Happy Birthday to Heritage Ramblings!

*Gertrude Broida Cooper and her husband Irving I. Cooper with their grandchildren in 1966. (Click to enlarge.)*

Our blog is one year old this week!

This is blog post number 135.

(That is an average of about 1 post every 3 days- now I know where my time goes.)

Our Home Page has been viewed 1,074 times.

The most views we have had in one day is 92.

The post with the most views had 68.

We have had 162 spam comments. (Dealing with that is a BIG time-waster, even if it is just a few clicks.)

We don’t want to say how many revisions a few of the posts have had- finding more information, fixing typos (wish I had taken typing in school), and being a perfectionist who doesn’t always get it perfect due to time constraints and distractions makes it challenging, but we keep striving to make this blog better.

We found two distant cousins. (Cousin bait is one of our reasons for blogging.)

We have had two persons with associated artifacts or a link to a person mentioned in the blog (not family) contact us.

The curator for the Healdsburg Museum found us through Ancestry.com but then saw the blog and liked it. She asked me to write an article on Edward B. Payne for their journal that accompanied an exhibit on Altruria and other Sonoma County, CA Utopian colonies- that was pretty exciting. The exhibit is over but they are planning a virtual exhibit of “Visionaries, Believers, Seekers and Schemers” in the near future. More posts to come with the Altruria story.

Two tombstones have had transliterations done from the Hebrew/Yiddish by kind persons who found us, and who recommended JewishGen’s Viewmate service for future items that need translating.

Not too bad for 365 days.

From an idea between two family members inspired by Legacy Family Tree Webinars on starting a blog (Thanks, Dear Myrt and Geoff Rasmussen!) and wanting to share the wonderful family history stories we have uncovered, we finally got it together and actually created one. We continue to be challenged concerning the mechanics of the blog- still trying to figure out how to add the lead photo of a post to subscriber emails, as I have it set up that way but it still does not do so- and finding the time to blog is almost impossible lately. Seems like each blog post requires a bit more research to fill in the blanks as one writes, as getting it down on paper- er, in pixels?- helps one to see what is missing. So the posts take longer than expected, but they really do help to put ancestors in the right context and clarify mysteries.

We do hope that you will stay tuned for more family stories- and we have some very exciting things in the works too!

Notes, Sources, and References:

1) Photo is from family treasure collection.

2) The post with the most views is “Those Places Thursday: Witebsk, Belarus and The Mother of Abraham Green or Rose (Brave) Green.”

3) Healdsburg Museum, Sonoma Co., California: http://www.healdsburgmuseum.org

Please contact us if you would like a higher resolution image.

We would love to read your thoughts and comments about this post, and thank you for your time! All comments are moderated, however, due to the high intelligence and persistence of spammers/hackers who really should be putting their smarts to use for the public good instead of spamming our little blog.