Seventeen years ago I was writing short sketches on local history for a Londonderry website. I submitted the stories each month, and learned that I was part of something called a community "blog". It was easy to do, and I thought "I can do my own blog" and so I started Nutfield Genealogy on July 27th, 2009. The first story I wrote was about my long time brickwall ancestor project that started in the 1970s when I was in high school - all about my great grandmother's stories that we were related to a Queen in Hawaii. I remember being very nervous about pushing the publish button. The rest is history (pun intended).
The first people to read my blog were my mother and other other family members. I remember being quite shocked to learn that complete strangers were reading and commenting on my blog posts. Who were these people? That experience was weird, but fun. And even more fun to learn that some of these strangers were distant cousins. Making cousin connections is still my favorite part of genealogy blogging.
Years ago I joined the genealogy blogging community and made friends with genealogy bloggers from all over the USA and the world. It was fun to meet up with these people at genealogy workshops and genealogy conferences in New England, Salt Lake City, and all over. We currently still have communities on Facbook, Substack, Threads, and we used to have converstations on Twitter and Google+ (remember Twitter and G+?). My favorite genealogy blogging memories from before COVID are events held by the New England Genealogy Bloggers group that used to meet up once or twice a year. I miss those days.
I've gone from posting about 25 times a month to just a few times a month. But I'm not stopping, and I'm still researching in the background. You might run across me at your favorite archive or library in New England, while I stil plug away at my family history after more than fifty years of research. It's a never ending story.
Thank you for reading, commenting, and following Nutfield Genealogy!
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For the Truly Curious:
17 years, first post was July 27, 2009 "Hawaii - the Boston connection to a royal lineage" https://nutfieldgenealogy.blogspot.com/2009/07/hawaii-boston-connection-to-royal.html
3,525 Blog posts and pages written and published
6913 Comments (I've noticed that comments are down in the past five years. I get maybe one or two comments each month. No idea why this trend is happening!) I've deleted an almost equal number of spammy comments, too.
Most popular blog post "A Favorite Christmas Gift! You might want one, too!" published December 30, 2012 with over 250,000 reads https://nutfieldgenealogy.blogspot.com/2012/12/a-favorite-christmas-gift-you-might.html
I have the links to five permanent pages (look up under the image at the top of this blog page to see the links) on my home page. The most popular page is the first one "Surnames from my Family Tree" https://nutfieldgenealogy.blogspot.com/p/surnames-to-9-generations.html There are hundreds of surnames listed in two groups (my Paternal lineage and my Maternal lineage) with links to the "Surname Saturday" post for that surname. This page has received many hits and lots of email as folks make cousin connections. Take a peek and see if we have a common ancestor!
All time number of page views as of 7:00 AM today (July 26, 2026): 8,891,947
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To cite/link to this blog post: Heather Wilkinson Rojo, "Seventeen Years of the Nutfield Genealogy Blog", Nutfield Genealogy, posted July 26, 2026, ( https://nutfieldgenealogy.blogspot.com/2026/07/seventeen-years-of-nutfield-genealogy.html: accessed [access date]).
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