It's my Blogiversary!

One year ago today I started this blog.

Happy Blogiversary, "Twigs of Yore"!

My stated intention was to write up bits of my research in order to practice writing and to actually get some of my hard work written up. In my next blog post, Chasing a BLACK sheep, I wrote up the story of my great-great-grandfather, James Black's death. After that... there was not so much writing up. Instead, I mostly wrote about whatever (connected with genealogy) I was doing or thinking about at the time.

The only other post that I consider to be a written up family story was An Elderly Woman's Sudden Death which described the death of James Black's wife, my great-great grandmother, Frances Gertrude Lewis. I was quite pleased with that one. I think in many ways it's my favourite post for the year.

So much for my stated intention.

I wondered when I started blogging if I would keep it up. So far so good! Over the last year I've published 56 posts, or just over one a week on average.

Along the way I've made discoveries, played with photos, joined in memes, done a little study, reorganised my files, raved about the Australian Newspapers collection on Trove, and started reading many, many more genealogy blogs than I used to.

I have found that there have been two main unexpected benefits of writing this blog.

The first is the motivation it provides to keep doing the research, and to do it properly. I find it very easy to lose focus and just muck around with my database or poke around in some data collection, without making real progress. Writing the blog has helped me to keep on track, to think through the next step more carefully, and where possible to actually take it. After all, I need something to write about and week after week of "didn't do much, just mucked around" would have been a bit embarrassing.

The other benefit is the interaction with other bloggers. This is a benefit I had read about before I started. To my surprise, all the things that people have said about there being a friendly helpful community of geneabloggers out there were true.

So, thank you to all who have visited my blog over the past year, and I hope to "see" you again through the next year!