Little did I imagine when I started this blog in November 2008 that I would have 78 followers and pageviews numbering in the hundreds of thousands currently at 411,057. Although some of these must be created by google and bing, the audience is from all over the world.
United States 158,650
Germany 65,740
Russia 42,350
United Kingdom 29,793
Canada 24,395
France 16,098
China 9,812
Australia 7,480
Ukraine 6,689
Sweden 2,145
That is looking at the pageviews since the beginning of the blog. However in any particular time period I also have reports of viewing for Norway, Finland, Spain, Poland, Chile, Columbia, and others which do not show up at the moment checking across the time period for views.
Not surprising to find United States looking at my Blake posts and probably 50% are Blake and that includes the United Kingdom, Australia and Canada.
Germany is perhaps my posts on my husband's German families - not a lot but there are some. Also within the Blake surname study there are several Blake lines that trace back to Germany.
Russia is likely because of my blogs on H11 which is found to a large extent in Russia particularly in the Ossettia area. I have had a number of emails from members of our study group who live in Russia. My H11a2a1 likely traveled from the Ukraina Ice Refuge 15,000 years ago across Doggerland to Scotland where the mutations common to me are found still today in Argyllshire and Ayrshire as well as County Antrim, Ireland. But we all belong to that same subclade H11 although with different mutations thus separating us into the many subclades of H11.
Sweden and the Ukraine also have a goodly percentage of people with H11 mitochondrial DNA and hence I suspect also are looking at those posts as a number of the people in our study group for H11 still live in Sweden and the Ukraine.
France likely stems from all the posts that I have done in the past on the French Canadian research that I have done on our son in law's families. His many lines stretch far back into early colonial New France particularly in the Quebec City area and Montreal.
China I am not sure but perhaps it is Blake researchers living in Hong Kong. No ideas really on that.
My last post looking at the number of pageviews was at 100,000 page views 26th February 2014. It took six years to reach 100,000 and only another four years to be at 411,057.
I hope to return to my will transcription in the near future but in the meantime I am tying up loose ends from last year. Somehow doing Conference 2017 occupied a great deal of my time and many many projects were begun and set aside. Because I had to do a lot of backtracking to pick up those threads I started new projects when time was available and now I am in the process of picking up those varied projects and completing them.
Some of them involve emailing back and forth to people whose DNA matched mine and as the search became more detailed I ran out of time to continue that remarkable research. Now I want to do so and see where it takes me. I have one real mystery in my family lines.
That of my great grandmother Ellen Taylor. Ellen only lived 37 years on this earth but she was greatly loved by her children and in particular my maternal grandmother. My grandmother was eleven when her mother died from pneumonia in Aston, Birmingham, England. Her youngest child was just one year of age when she died in 1897. Even all those years later when I was in my teens it still horrified my grandmother to think that her mother died so young at 37 years of age. By then my grandmother was in her mid 70s just a little older than I am now. She was very healthy at that time although beginning to show the signs of age. I can remember her when she was in her early 60s and taught me to double jump with a skipping rope. But age catches up to us and she gradually aged before my eyes. I was so lucky to see her every week of my life until her death (and oftener especially in the summer when I would bike over to visit with her most days). My grandmother talked a lot about her mother I always thought but now as I reach back into her past I realize she talked about her as a person and not as a member of any family group. My questions about her parents were skillfully put aside in favour of details about her mother as the person that she loved. Towards my late teens (my grandmother died when I was 21) she gradually let slip into conversation details about her mother. I suspect this was accidental because questioning did not bring more details but rather an interesting story about her mother and her handiwork. I did learn that her mother had had an illegitimate child seven years before my grandmother was born (my grandmother was the eldest of seven children). I did find Florence Elizabeth Taylor and Ellen Taylor on the 1881 census but linking her with her family was a challenge that continues to this day. I think I have found her with her family on the census in 1861 and 1871 but not being able to find the marriage registration for my Edwin Denner Buller and Ellen Taylor has meant not knowing for sure the name of her father and with a name like Taylor that really is a must have. So any possible links to my great grandmother are carefully traced to see if they will yield that answer.
Phasing my grandparents continues to be high on my list and hence DNA remains one of my most important tools in my genealogy toolkit. It is funny to hear me talk about genealogy even after fifteen years of being involved. I really stayed away from genealogy for a very very long time. I enjoyed hearing stories from my grandparents about my relatives in far away England as a child. But it didn't motivate me to really look at those relatives and the ancestors that we shared in common. A trip to England in 2001 had more to do with my becoming interested in genealogy. As we checked into our hotel near Covent Garden in London I had this incredible feeling of belonging. It stayed with me the entire time as we walked the streets in that area. Little did I know in November 2001 that my 2x great grandfather Henry Christopher Buller had had a pork butcher shop just around the corner from our hotel in the 1830s and 1840s. That feeling of belonging made me aware that I really did not know a lot about my families all of whom, still to my knowledge, were born in England way back into time.
I have diverged from the original post which I do do often enough that is for sure. Back to work!
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