31 October 2017

Breaking Down Brickwalls by Blogging

Last Saturday's excellent presentation 21st Century Genealogy: Taking Advantage of Social Media for Your Research to Ottawa Branch OGS by Gail Dever prompted a blog post by Elizabeth Kipp. It tells how her blog established a contact that allowed her to push a branch of her family tree back further.

2 comments:

Glenn W said...

Great idea -- perhaps you can suggest way and means of doing so. I have several family related blogs and I can see how valuable they can be ... a chance collect one's notes and thoughts to write about the family, assist others and be assisted.

Elizabeth Kipp said...

Being very verbose in your writing is helpful I think. I have just passed 400,000 page views on my blog since it went live in 2008. Most months lately I have around 3800 to 4000 pageviews. My blog is advertised on my Guild websites for each of my two one name studies. I mention my blog in my newsletters (I publish quarterly one for the Blake family, one for the Pincombe family and one for my H11 haplogroup study at FT DNA). The H11 study is over 200 individuals now and the newsletters are visible on the FT DNA website for each of the three projects mentioned. My audience is variable with monthly stats for October showing Russia 1585, United States 594, United Kingdom 387, Canada 241, Spain 150, Australia, 125, Germany 112, Netherlands 80, Ukraine 80 and China 58. The strong interest by Russian readers lately has been the H11 project I suspect. H11 wintered during the Last Glacial Maximum at the Ukraina Refuge which was likely located in the southwestern area of the Russian Federation/Ukraine. About 1/5 of my members in the H11 study live in Russia. This past week my readers have been United States 196, Canada 129, United Kingdom 113, Germany 45, Spain 30, France 20, Russia 16, China 14, Ukraine 14, Australia 11. Some of these will be google bots I suspect. I had an email from a Russian member of the H11 study through the FT DNA website and I suspect that he was in the process of reading all my webposts (1809 posts in total). I did a 52 ancestor challenge a couple of years ago and that also brought in new followers (78 in total now) as I dealt with 52 of my 64 4x great grandparents working back to them and further back from them each Sunday. That was a remarkable experience and I hope to repeat it one day looking at my five x great grandparents over a two or three year period. A project for the future when I may have more time .... Life is incredibly busy these days.