Today is the anniversary date for Creative Gene. It's been 11 years since I first began blogging. The last few years have had very few posts, but in spite of how it may have appeared to my readers, it was always alive in my heart.
I have done a bit of reflecting lately on my years of blogging. The inspiration for that came from my friend Barbara Poole's blog, Life From The Roots. My experience has been similar to hers in some ways but very different in others. For instance, she started out blogging only about genealogy and more recently added other topics... and lots of her wonderful photography! I would say things went just the opposite for me.
I started Creative Gene as a blog for all of my creative pursuits, especially creative writing, but then I had to eliminate everything but genealogy to be taken seriously on the topic. Heck, in the early days I couldn't get listed on Cyndi's List because my blog apparently seemed more "personal" than "genealogy". And so I created separate blogs for my photography and digital scrapbooking and even started a blog for one line of my family intending to create additional ones for other lines (thankfully, that never happened).
In the early days, I was still trying to figure things out. When I started writing blog posts on genealogy there weren't many role models for me to follow. I was only able to find a handful of others writing blog posts about genealogy back then and they didn't seem to be experts on the subject either. ;-) So I found myself in uncharted waters and had to figure things out as I went along.
I made my share of "mistakes", like including too many other topics in a "genealogy blog". It wasn't important to me to be known as a "genealogy blog" except that search engine listings were hard to come by back then. The more you used a particular word in blog posts the higher your ranking on Google was for that topic. (Their algorithms were more primitive back then. ;-) And being a web site designer, that was very important to me.
In later years, the multiple blogs I'd created and the need to post to them with some frequency to maintain a search engine ranking, became impossible to continue. Just not enough hours in a day.
But Creative Gene lived on while the others faded away. Of course, Creative Gene was helped along by the Carnival of Genealogy. Oh what a brilliant idea I had with that! I found so many like-minded (genealogy-minded) souls, who later became friends, with that writing project. Those were the good old days.
Today is a different day and time. I'm a different person. I continue to develop myself and my hobbies beyond genealogy, though I'll always feel a passion for it. I'm happy to currently be focused on organizing and writing about my family history instead of focusing on researching my genealogy and blogging about it. But on this, the 11th anniversary of Creative Gene, I'm still here keeping it alive and well.
Thanks to all who've followed me along the way. You've made it fun! And a special thank you to all the blogging friends I've made along the way. You've enriched my life in so many ways. I value your friendship.
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And to end this post I'm going to shift gears in a different direction. I got my autosomal DNA test results the other day, and my brother's too. No big surprises but definitely one little one.
My ethnic makeup:
European: 96% (90% Eastern European (Poland); 6% Western and Central European (Germany/France/Switzerland)
Central/South Asian: 4% (This is "the little surprise" because the map shows this to be roughly in the area of Afghanistan... didn't see that one coming ;-)
My brother's ethnic makeup:
European: 100% (95% Eastern European (Poland); 5% Southern European (Southern Spain, Portugal, Italy, Greece)
I've been on vacation for the past couple of weeks so I haven't put any time into my plan for organizing and writing my family history. Hopefully, I'll accomplish more in the next month.
