was not fun, but it was necessary. I wanted a stable, explainable record; one where the evidence supports the tree, not the other way around. Family history shouldn’t rest entirely on folklore, though the tall tales sometimes earned a place, clearly labeled as such.

Initially, I imagined two volumes: one covering our five primary British ancestral lines as they extended into the United States, and a second devoted to their allied families “across the pond.” That plan didn’t last long. The records I had gathered, baptismal, marriage, and burial registers; land charters; court cases as plaintiffs and defendants; censuses taken hundreds of years ago, contained far too many compelling details to compress into just two books.

As the stories grew, so did the project. Two volumes became ten.
Volume 1 focuses on our family in the New World.
Volume 2 covers our medieval gentry.
Volumes 3 and 4 record the lives of knights and barons.

I thought that might be the end but I quickly learned our “British” ancestors were not always British. Volumes 5 and 6 explore our Anglo-Norman families who arrived in the British Isles around the time of William the Conqueror, who, somewhat astonishingly, turns out to be one of our many great-grandfathers. His lineage alone justified Volume 7: British High Nobility.

Even that wasn’t the end. Our family tree is less a tree than a bush. The final three volumes follow far-flung Continental European ancestors whose descendants eventually migrated to Great Britain.

Along the way, I’ve learned an extraordinary amount about historical eras I once barely understood. I’ll be sharing some of those discoveries here on the blog over the coming weeks.

Although the narrative writing is now complete, there is still plenty of work ahead before publication, editing, cleaning thousands of footnotes, writing an index (ugh), adding photographs, and sourcing every one of them. Still, the hardest part is finished.

And that feels pretty darn good.

When Silence Answers the Question

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There was a recent public discussion about artificial intelligence and genealogy that left me thinking, not emotionally, but analytically, about where our field is right now.

What struck me most was not what was said, but what wasn’t.

Several audience questions centered on whether AI should be used at all, or when AI might someday be capable of returning source citations. Those questions are revealing. They suggest a community still waiting for permission, still assuming capability lies in the future, and still being told to fear a tool that many genealogists are already using responsibly and effectively.

More concerning, however, were moments when concrete ethical scenarios were raised and no clear ethical line was drawn. When real examples involve other people’s data, living individuals, or derivative work, “it depends” is not guidance. It’s abdication.

Genealogy does not function well on ambiguity alone. Our work affects real families, real identities, and real relationships. Ethical frameworks only matter if they are applied when it’s uncomfortable to do so.

Silence is data.
So are the questions we choose to answer and the ones we avoid.

What this discussion confirmed for me is something I’ve been observing for months: much of the leadership around AI in genealogy is stalled. Not because the technology is unknowable, but because decision-making feels risky. Talking is safer than teaching. Warnings are safer than methods.

The work, however, is already happening, quietly, responsibly, and outside the spotlight.

And that’s where I’ll continue to focus my energy.