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Tuesday, December 28, 2010

Top Ten Stories for 2010

The coming of the New Year is always time for a few "Top Ten" lists. Here are my ten most popular stories posted this year, as calculated by the statistics page on my blog. Thank you to everyone who read my blog this year!

10. Treasure Chest Thursday- The Imprisonment Quilt, judging by the search terms I've seen lately on the statistic page of my blog, this story attracts both quilters and people researching Queen Lili'uokalani on line. There were also quite a few people searching under "Iolani Palace" and most interesting were the number of search hits for "Iolani Palace Frosted Windows". If you are curious about "why the frosted windows in Iolani Palace?", you must read this story!

9. The Value of Posting Brick Walls on Genealogy Bulletin Boards, need I say more? Isn't everyone searching for ways to break through those genealogical brick walls?

8. Baseball and Genealogy Research, was a fun story and it generated a record number of email. There is at least one baseball player in almost everyone's family tree. There were also many comments with ideas and links for good places to research old baseball records and players, so be sure to read the comments from readers if you read the story.

7. Blog Caroling - James Pierpont and Jingle Bells, this was a last minute entry for the year, and perhaps it was popular because of the Christmas theme. In looking at the search terms, "Civil War" and "abolitionist" came up quite a bit. If you are curious why, you must read about James Pierpont!

6. Internet Searches vs. A Real Library, was a surprise hit with readers and with search terms through Google, Bing and other search engines.

5. Family History Day, Concord, NH, 23 October 2010- another surprise hit, but perhaps folks were searching for directions? more information? registration links? And all I did was post some information about this upcoming event.

4. Ellis Island Oral Histories- How I Learned Something New- one of my favorite posts, and I guess a lot of readers liked it, too!

3. Beauport Mansion, this was a post I did on a historic home in Gloucester, Massachusetts, which has generated lots of hits on Google and Bing for Henry Davis Sleeper, the builder, and for his parents Jacob Henry Sleeper and Maria Wescott. There must be a lot of folks researching the SLEEPER genealogy.

2. Thanksgiving Proclamation 2010, Wow, I'm so glad to see so many people are interested in the story behind Thanksgiving, as well as interest in the Mayflower Society and New Hampshire governor John Lynch! Remember, you can't have your Thanksgiving dinner until someone signs this proclamation every year, LOL!

1. Canobie Lake, was a story I did about a local amusement park which is now well over 100 years old. I'm surprised by the number of hits on this by search engines, and I chalked it up to folks searching for directions and information during the summer. However, the hits keep on coming, even though the park closes after Halloween. I've surprised that this was the #1 story, but then again, there were a lot of surprises on this list.

Three posts tied for the most comments of all time: Treasure Chest Thursday-Publishing a Book for my Blog (a story about using Blurb book software to "slurp" your blog posts directly into book form- and I've recieved loads and loads of email from other bloggers since this was posted about their adventures into self publishing their blogs, genealogies and photo books), and Diabetes and Genealogy (another surprise, I guess diabetes runs in lots and lots of family trees), and also Vote for your Favorite Genealogy Blog, which was about the nominations for the Family Tree Magazine Top 40 Genealogical Blogs. Comments are some of my favorite things, so keep it up readers!

The most popular of all things on my blog, passing all posts and even the Canobie Lake story by double, is my page of "Surnames to 9 Generations". I'm thinking of expanding this to perhaps 12 generations, but since genealogy is exponential, this would be quite a large page! It makes me happy to think of all the hits on this page, and maybe they were made by some distant cousins!

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Copyright 2010, Heather Wilkinson Rojo

1 comment:

  1. Some good posts there, Heather! I especially liked the Canobie Lake one. I've never checked your Surnames list but I will now to see if there are any more connections between us.

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