Top Four Blog Posts of 2023

 

During 2023, I wrote 117 posts. These four had the most views of the year:

• In Beta at Ancestry: Top Hints. Read the full post here. I was interested in testing this new Ancestry feature, which were designed to show hints that "will help you make better discoveries." Well, no more top hints, only hints on Ancestry. The usual hints, organized according to all hints, record hints, photo hints, story hints, tree hints, and 1950 US Census hints. I do check hints on occasion, when I'm focusing on a particular ancestor, but I don't go systematically through the thousands of hints for each tree.
• Prepping for the 1931 Canadian Census Release. Read the full post here. Good info for planning, and putting Census answers into context. Rather than try to find elusive Canadian ancestors through searching by home address, I waited for indexing and easily found most of my targeted ancestors. As Gail Dever recently noted, the 1931 Canadian Census is now fully indexed and conveniently searchable (with multiple variables) on FamilySearch. 
• Dating Family Photos, Investigating Photographers. Read the full post here. I've tried the MyHeritage PhotoDater on multiple photos and I like how it attempts to narrow the range of years, giving me a bit of a headstart. I still like researching photographers like Beldegreen, who took many of the photos of my immigrant maternal grandparents.
• Are Genealogy Blogs Still Relevant? Read full post here. This is my 16th year of genealogy blogging (and my 26th year of researching family history). Yes, I definitely think genealogy blogs remain relevant, even in this era of videos and short-form social media platforms. As I said in my August post, I sincerely appreciate the genealogy bloggers who have been offering tips and tricks and stories and more. You all inspire me to keep digging and keep blogging. 

Is Your Genealogy Blog in the Wayback Machine?

During #AncestryHour on Tuesday, participants discussed how to preserve digital info, including blog posts. Then someone came up with the bright idea to check the Internet Archive's Wayback Machine.

As shown above, my genealogy blog was saved 111 times in the past decade. (I began blogging in 2008 but the Wayback Machine apparently didn't save my posts for the first few years.)

Pick a date and click

I picked one of the dates in the timeline, and a calendar popped up, highlighting the days when my blog was saved as a snapshot in the Wayback Machine. If I click on a specific highlighted date, I can see exactly what my blog's home page looked like then. 

For instance, the image at right shows the top of my blog on November 24, 2011, Thanksgiving Thursday. 

The Wayback Machine also included in its snapshot that day's post and blog posts going back to November 2, 2011, all of which were visible on the home page. 

(This design shows what my blog looked like before I inserted ancestor landing pages and other elements.)

Try it, you'll like it

If you have a blog, do enter the URL in the Wayback Machine's search box and see how many times (and when) your blog was saved by this wonderful digital resource.

Then take a trip back in time by clicking to see what your blog looked like on that date.

Plus feel good that some of your blog entries have been archived for the public, to be preserved and available into the future!

"Preservation" is this week's #52Weeks genealogy challenge prompt from Amy Johnson Crow.