Celebrating My 15th Blogiversary

One hot summer night in 2008, I decided to begin blogging about my genealogy adventures. I had been tracing my family's roots for a decade by then. 

What to name my new blog? I remember trying one or two names, but they were already in use by others using the Blogger platform. Then I typed in Climbing My Family Tree and was pleasantly surprised to discover no one else had that blog name (on Blogger). 

Early posts were about questions I was trying to answer and some of the clues I was beginning to find. Soon I was posting about family history artifacts, useful resources, research trips, conference sessions and exhibit halls, mystery photos, cemetery visits, plus lots of unexpected detours and surprise discoveries. 

Best of all, my blog has been terrific cousin bait, bringing me together with some wonderful relatives I didn't even know I had. Whether close or distant, cousins who have gotten in touch have all added to my knowledge of ancestors and our family tree, for which I am grateful.

The WayBack Machine began archiving my blog in the fall of 2011. At that point, I had three badges on my blog plus a "Blogging for Ancestors" widget that used to be a loose connection between genealogy blogs, as shown here.  

By now I've written more than 1700 blog posts about my ancestors and my husband's ancestors. These have served as an ongoing "first draft of family history" as I create projects to preserve my family's past for the sake of future generations. More posts to come as I embark on my Sweet Sixteenth year of blogging. 

With the social media world still in flux due to changes on X/Twitter and other sites, I plan to continue blogging as a way to share family history adventures in my own words, in my own time. Thank you for reading!

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.