Happy Blogiversary

Happy blogiversary to my blog at gophergenealogy.blogspot.com. Eight years and it continues to serve others. More posts to come.

2014 Ends and 2015 Begins

This has been an incredible year for our family. It started out right with attending the Salt Lake Institute of Genealogy, which I am repeating this year. Most of my mother's estate has been taken care of except for the sale of her home and some cemetery issues. My genealogy work continues to evolve and there was some work for other people. There were twenty four classes taught, for a total of 167classes taught in twelve years or 83 in the last three years. For this blog there were 277 posts written and this makes 278. For the last few months my posts have been less frequent and over the holidays there was some down time from computer work altogether.

Putting Off Writing Blog Posts

Sometimes one does not feel like writing or things get in the way of getting the words to flow in writing a post. Lately I have been doing a lot of reading, more as a distraction from dealing with my mother's probate and the selling of her home. Even though we are working with a potential buyer and have had several offers, my anxiety is running rather high. Over the weekend I spent about three hours re-doing the power point presentation for this week's class.

Blog Posts and the Oscars

Today marked 35,000 post views for this blog. In April will be the five year blogiversary. This is my 250th post and it is amazing the variety of topics that they cover. With seventy followers and many others who are reading, it is an honor to know that there is interest in what is written. Tonight I watched the Oscars, which is not something that I normally would do. It was entertaining and thought provoking.

Blogging Fun and Other Time Commitments

Today's review of my blog views shows 25,555. When it reached 25,000 views last week that was amazing, but this was the serendipity moment as the numbers all lined up. Lately things seem to be picking up again. There were two days in a row this month that were 120 and 110. In April 2013 I reached 1764 views for the all-time high of monthly views. May was 1708 and so far for the month of June it is 1423.

Serendipity Within the Gates Family

Now, how would you feel if this email arrived in your inbox as this did in mine yesterday?

"Hello,

It was my good fortune last evening to have Googled my 3rd great grandfather's name and run into your blog! I knew very little about "Ardell" prior to that. I suspected he was an 1812 vet and had inklings he was down near Mankato at one time. A big issue for me was that I had 2 different death dates for him. Turns out he lived much longer than I imagined.