And then, we were four.  Has time really flown by that fast? I was only yesterday that GeneaBloggers started with a listing of 400 genealogy and family history blogs. And on last year’s blogiversary we had 2,000 blogs listed – so we’ve grown by over 1,000 blogs in a year! We are celebrating our 4th blogiversary today so here’s a gift for you: a brief history of GeneaBloggers.

GeneaBloggers History

GeneaBloggers is an online community resource listing over 3,000 genealogy and family history blogs all over the world. Blogs are listed when they are submitted by the owner of the blog or by one of their readers. The only qualification is that the blog have current articles and that it be focused on genealogy and family history.

Why Blogs?

Well very often as genealogists we need a way to write the stories of our ancestors and to write our own stories about how we found them.  Each day there are close to 500 articles created by our members who write up their research finds, post photos and documents, share the latest resources (online and offline), publicize webinars and events and generally just share their infectious enthusiasm for genealogy and family history.

Facts and Figures About GeneaBloggers

GeneaBloggers was started on January 18, 2009 by Thomas MacEntee, a professional genealogist, author and educator who realized the need for a community of genealogy bloggers.  In those 4 years, the site has grown to include over 3,000 blogs from all over the world.

In addition there have been over 3,100 different articles posted at GeneaBloggers with almost 12,000 comments made by readers to those articles. And the GeneaBloggers site has so far seen over 8 million visitors including those reading via RSS feed readers like Google Reader.

How Can You Use the Resources at GeneaBloggers?

Even if you don’t have your own blog, you can search for your surnames across all 3,000 blogs by clicking Search All Blogs at the top of the page. Also, check out Blog Resources which lists over 500 links to sites about backing up your genealogy data, cheat sheets for Facebook and other programs, and more.

If you are a blogger, click Suggest A Blog to submit your blog to be included at the GeneaBloggers site.  In addition, check out the About page for info on how to participate in various GeneaBloggers events such as the Daily Blogging Prompts.

[Note: readers are encouraged to pass the above information on to their genealogy societies for use in newsletters, etc. so others can benefit from the resources at GeneaBloggers.  In addition, bloggers can use the information (in part or in whole) on their own sites to help get the word out about GeneaBloggers.]

©2013, copyright Thomas MacEntee

You may have seen some changes here at GeneaBloggers over the past week with some outages.  Let me explain what happened:

Since late 2010, I’ve been using WURV.com as my hosting service since they specialized in hosting WordPress sites and they gave me a dedicated server for the cost of $25 a month.  Sounds too good to be true?  Well, everything was fine . . . at first.

Then WURV.com became less and less responsive to my emails (but their invoice always showed up on time for payment).  Over the weekend, I was no longer able to get to the WordPress admin area.  Also, since July I’ve been noticing some weird behavior on posts, especially the Google cache versions: there would be spam text and links, but not on the live version. Basically I think that WURV.com bailed and just abandoned its business without telling its clients.  Real smooth.

Well guess what?  It seems that since July 2012 someone else has taken over WURV’s servers since NONE of my content has been backed up since then.  Poof! Gone! So I’m not sure where I’ve been posting to for the last five months. As I work to upload content and recover items, I ask for your patience.  I may never be able to replace images posted from July – November 2012 here, but I’ll try.

For now I’m happy to be with SimplyHosting.net which was recommended by many members of the Technology for Genealogy Group over at Facebook. Onward and upward!

©2012, copyright Thomas MacEntee