Happy 15th Blogiversary!

Fifteen years ago, I started a blog on January 15, centered around my maternal grandmother’s family. It was too confining, so in June of 2011, I started this blog, so I could also write about my grandfather’s family, my father’s family, and my husband’s family. That began the start of My Trails into the Past.

15 years is a nice round number and I still enjoy blogging. I write at least three posts a week: one for 52 Ancestors in 52 Weeks, one for Saturday Night Genealogy Fun, and one for Genea-pourri about my genealogy pursuits of the past week. So doing that means close to 150 posts a year. Of course, some are posted on my other blog, Mam-ma’s Southern Family, if the theme has something to do with her family.

This year, I started a new meme, working on twelve family lines, one per month. That has increased the number of posts I have written per week. So far in 2026, I have written about 80 posts and I wrote 80 posts last year since June 27.

12 for ‘26
This is a new theme this year and I have worked on my Hork, Sievert, Gleeson and Tierney lines, and my husband’s Wollenweber and Voehringer lines. Loveless and Hutson round it out, but were posted on the other blog. My goal in researching and writing about these families, is to decide which line might be suitable for a Kinship Determination Project (KDP) for my certification renewal. I haven’t decided yet.

I usually start with a timeline, covering documents I have already collected. Then I use FamilySearch full-text search to locate more documents. I also use newspaper websites in the same way. I create new research questions, especially as I get to the end of the month and it is time to switch gears for a new surname. This month, I haven’t written as much, as the deed research for the Tierney family in Nepean Township, Carleton County, Ontario, Canada, has been more tedious. My ancestors did not just buy one piece of land they farmed their whole life. I hope I can get enough of something to write a post of my progress before the end of the month.

Goals for the Next Year
I would like to enter all my posts into AirTable so I can more easily see what posts I have written about different people in the family. With nearly 1500 posts in this blog and nearly 300 in the other, even with searching on the blog, it is hard to discover what I have already written about a subject. I do save the Word documents of my posts in the folders of my family members. Perhaps, I only add the posts that pertain to family and skip any about general genealogy topics. That will save me some time.

Here's to more family history blogging!

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