Happy Blogoversary to Me!

I started this blog three years ago today.  In the beginning I wrote stories just for myself and my family, but Nutfield Genealogy just grew and grew and grew...

At first only family read my blog, and then a great bunch of people known as the "GeneaBloggers" started following my posts and commented.  We all became Facebook friends, and tweeted and G+ed each other's posts.  Then the general public began to read, and well... the rest is history.  Those first few months hardly anyone read my blog, and I didn't post much.  But as I practiced, it became easier to write and format posts and now I publish a post six days a week.

Over three years my readership has grown to almost 300,000 page views according to the statistics on Blogger.  Most of those hits were in the last year.  I'm not sure if that counts readers on Facebook, Networked Blogs or other blog readers.  I've posted almost 1,000 posts, and received almost 2,000 comments. As of today I have 181 followers.  I remember that in the beginning the only little faces that appeared under the follower widget on my blog were myself and my husband, and now I have pages of smiling friends to look at!  Thanks everyone!

My five most popular stories over the past three years are (according to the Blogger statistics):

#5- Publishing a Book for my Blog (I still get email asking about Blurb and the blog to book process)
 http://nutfieldgenealogy.blogspot.com/2010/04/treasure-chest-thursday-publishing-book.html

#4  Canobie Lake Park, this post gives a brief history of our local amusement park which is over 100 years old, but I'm sure that most of the people Googling the park name are looking for directions or hours:
http://nutfieldgenealogy.blogspot.com/2010/08/canobie-lake-park-salem-new-hampshire.html

#3  1940 Census Sneak Peek for Genealogists, written back in April 2011 (a full year before the release) this post gained a lot of hits because I gave lots of hints about what to expect from information I gleaned at the 2011 NERGC workshop:
http://nutfieldgenealogy.blogspot.com/2011/04/1940-census-sneak-peek-for-genealogists.html

#2  Pinterest, Ancestry and Copyrighted Images, this post was popular because it hit on such a sensitive subject, and it also gave a sense of relief to lots of folks who wanted to use those great images on social media: http://nutfieldgenealogy.blogspot.com/2012/04/pinterest-ancestry-and-copyrighted.html


#1  Hezekiah Wyman and the Legend of the White Horseman, this post puzzles me more than any other strange hit my blog receives from Google and other search engines. It has received nearly three times the hits than my #2 story.  I have no idea why this local legend about the Battle of Lexington and Concord is so popular.  Check it out for yourself!
 http://nutfieldgenealogy.blogspot.com/2011/04/hezekiah-wyman-and-legend-of-white.html

With nearly 6,000 hits, my surname page  http://nutfieldgenealogy.blogspot.com/p/surnames-to-9-generations.html has had three times as many readers as the Hezekiah Wyman story!  I suppose this is all thanks to Google, and the fact that people LOVE to Google their own names and surnames.

-------------------

Copyright 2012, Heather Wilkinson Rojo