2018: Blog in Review

Where did the year go? I swear I blinked and it was gone. Poof! The coming new year means it’s time to look back and review my performance on the blog over the past twelve months and make plans for 2019.

Last year I disappointed myself by not meeting my writing goals for this website. As a result, I set different goals, focused not solely on how much I wrote, but on how I wrote.

Since the most popular posts seem to be those that describe a research tool or explain how to use a genealogy resource, I decided to focus more on these type of posts and those that explained how I’ve addressed a research problem.

I also gave myself permission to write about research subjects that were in progress, rather than waiting until I could share a complete genealogical sketch and biography. This is a particular issue for me—whether I’m writing for the blog or working on my other family writing projects.

The Results

Although I didn’t want to focus on the number of posts written, it’s still a quantitative measure of how involved I was with the blog this year. Here’s what my monthly post count actually looked like in 2018 as compared to 2017 (2018/2017).

• Jan: 8/12
• Feb: 5/7
• Mar: 5/6
• Apr: 4/3
• May: 6/6
• Jun: 5/0
• Jul: 2/1
• Aug: 5/0
• Sep: 2/2
• Oct: 6/2
• Nov: 7/0
• Dec: 8/6
• Total: 63

Or expressed another way…

The chart shows that while I had months where I wrote more in 2017 (blue), I was a somewhat more consistent poster in 2018 (red), averaging a little more than 5 posts/month.

Top Ten Posts in 2018

I like to check which posts are getting visited. It helps to direct the type of posts I write. The point of the blog is to share my family research, of course. But I like to help other researchers, too, if I can.

What content was most popular (aka most visited) this year? This year’s top 10 list looks a lot like last year’s list.

10. Lancaster County Deed Books Online (#9)
11. 1916 Aetna Explosives Co. Explosion at Mt. Union Pa. (#10)
12. Pennsylvania Warrant Township Maps (#6)
13. Making a Deed Map from Old Metes and Bounds (#8)
14. Huber Immigrants (#4)
15. 5,000 Acres—Where Did It All Go? (#5)
16. 5 Tips to Help You Get the Most from Your AncestryDNA Results (New)
17. Friday Finds: Trinity Lutheran Birth and Baptismal Records Online (#3)
18. How to Use the Online Lands Records at the PA State Archives (#2)
19. Pennsylvania Genealogical Map (#1)

It’s not particularly surprising. It’s tough for new posts to generate the number of hits that allows them to compete with posts that have been available for years. Still, there is one new post on this list: #4. There had been another new post on the list when I first started writing this post, but the Aetna explosion post pushed it back out of the top ten. :^o

Both new posts deal with Ancestry—one with getting the most from your DNA results and the other with a new feature. Both subjects have been covered on other blogs and social media, so I’m a little surprised to see how often my posts have been viewed.

Top Ten Posts from 2018

How well did I meet my 2018 goals? Did the posts I wrote include the topics and content focus that I singled out in last year’s blog review?

Let’s take a look at the ten most viewed posts written in the past year (month written and # of visits in parentheses).

10. Climbing Esther’s Tree (Jun; 32)
11. Say What? Census Husband Swapping (Jan; 36)
12. TBT: Using Online Land Office Records at the PA Archives (Aug; 41)
13. AncestryDNA Updates Ethnicity Estimates (Sep; 52)
14. Topics from the Timeline – Social Sunday (Apr; 53)
15. Follow Friday: Here’s What I’ve Been Reading (Jan; 56)
16. My 23 and Me Results (May; 83)
17. Quick & Dirty Trees for DNA Matches (Oct; 99)
18. Online Pennsylvania Deeds at FamilySearch (Jan; 154)
19. New in Ancestry Trees—Potential Ancestors (Jun; 224)

Most of these posts deal with online genealogy resources’ features and content or how to use them. My Follow Friday and Social Sunday posts share posts from other geneablogs or history/archaeology/genealogy content from other sites around the web. And two of the posts are examples of sharing research or an example from my family research.

When I look at my editorial calendar, I see more posts like these, plus snapshots of research in progress like my articles regarding Jacob Schneider and the Schott, Bowerman, and Rupert families.

All told, I think I did good in 2018. Please, excuse me while I go pat myself on the back. ;^)

Where Did They Come From?

I’ve been discussing which posts were visited this year by the most people. But how did they get here, to this blog?

I know some of you follow along and receive emails when I post new content—thank you for keeping me company on this journey of discovery! But how else did readers get here? According to analytics, a lot of my traffic is from Google and other search engines. But some of it is from Facebook and some is “direct.”

That means some of my posts have been shared on social media and by other bloggers. It’s gratifying to see that someone thinks what I’ve written is worth sharing with other people—friends, family, or their readers, or worthy of comment. I don’t plan it that way, but it is still a thrill when it happens.

So, thank you to to those of you who have shared my posts and/or taken the time to comment on a post! I greatly appreciate it.

What’s Up for 2019 ?

My goals for 2019 can be boiled down to: keep writing. I didn’t always feel inspired to write this year, nor did I always feel like I had something particularly interesting to report. But I met my writing goals anyway and a number of posts that I wrote this year were relatively well-received—or at least viewed repeatedly.

One reader’s comment on “Slow Down, Don’t Move Too Fast” was illuminating and I hope to use it to guide my writing in 2019. She wrote, “It is useful to actually see an example and evaluate it rather than simply [be] told.” This has always been true for me as a reader, too.

Yet, in my own writing I’ll make only oblique references to things that were wrong or not particularly helpful. I don’t delve into them to show why that it is when I’m trying to untangle a research problem, like distinguishing between two Ludwig Shotts or three Michael Benders for instance.

Maybe I need to think about not just writing up my findings, but instead writing a step-by-step on how I reached them. Since part of this exercise is about me becoming a better researcher and the other is sharing with people who want to learn, that might be useful on both counts.

• Category: Commentary
• Tag: Year In Review