Creative Gene is Nominated for FamTreeMag Top 40

I'm feeling under the weather with the flu but I wanted to take a moment to say thank you to everyone who voted to nominate the Creative Gene blog for the Family Tree Magazine's Top 40 Blogs contest. I am honored to have made the list in the "All Around" category. I also want to congratulate all of my fellow bloggers who have been nominated as well. I am in the company of greats!

Voting for the nominated blogs will run from Oct. 5 thru Nov. 5. You can vote as many times as you like. If you'd like to see the Creative Gene blog on the final Top 40 list please vote! You can click here to vote or click on the Top 40 Blogs button on the left side of this page. Thank you for voting for your favorite blogs!

Carnival of Genealogy, 81st Edition

Schelly has posted the 81st edition of the Carnival of Genealogy on her blog, Tracing the Tribe. The topic for this edition is: your blog's obituary. You'll find an exciting range of creative, humorous, poetic, serious, and thoughtful posts on the subject. The contributors this time around really put some heart and soul into their posts. Don't miss it!

Schelly has done a terrific job of putting the COG together, and a big THANKS! goes out to her for guest hosting this edition. Great job Schelly!!!

Call for submissions! The topic for the next edition of the COG will be: What's your favorite genealogical society? Do you belong to a society? Tell us why! Or if not, why not? This will be the inaugural edition of an all-new GenSo blog carnival – the brain child of Kathryn Doyle of the California Genealogical Society and Library blog. The new carnival will be strictly about genealogical societies and will begin in January 2010. Kathryn, our next guest host, will provide further details about her new carnival in the next edition of the COG so stay tuned! The deadline for submissions about your favorite GenSo is Oct. 15th.

Submit your blog article to the next edition of the Carnival of Genealogy using the carnival submission form. Please use a descriptive phrase in the title of any articles you plan to submit and/or write a brief description/introduction to your articles in the "comment" box of the blog carnival submission form. This will give readers an idea of what you've written about and hopefully interest them in clicking on your link. Past posts and future hosts can be found on our blog carnival index page.

Thanks for the poster, fM!

Creative Gene's Obituary (COG #81)

I'm not really retiring the Creative Gene blog. This post was written for the 81st edition of the Carnival of Genealogy. The topic is: Your blog's obituary. I don't have lofty ambitions for this blog so what I imagine I'd say about it 6 years from now is pretty much the same as what I'd say today...

Creative Gene is laid to rest. After a successful run of 10 years, Jasia has decided to end her writing adventure. She started Creative Gene as a writing exercise back in 2005 with the intention of improving her writing skills. It was inevitable that she would write about her hobbies genealogy and photography at some point, but it wasn't long before they became the primary focus of her blog. There weren't a lot of other genealogy blogs on the 'net at that time but she found a few and made some connections with other bloggers. Jasia learned a lot about genealogy and about blogging from reading their blogs. And Creative Gene was all the better for it.

Roughly 7 months after Creative Gene began, it gave birth to the Carnival of Genealogy. Jasia could see the merits of having an online platform for genealogy topics and hoped that she could sell the concept to some of the other genealogy bloggers she'd made connections with. In the beginning, she did it all by herself. She didn't write all the articles but she went out and found several articles on a given topic for each edition. Eventually, the idea caught on and others began writing articles and submitting them to the COG. It's popularity grew beyond her wildest expectations and was written about in national genealogy publications. The COG also appeared on the recommended reading list for at least one collegiate history course. Over the years, the COG grew and experienced a few changes. The result was an even better quality publication. The COG more or less put Creative Gene on the map of the genealogy blogosphere but Jasia hopes it is not all that Creative Gene will be remembered for.

Jasia has always been proud of her Polish heritage and tried to keep Polish and Polish-American themes an ongoing part of Creative Gene. It was an integral part of her family history after all. She also shared her research experience with other genealogy researchers in hopes that they would enjoy the success she did in researching her own family history.

Creative Gene is survived by an extensive network of genealogy blogs written by friends including footnoteMaven, Apple's Tree, Genea-Musings, GeneaBlogie, What's Past is Prologue, Destination: Austin Family, AnceStories, Genetic Genealogist, Moultie Creek, Steve's Genealogy Blog, Transylvanian Dutch, Tracing the Tribe, West in New England, Orations of OMcHodoy, Before My Time, About.com Genealogy, All My Ancestors, CanadaGenealogy, Dear MYRTLE, Looking4Ancestors, Beyond Fiction, et al.

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Long live Creative Gene!