James M. Beidler came by his German genealogy expertise honestly—it took him more than twenty years of searching to find any ancestry that wasn’t from Germany! James is a columnist for German Life magazine and is considered to “go-to” person for German genealogy articles and lectures.
He writes “Roots & Branches,” an award-winning weekly newspaper column on genealogy that is the only syndicated feature on that topic in Pennsylvania, and edits Der Kurier, the quarterly journal of the Mid-Atlantic Germanic Society. Beidler is also a frequent contributor to other periodicals ranging from scholarly journals such as The Pennsylvania Genealogical Magazine to popular-interest magazines such as Ancestry and Family Tree Magazine. He has published a compilation of his newspaper columns and is planning a similar book culled from his German Life works.
As a lecturer, he’s been on the bill at one time or another at all the nation’s largest genealogical conferences and also was part of the Pennsylvania Humanities Council’s acclaimed Commonwealth Speakers program from 2002 to 2009. He lectures frequently to local and regional groups and is also an instructor for the online Family Tree University.
He has been president of the International Society of Family History Writers and Editors and was executive director for the Genealogical Society of Pennsylvania. He served as national co-chairman for the 2008 Federation of Genealogical Societies conference in Philadelphia.
Beidler was born in Reading, PA, and raised in nearby Berks County, where he currently resides. He graduated Phi Beta Kappa from Hofstra University in Long Island, NY, with a BA in political science in 1982.