Happy 10th birthday to this blog! I started writing Know Their Stories a decade ago, on June 26, 2013. Since then, I've written 186 posts about my family's history.
When I began this project, I saw it as an important way to share the stories hidden in my family tree. I didn't want my ancestors to be just names and dates. My grandmothers shared so many wonderful tales about the people in our family, and I wanted to save that information for posterity. This blog has motivated me to dig deeper into my family tree and really flesh out what I know (or in many cases, don't know) about my ancestors. It's been an incredibly rewarding journey thus far.
In the last ten years, so much has changed... in the world, in the practice of genealogy, and in how stories are shared. When I started this blog, there was a whole community of "geneabloggers," and we regularly read each others' posts and commented on them. I looked forward to updates from certain other bloggers and getting visits from them. That has completely disappeared in the last decade, and I currently have no communication with others who may be writing about family history. The blogs are gone or haven't had updates in years. Blogs just aren't the preferred way of sharing content anymore.
Some content creation has moved to other long form mediums, like Substack, but the primary way stories are shared currently is via video on social media outlets like Instagram and TikTok. To me, it seems that this hasn't really caught on in the genealogy community. I have just been plodding along with Blogger, fully conscious of the fact that no one reads what I'm writing and it's not the best platform for sharing information. Google isn't always indexing my posts anymore, which means they aren't searchable and I'm really writing in a vacuum. Lately, I've been giving some thought to where else my family's information needs to live in order to be preserved. In a few circumstances, I have copied over complete posts to Ancestry, attaching them as PDF files to family trees. I hesitate to do this for all posts, because sometimes information needs to be edited and updated after the fact. For example, if I had copied over my original posts on the Lacey family to Ancestry, I would have shared a lot of incorrect information, and there's no real way to claw that back. As you know, once people add something to their tree, it's nearly impossible to get them to change it, no matter how obvious the evidence of error. Of all the people I've reached out to in an effort to explain that the information they've linked on my third great-grandmother Temperance Burns is incorrect, approximately zero of them have read my messages or changed anything. I don't want to be responsible for mistakes that live on forever. So, I'm considering various ways to share the information in this blog on other platforms, but haven't settled on a solution yet.
Ten years in, I still feel that there's a lot to share about my family and the process of researching their lives. There's also a clear opportunity now to diversify where this information gets shared. I'm excited to see what the next ten years of writing will bring, and how much more I'll learn about my ancestors. I also look forward to continuing to meet cousins who discover these stories online.
These are currently the most-read posts on Know Their Stories:
Organizing Your Genealogy: How I Did It and You Can, Too! - This post went a little viral on Facebook some years ago and got nearly 5,000 views. It is by far my most-read post.The Short Family and William Penn's "Welcome" - This post about my Short ancestors and their arrival in Pennsylvania in 1682 has gotten about 1,600 views. The creation of this post was greatly aided by information I found at the New England Historic Genealogical Society.
Scandalous Ancestor: Alvin Jared Howe - This is one of my earliest and shortest posts, written in 2013, and I have no idea why it has racked up 1,200 views. Perhaps because Howe was an important figure in Santa Ana, California?
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