We've shared 209 blogs! We've been contacted by many SHACKFORD cousins (wish we'd been counting!), a college student researching Martha Hale Shackford, a museum holding some SHACKFORD items, and someone related to a SHACKFORD landlord mentioned in a blog. Multiple folks have posted comments on SHACKFORD blog pages.
According to Google Analytics, we've had 8133 page views, 4093 sessions and 3122 individual viewers. That's not bad for the narrow topic of SHACKFORD genealogy!
On January 2013, we set a goal of blogging at least once a week with at least five blogs about my SHACKFORD line and blogged at a rate of twice a week and included blogs about my own SHACKFORD ancestry.
We set some goals in 2013:
We decided not to pursue a genealogy research study path but instead decided to diversify retirement activities, added more tennis, and began volunteering at a local Literacy Center where we teach math literacy -- yes -- Math CAN be fun!.
Attending 3 genealogy meetings -- we chose to attend WEBinars instead because the professional genealogy society is a two hour drive from here. We postponed attending a genealogy conference but watched RootsTech from the living room.
Instead of finding research sources in our local county where no SHACKFORDs ever lived, I started volunteering weekly at our local Family History Center helping visitors with their research. When visitors aren't present, I get to do my own research using the free resources. I even gave a presentation on the FamilySearch Premium Sites to other volunteers and was the lead for our community Celtic festival's genealogy booth. Both were fun activities where I learned a lot, met some folks who do genealogy research in Phoenix and Flagstaff and had a lot of fun helping others with their genealogy research.
We added Elizabeth Shown Mill's Evidence Explained to our library and are using it to document sources.
We decided to keep the Weebly WEB site instead of converting to another WEB server because we now can write an article in Word and transfer it into Weebly and it will keep the footnotes.
And we established a digital genealogy filing system for new research material, found more than five reference sources but still have to add them to the WEB page, and established a monthly backup plan.
GOALS for the NEXT YEAR OF BLOGGING:
Continue with SHACKFORD Family History blogging once or twice a week with a focus on answering reader's research questions (currently have two recent questions that have not been answered yet).
Transcribe at least one probate record each month (they give us so much information!)
Flush out the research plan for places where travel is needed for further research and begin to develop a trip plan to accomplish the research (another RV trip plan!!!!) See if it's possible to visit any of the close places (California?) in the next year.
THESE TWO YEARS OF BLOGGING HAS BEEN FUN BECAUSE OF THE WONDERFUL COMMENTS AND INSPIRATIONAL RESEARCH TIPS FROM THE READERS OF THIS BLOG! THANKS SO MUCH!!!