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A Year In

I passed a milestone this week. This site, its blog, and much of the ancillary information, has now been up for a year. (I posted the first blog entry and the first set of family trees on Halloween 2010.)

Overall, I’m quite satisfied with the results. My goals in starting the site were:

  • to have a platform to post genealogical information
  • to have a space to write some of the things that cross my mind
  • to be able to post some of the photos I take

Each goal has been successful. And overall, I think the site does what I intended it to do. Here are the first year metrics:

  • 2,391 visitors
  • 3,805 visits
  • 9,163 pageviews

Google, it ain’t. But then, it was never intended to be.

The single biggest traffic day was Sunday, May 29, when I tried to set down my thoughts on the passing two days earlier of my pal James Kang. Being able to write my feelings somewhere gave me a tiny bit of relief, and I hope the things I said gave some comfort to James’ many friends, online and off. So the blog that day fulfilled the second goal.

As for the first goal, it too has been amply met. Posting family trees got the names onto search engines. An astonishing number of people Google themselves or their ancestors, and they’ve happened on the family trees I’ve posted. Many have gotten in touch, enabling me to add names to the genealogical record, broaden the knowledge of the family, and in many cases to establish family relationships online and in person with people I didn’t know existed. The Strauber-Strober-Struber text tree got 577 pageviews in its first year, an average of slightly less than two a day. In some cases, the family ties we’ve been building and reestablishing had been ruptured in the late 19th Century, so overcoming so many of them after 110 or 120 years is significant.

As for the third goal, the photos, I’ve had some good bursts, which you can see from the home page by clicking on PHOTOS in the menu and picking an album from the drop-down list. There aren’t as many photo albums as I’d like to post, and the stuff I’ve put up isn’t as good in almost every case as I’d like it to be.

But those are worthy goals for the second year. So please, come back soon and let me know how you think it’s coming together.

Comments on this entry are closed.

  • Royal Calkins November 8, 2011, 5:49 pm

    Love the blog, love the Rebecca photos. Keep it up

  • Bryan Frank November 9, 2011, 5:54 am

    I think you’re knocking them out of the park. Keep going.