Thursday, October 25, 2007

Genea-Musings Greatest Hits

I read the "Popular Pages" and "Entry Pages" blog post statistics for Genea-Musings almost every night on www.Sitemeter.com and www.Statcounter.com. Unfortunately, I only get information about the last 100 visits, which is usually the last 8 to 12 hours.

Certain Genea-Musings posts are always on the list. They include (in approximate order of popularity):

* Family tree tattoos? I really don't know where I'd put one - on my head? At least it would be visible. I worry that my dermatologist would wipe out an ancestor or two if she found a cancer spot.

* World Records for number of children. Every time I read this I worry about how they dealt with the confusion and mayhem around the house, and the cost of college educations for all of them.

* Spooky names in the census. Others have done this, including myself.

* John Tyler's Grandson is still alive!. This was the most amazing research story.

* How rare is your personality type? I'm ISTJ, what are you?

All of these posts are picked by people Googling key words - they are not genealogists, just curious people.

My own favorites? I think that they are:

* Shopping for the Genealogist who has everything. I need to find new gifts for my wife's birthday and Christmas - I'd better start soon!

* Index for my Cornelia Bresee search. This links to all of the posts that detailed my efforts to tap online genealogy resources to find Cornelia's parents.

* The Ultimate "Dodging the Census" Puzzle. This lists my futile search for the Robert Leroy Thompson (1880-1963) family and his parents in the census records from 1850 to 1930. Not one positive census record, which leads me to think he had a name change.

* The Census Whacking Index. A list of my posts about strange and funny names in the census. Which reminds me, I haven't done one for a long time.

* Best of the Genea-Blogs (last one). My almost weekly series of posts highlighting genealogy blog posts that I judge "best of the week."

You can click on the categories at the bottom of each post on the actual blog page to see the "collection" in each category. I still haven't changed my blog to be able to list all of the categories - I worry that I will lose it all.

If you want to do a Google search of my blog, put the keywords in the little "Search Blog" box up at the top of the web page header.
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Of course, this post is just another obvious attempt to create additional page views so that I can have my most ever visits and page views in October, and to increase my Reach in the Quantcast ratings.

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