Thursday, December 29, 2011

My Favorite Posts for Nutfield Genealogy 2011


These were my favorite posts for 2011.  Most of my favorites are on this list because they turned out to be such fun to research, but some of them were my favorites because they generated so many comments.  I love getting comments and making contact with readers, especially if we end up having “cousin connections” or similar research interests. 

If you don’t see your favorite story on this list, leave me a comment!  I’d love to know what you enjoyed reading this past year at Nutfield Genealogy.

Heather’s 2011 Favorites

1. – 4.  My Dad’s College Paper on the Massachusetts Underground Railroad
This almost wasn’t even a post.  It started as a simple comment on Facebook when I said that I had found my Dad’s 1954 college report.  I had more than a dozen people ask me to post it online.  I thought that was an interesting idea, and took on the challenge of transcribing the report and also doing some of my own research on the people Dad had contacted in 1954. I posted a bit of genealogical serendipity in Part 4.

5. Five Kernels of Corn for Thanksgiving
AND 6.  Five Kernels of Corn- An Update
I had fun researching the origins of this little story passed on to Mayflower descendants, and then I had even more fun researching why it was only a myth thanks to comments left to me by my Mayflower cousin, Ginny Mucciaccio, former Governor of the Massachusetts Mayflower Society (she is also my cousin through the Wyman Family of Woburn, Massachusetts). 

7.  Veteran’s Day Transcription Project
In 2010 and 2011 I started transcribing the veteran’s memorials and honor rolls in Londonderry for Memorial Day and Veteran’s Day.   Here I invited other genealogy bloggers to join me, and I had a great compendium of participants from six states and the United Kingdom.   By transcribing the honor rolls, we make the name available to search engines on the internet, and thus descendants and family members can find their veterans’ names.  This is a project I hope to continue in 2012.

8.  Rebranding History
This story was inspired by a visit to the grand re-opening of my ancestor’s house in Lexington, Massachusetts, which turned out to be a “rebranding” of the museum with a completely different focus, not on the family who lived there, but on the British Regulars who attacked their town and tried to burn down the home.  It received several good comments, lots of email, and inspired two blog posts by Bill West and J. L. Bell.   It was all good commentary, for and against, representing different points of view on a controversial subject.   Thank you to those who participated!

9.  Draper and Maynard Sports Equipment
This was so much fun to research.  I took a simple little story told by my uncle, about his visit to a relative’s factory when he was a little boy.  There was a lot of history behind his little memory!  

10.  The National Archives – They read my Blog?
This was a follow up to a post I wrote about going to Washington DC to visit the National Archives to see a specific document first hand- only to be turned away.  Surprise, surprise!  They liked the first post enough to write back to me, and to send me a fine hi-res photograph of the document in question.  It was a win-win situation for everyone!   The link to the first post is http://nutfieldgenealogy.blogspot.com/2011/04/national-archives-good-news-bad-news.html  This was the post that I spoke about on the GeneaBlogger Talk Radio Show.  Thanks, Thomas MacEntee!

Stay tuned tomorrow to see the posts that were actually the most popular stories with my readers on my blog this year, according to the statistics provided by Blogger.  

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Copyright 2011, Heather Wilkinson Rojo

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