300 Blogs

Since the occasion of my 300^th blog is occurring coincident with the end of the year, I thought I’d write a summary of what these 300 have been. I won’t guarantee that I won’t write another one before the end of the year, but this is close enough.

I began writing these on February 1^st of 2015. I had no particular goals at the time except capturing the continuing stories that came to mind. I had just published my autobiography a few months before, so these were like additional chapters to that book. I wrote 38 entries that first month, 16 more the following month, and my first 100 entries by June. Having gotten that initial burst of pent-up energy taken care of, the rate of writing new entries slowed down. I wrote a total of 137 entries in 2015, 86 in 2016 (30 of these being a daily writing assignment that I took on in April), and 77 thus far in 2016. There are a few months I wrote as few as 2 entries depending on what else was going on in my life.

Within a few months of starting, a new pattern had developed. Since I had been mentally working on my autobiography for most of the prior year, I had not spent much time on something that is of major interest to me – doing genealogical research, especially looking at the intersection of genealogy, geography, and history, i.e. looking at how family stories are impacted by where the people were at the time and what else was going on around them that influenced them. This has become my major theme since then.

I have put all my blogs into a half-dozen themes and the counts of each of these themes are:

·       112 – Genealogy

·       67 – Wolcott History, i.e. stories about the town where I spent my formative years

·       57 – Family stories

·       16 – Technology, primarily stories of the technology I worked with

·       17 – Planning

·       84 – Miscellaneous (like this one)

Note that these add up to more than 300 because there are some that I have tagged with more than one theme.

Most of my entries are 1-2 pages (as I capture them initially as MS-Word documents). I’ve also written a few multi-part blogs, as I have too much for an easy read. The key ones here are:

·       8 – Planning

·       6 – Future Planning

·       6 – Trip to Ghana

·       5 – Gender and Sex

·       4 – My Father’s Navy Service

·       4 – Marrying a Cousin (written as separate entries over a long span of time, but on the same topic

My readership varies considerably. While I post links to all my entries on my Facebook account, I also share appropriate entries on two Facebook groups: Wolcott History ones on “You Know You’re from Wolcott if …”, and Pierpont Genealogy ones on the “Pierpont Family Association”. Some of my 30-day writing assignment have gotten little interest (less than 10 views), but some of the Wolcott History ones have in excess of 400 views. In total, I’ve had over 20,000 views in the last 3 years or an average of 60-70 views per posting. I’m not widely read like some people I’ve heard about, but that has not been my intention.

I want encourage others to realize that our past is not just some dusty old archive and not relevant to daily living. Rather, our ancestors were real people with real problems, even if their problems are not ones we have today. And they were impacted by where they were and what else was happening in the world – just as we today are influenced by these same things. There is a wise saying that I’ve heard many times over the years, “Those who don’t know history are doomed to repeat it.” This blog is part of my small effort to help educate people and encourage them to know their history.

To you, my readers, I hope that I’ve piqued your curiosity at least a few times and caused you to consider things that you might not have otherwise.