52 Weeks of Abundant Genealogy - Week 1 - Blogs

Week 1 – Blogs: Blogging is a great way for genealogists to share information with family members, potential cousins and each other. For which blog are you most thankful? Is it one of the earliest blogs you read, or a current one? What is special about the blog and why should others read it?

Challenge from Sunday 1st January 2012 - Saturday 7th January 2012 

I can't remember the first genealogy blog I read. I started this blog in a very naive form in 2002, which makes me in the blog world nearly 10 years old!

Blogging is so very easy to start, find a platform, and start writing, connecting with others and making comments. Of course, because there are so many blogs and so many great blogs, it really is hard to choose a particular blog. There are so many personal genealogies to read, genealogical processes and thoughts read that can be used as a springboard for others to use. With there being so many blogs it is easy to miss a great one - Twitter helps with that for me. That said, the biggest blog resource I use is Geneabloggers.

Just look through the Geneabloggers site. Thomas produces a daily post every day of every week. All free of charge. The site is a spring board of positivity, contemplation and blog prompts. If ever you wanted to write a blog post and didn't know what to write stop by Geneabloggers to read a list of prompts. It is also an information gateway, a host to other bloggers. If it is possible to have a Genealogical Blogging Encyclopedia then Geneabloggers is it!

Turning now to my own blog. What I am most grateful for is the facility to be able to write and share with a whole host of people over a host of things. The focus of my blog is quite simply me and everything that makes up me - my hobbies and obsessions, my ancestry, holidays, thoughts, photographs and much more. What there is rarely a mention of is the day job and I guess that says it all! 

I take part in various meme's across the week - Tea Cup Tuesday which means that I get to share tea cups and alike that I inherited. I also post fairly regularly to Postcard Friendly Friday and share my postcard collection. I am planning a more focused post for Sunday Stamps using my childhood collection of stamps before they travel across the Pacific in the Autumn to the next generation of my extended family. I also like to take part in Sepia Saturday which enables me to share my photographs of past generations and occasionally I include a more recent one. I tend to follow my other obsession of books with a bookish post at the Sunday Salon, although I have been slack of late. Almost finally, I often post about Weekend Cooking, where I perhaps share a book review of a cook book or program or in the past a smart phone cookery app and perhaps a recipe or two!

In addition to these I take part in various prompts provided by Geneabloggers and have just almost completed the 52 weeks of personal genealogy. I usually take part in the Carnival of Genealogy hosted by Jasia.

I host a blog called Grave Encounters as part of the Graveyard Rabbits and have been invited to write in their international slot during 2012. 

During the latter part of 2011, I started a year long project of sharing my Guildford and District Collection of postcards, again I decided to post these to a separate blog. 

I also have a blog called George's War, which has been quiet over the last few years which is about my Grandfather's time in the Army during the Second World War. 

The plan during 2012 is to share my One Place Study on Puttenham, a rural village in Surrey England using a separate blog.

The absolute beauty of a blog is that, whilst perhaps isolated writing in our homes or other venues we can share our research, thoughts and much more with a mixture of known and unknown world wide web population. The search engines tend to record posts for prosperity and I am always aware that once a thought or comment is committed to the blogosphere it can be read by ALL, so I use the rule of thumb, if I wouldn't tell someone a specific at a bus stop then I won't share via my blog! 

A blog can grow and develop with you. This blog has. It has grown as I have become more confident, taken part in more posting activity and received more comments from others. What I am grateful for is the on line friendships that it brings. The people that we "meet" along the way as we read other blogs, post to our own blogs and leave and receive comments. There is a real sense of community, both within the blogging world and the genealogical world.

What is quite remarkable is that the world has a landmass of 13,056 million hectares, yet the world wide web has reduced it in a virtual way to the size of a matchbox! We live in a remarkable world and have an enormous amount of technology and information at our disposal, the blogging world helps to make that possible.