Happy 6th Blogoversary to me!

Several years ago I started to write local history stories for the Londonderry news website. I didn’t know it was a blog.  I didn’t even know what the word blog meant.  After my first few posts, the editor gave me a password to edit my own stories in Wordpress, and that’s when I learned more about blogging.  I decided that if I could do that, why didn’t I start my own blog about my special interest in genealogy?  On 27 July 2009 I designed my blog and published my first post using Blogger.  The rest is history.

I had fun last night perusing some old blog posts.  Back in December 2011 I wrote that my most popular blog post had over 1,200 pageviews and I was feeling quite happy.  Through the power of the internet, and the incredible phenomenon of social networking online, my numbers have grown exponentially.  In December 2012 my top post had 6,000 hits.   My top post now has almost 145,000 hits, and my second most popular post lags behind at 28,325 pageviews, the third at 18,448.  Quite a jump in readers in 6 short years!

Over the past six years I have had six guest bloggers. None of them had ever written a blog post before I extended them the invitation to try a guest post.  Three of them enjoyed the experience so much that they started their own blogs, and have been very successful!  These are Bette Pye Wing at The Pye Plate,  John Tew at Filiopietism Prism, and Tom Tufts at Tufts Genealogy.   They are all still blogging away, gaining more followers every day, and making lots of cousin connections online.

My very first weathervane post was on 24 August 2011.  It was a story on the gilded centaurweathervane on top of Andy Mack’s barn in Londonderry, New Hampshire.  It was a terrible photo because I couldn’t get near enough to take a good close up.  But it was the start of something great, because now I have posted 218 “Weathervane Wednesday” stories, with weather vanes from all over Nutfield, and from all over New England, the US, and from around the world!

In the past six years I have posted:

51 Wordless Wednesdays

52 Women’s History stories

56 “Amanuensis Monday” posts (mostly transcribed letters)

57 posts that mention “Liliuokalani”

65 stories based in the town of Ipswich, Massachusetts

66 posts with the keyword “Spain”

66 stories with the surname ALLEN

72 stories with the keyword “Revolutionary War”

92 stories with the surname WILKINSON

96 posts about the city of Beverly, Massachusetts

114 posts about historic sites inside and outside of New England

130 posts with the keyword “Derry”

170 posts with the keyword “Londonderry”

176 Surname Saturday posts

228 posts with the keyword  “cemeteries”

255 Tombstone Tuesdays

Thank you to all my blog followers!  I love the blog comments, email and Facebook discussions.  Please continue to send your notes, comments and suggestions - and especially your cousin connections.  Thank you also to all the blog followers who have joined my “Nutfield Genealogy” Facebook page.   There are 441 people at that page, maybe by next year’s blogoversary I will have reached 500.  Fingers crossed!

More statistics for the truly curious:

I've written a total of 1961 posts

There have been nearly 4,000 comments (a dearth of comments this past year.  No clue why?)

A total of 1,563,669 (at the time I wrote this last night) pageviews to my blog.

My best month for readership was April 2015, with 59,394 pageviews 

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Heather Wilkinson Rojo, "Happy 6th Blogoversary to me!", Nutfield Genealogy, posted 27 July 2015, (  http://nutfieldgenealogy.blogspot.com/2015/07/happy-6th-blogoversary-to-me.html: accessed [access date]).