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Wednesday, August 16, 2006

Wonderful Genea-blogging

One sign of maturity in the genealogy blogosphere is the proliferation of well-written feature-length articles and opinions on topics of interest.

While some of the Ancestry.com article writers now have their own blogs on which they post their weekly articles (for instance, George G. Morgan's Along These Lines blog), and other book and magazine writers have started blogging (for instance, Arlene Eakle and Megan Smolenyak), there is a vast array of relatively unknown educated and talented genealogy bloggers at work or in training.

Blogging about writers or work that you admire is one way to immediately publicize examples of great research and great writing. I found these articles posted in the last week as worthy of mentioning here:

1) Lee Anders at The Geneaholic found two articles by Diana Hartman at Blogcritics titled "Hunting Humans" - they are here and here. Excellent material, with a promise of more.

2) Jasia at Creative Gene has written two excellent analysis articles about genealogy interest, society membership and conference attendance here and here. These should be must reading for society officers and program planners.

3) Steve Danko is posting a series of thoughtful articles about the Genealogical Proof Standard, sources, information and evidence. The first four articles are about the Preponderance of Evidence, Proof Standard, Source Citations, and Original Sources, Exact Images and Original Records. Steve's articles are very well done and useful, because he is using examples from his own research to illustrate his points.

Having been blogging now for all of four months, I am painfully aware of the effort and dedication needed to write articles like the above examples, and I really appreciate these authors, and all bloggers. I am also dismayed that so few people comment on articles like these, or on genealogy blogs. These genea-bloggers need positive feedback and praise because they are the magazine article writers and the book authors of the future.

What "great" articles should we all read? Tell me, and the genea-blogging world.

3 comments:

  1. My excuse is I read too many wonderful blogs/columns. So many, in fact, I don't have time to stop at each one to leave a comment. But, I'll promise to do better if you'll promise not to take away my cable modem (Saw your comment over at Chris'... LOL...).

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  2. My excuse... Who has time to leave comments when we've got all these ancestors to find? :)

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  3. Thank you for the compliment Randy. And thank you for reminding us how important it is to give feedback to our fellow bloggers. Comments remind us that someone is reading the words we pour ourselves into. And that is very gratifying.

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