Happy Fifth Birthday, Steve’s Genealogy Blog!

Today is the fifth anniversary of when I started this blog and, as such, is quite an important occasion for me .  I wasn’t quite sure what I wanted to do with this blog when I started it except that I wanted to devote it to genealogy.

At first, I started detailing my genealogy-related research trips, and then I began discussing record types with examples from my own research .  One thing, however, that I wanted to do was to publish the genealogies I’ve been researching and link the events in those genealogies with images of the original records .  In recent years, most of my efforts on this blog have been in that vein.

This type of personal research blog is not particularly interesting to most people (genealogists included) unless, of course, someone happens to find their own ancestors in what I have written .  Luckily for me, several people have, indeed found their own ancestors here and I, in turn, have found previously unknown cousins.

In five years, I have published 1,802 articles, nearly one every day .  Since most of the records I discuss on this blog were written in a language other than English, it’s difficult for me to transcribe, translate, and publish more than one record a day, especially because I have a full-time job that requires my attention most of the day.

In five years, there have been 1,734 comments posted to this blog, some of which are pingbacks, so I suppose those really don’t count as legitimate comments .  Interestingly enough, most of those comments have been posted to a relatively small number of posts .  The very nature of this blog means that very few people will have comments about a particular record, so most of the comments are on posts that aren’t record related.

I’m a bit unsure about the readership .  I don’t subscribe to some of the site counters that other people use that might give me a more detailed understanding of the readers, but WordPress Site Stats tells me that in 2011 there have been an average of 291 views per day .  The Count per Day Plugin, however, tells me that I have an average of 565 visitors per day .  So, every day, I have 565 visitors who each view one-half of a post .  Go figure.

The top ten posts and pages since I installed WordPress Site Stats a few years ago are:

The Vincentian Institute in Albany, New York
Bearded Iris 
A New Look at Immigrant Passenger Manifests
Kodak’s Brownie Hawkeye Camera
The Angel Raphael
Jesus Blessing the Children
The Old Town Marketplace in Warsaw (Rynek Starego Miasta)
Halloween 1962 at the Vincentian Institute, Albany, New York
Izbicki Documents
Photos of the Vincentian Institute in Albany
The Church in Dubiecko and What I Found There

Relatively few people visit my blog regularly (a few relatives and friends are the exceptions) .  Most find my blog through search engines such as Google where the top ten search terms have been:

iris
warsaw old town
sharon murphy
steve danko
stephen danko
genealogy blog
izbicki
warsaw mermaid
water lilies
steve dankos

You will notice that the top search terms will lead the reader to several of the top posts .  Who’d have guessed?  But, wait a second here, how come more people find my blog by searching for Sharon Murphy than by searching for my name? 

I’ve also had visitors who have found my blog using the following search terms:

complete birth record -obama (sorry, I don’t have a copy)
greek lagoon (perhaps on my next vacation)
askeri haritalar (I’m sorry, I don’t speak Turkish)
what is juskiw mean in ukrainian (I’m sure I don’t know)
croked house (did you mean crooked or crocked?)

OK, that’s enough .  Thanks so much for your support over the past five years whether you are a friend, relative, or stranger who finds something interesting or useful here, or even if you just found yourself here by mistake .  Here’s to the next five years!

Copyright © 2011 by Stephen J. Danko