Happy Ninth Blogiversary

I’m celebrating 9 years of blogging today. It’s been an incredible journey. Thank you for joining me! Let’s look at a few statistics (or feel free to scroll past them).

All Time Stats of Views by Country

The top country on this list is not a surprise. Coming in second, the 10,599 views from Luxembourg are fantastic when considering the population of this tiny country.

What brought all of these visitors to my blog?

The Top Ten Posts and Pages

Other than the home page/archives, the top ten posts and pages were:

Source Citation Trick for WordPress.com – HTML Code

How I Got My MISSING AncestryDNA Circles Back

The Ancestors (a page)

Old Photographs Saved From Trash Can (a page)

6 AncestryDNA Notes for Easier Comparison

About Cathy Meder-Dempsey (a page)

Genealogy Toolbox: Links to West Virginia Land Deeds on FamilySearch

Step by Step Guide to Accessing Browse-only Records on FamilySearch

James SIMS (1754-1845) Pioneer of Nicholas County, West Virginia
(a biography I wrote long before I began blogging)

Dear Cousin – We Have a DNA Match, Now What?

A Few More Statistics

By the end of 2021, I’d written over a million words. Probably three times that many if you take into account edits and re-writes.

As of yesterday, 682 posts were written in nine years. They’ve been viewed 307,593 times by 170,438 visitors.

I’m 6 followers shy of 600!

Looking Back

Before I started blogging, I concentrated mostly on the census, birth, marriage, and death records in my genealogy research. When I started to write the stories I realized my early research had gotten into a rut. Actually, I’d noticed this earlier on, and deciding to start this blog helped me to grow and change.

Over the past three years, the stats on my blog have been going down. I wrote fewer posts as the priorities in my life changed. This has a lot to do with the coronavirus pandemic we’ve been living through. I don’t think the downward trend has hurt my blog.

Looking Toward the Future

Last year as I reviewed blog posts from my first year, I crafted missing source citations (learning while doing) and added them to my database. As I worked on these, research questions I hadn’t thought of came up. It was hard to NOT re-write some of the posts. I’ve saved the questions and hopefully the answers for future posts.

When you’re on a journey, it’s not always smooth sailing. There are canceled flights, delayed trains, and missed buses. My love for genealogy research remains the same. The journey continues, even if the road gets a bit bumpy.

The things I’ve learned over the past nine years have taught me to be a better genealogist, researcher, and writer. I’m going into year 10 motivated and determined to open doors in brick walls by using all the skills that blogging has brought me.

© 2023, copyright Cathy Meder-Dempsey. All rights reserved.