Looking Back on 2020

It's good to revisit the past year, to reflect on what worked well and what to improve on. This past year on writing posts for this blog, I kept a spreadsheet of the posts and in total, I wrote 155 posts across two blogs: this one and Mam-ma's Southern Family. In order to do some statistical analysis, I learned I need to create a couple more columns with some codes to better help with sorting and counting. Hand counting across 150 plus entries in a spreadsheet is difficult.

In all, I wrote 138 posts in this blog, which fell into four categories:

• 52 Ancestors in 52 weeks: 38
• Genea-pourri: 51
• Saturday Night Genealogy Fun: 40
• Family Stories: 10

The top-viewed posts by theme this past year were:

From 52 Ancestors meme:

• Air: George J. Gorrell Served in the Army Air Corps During WWII
• Scary Stuff: Building the Bridge Over the Vesle (France)
• Winter: Freak Snowstorm in Southern California on Virginia’s 5^th Birthday
• Different Language: Swedish & German Spoken at Home
• Quite the Character: My Aunt Beryl

Several of these posts were highlighted in the weekly email wrap-up from Amy Johnson Crow and 52 Ancestors in 52 Weeks challenge for 2021. These helped with the higher numbers and also if I added a link to my Facebook page.

For Family Stories:

• Letters Home, Using V-Mail
• A Marriage Find and a Tip When Searching Newspapers
• Tom Johnston Becomes Guardian to his Own Children

Saturday Night Genealogy Fun:

• Your Top 10 Free Genealogy Sites
• Your Father’s Work History

Blog posts most proud of:
The series about George J. Gorrell’s service in the Army Air Corps in England during WWII. The last post with the links to the previous posts is here.

The series about my aunt, Lorene Hork, traveling around the world with girl friends in 1953. The last post with links to the previous posts is here. I’m not quite done and need to finish the last leg of her journey.

Copyright © 2020 by Lisa S. Gorrell, My Trails into the Past. All Rights Reserved.