Imagination failure: need help

An old friend and famous Rankin researcher gave me some pointed advice when I first started publishing on this website. People like to read stories, she said. She told me this at least twice, possibly three times, leaving me thinking my academic-ish genealogy articles were boring as hell.

Sometimes, though, there just isn’t enough information about long-dead people to craft a good tale. Or at least I lack the imagination to manage it and remain within the confines of truth.

In an effort to find out what might be popular other than stories, I have been looking at data on the articles on this blog to see what has been read the most often. This is what I learned:

… the all-time most read article is titled “Who Are the Scots-Irish, Anyway?” It is an historical article by a non-historian about the economic and religious factors driving Scots-Irish migration. There are apparently a lot of us Scots-Irish who wonder when and where our ancestors immigrated to the Colonies. Answer: most Scots-Irish arrived in one of the Delaware River ports during the so-called “Great Migration” from Ulster between 1717 and just prior to the Revolution.

… the second most popular article is “What is Proof of Family History?” It was inspired by a similar article by my distant cousin Roberta Estes. She and I might reasonably be characterized as rabid on the subject.

… the third most popular topic, grouping several articles together, is what you might call personal stuff. These are of no use whatsoever to anyone from the standpoint of family history research. They are just personal stories. These include one about my father titled “The Fastest Post Ever Written”, one about some of Gary’s experiences in Vietnam called  “Welcome home, sir,  and Thank You for Your Service,” and another simply titled  “Love Letter,” written to Gary on the occasion of a wedding anniversary. We’ve now been married for 58 years.

… there are other articles that definitely include stories which have had fairly numerous hits. E.g., “Family history stories:  the Good, the Bad, and the Ugly,” “Family Names and Stories,” and “AHA! moments in Family History Research.” The last one probably gets too deep into county minutiae to have much broad appeal and is also too recent for me to judge its popularity accurately.

… a couple of Rankin articles have had many, many hits: “UPDATE:Rankin DNA Project Families: August 2121,” which obviously needs to be updated again. Also, “Revised:: the Most Famous Rankin Legend of All,” in which I take on a Rankin shibboleth cast in bronze (I’m not kidding) which refuses to die.

… finally, a series of articles I have written about the Winn family of Lunenburg County, Virginia, taken together, has had more hits than anything else on this website. I can only conclude that there are a lot of Winn researchers out there who are adept at finding obscure family history blogs.

See articles at these links: (1) Virginia Winns Part 1: YDNA and Some Colonial Virginia Winn Families, (2) Virginia Winns, Part 2: Colonel Thomas Winn of Lunenburg, (3) Virginia Winns, Part 3: Col. Thomas of Lunenburg, John of Amelia, and Richard of Hanover, (4) Virginia Winns Part 4: Samuel Winn, Scoundrel, and a Famous Creek, (5) Virginia Winns Part 5: Richard and Phoebe Winn of Hanover County, (6)Virginia Winns Part 6: Competing Theories About the Hanover Winns, (7) Virginia Winn Series Part 7: Portrait of Mrs. John Winn of Hanover County,  and (8) QUERY: (1) WHO WAS JOHN WINN d. AMELIA COUNTY 1781 and (2) WAS HE RELATED TO THE LUNENBURG WINNS?.

There is another whole batch of Winn articles using Roman rather than Arabic numerals, probably because I couldn’t remember where I was in the list: (9) Lunenburg Winns: Part I of ???, (10) Lunenburg Winns, Part II of ?; Daniel Winn, (11) Part III of ?? How Many Times Was Col. Thomas Winn Married?, (12) PART IV of ?? John Winn Sr. of Lunenburg Who Died in 1795., and (13) PART IV Addendum: a Friend Told Me Where Daniel Winn’s Son Thomas Migrated. There are undoubtedly redundancies among these articles, my primary excuse being that one cannot be sure everyone has read prior posts. My secondary and probably more honest excuse is that I am old and cannot always remember what I had previously written. I was in fact somewhat taken aback when I saw that I had written so many Winn articles. And I am not sure these are listed above in the order in which I wrote them.

Some of my personal favorite articles are ones that take on some family history lore that is cast in concrete (or bronze) and that is just plain wrong. Some are easy, like disproving the notion that Samuel “Old One-Eyed Sam” of Lincoln County, NC, whose wife was Eleanor (“Ellen”) Alexander, was descended from Joseph and Rebecca Rankin of New Castle County, Delaware. Y-DNA conclusively puts that hoary old theory to rest. We don’t know Sam’s parents. Proving that Eleanor Alexander Rankin’s given name was actually Eleanor rather than Ellen, her nickname, was also fun, although Y-DNA is no help there. Likewise, it was easy to prove that the Adam Rankin (wife Mary Steele Alexander) who died in 1747 in what was then Lancaster County, Pennsylvania was NOT the brother of the John Rankin who died in the same county in 1749. Again, Y-DNA conclusively proves that Adam and John were not genetically related.

PLEASE LET ME KNOW IF ANY OF THE LINKS DON’T WORK and I will try to fix them.

The most fun articles for me to write are those that involve finding, interpreting, and untangling a web of county records. Interestingly, it is rare to find someone who uses the images of original county records available at the FHL website to do their family history research. Far more common are people who rely on online trees. Those, of course, are what perpetrate erroneous facts ad infinitum, ad nauseam, despite the fact that the software suggests FHL records.

I will never publish enough articles to make a dint in some of the easy-to-disprove errors (e.g., Old One-Eyed Sam’s father; Adam and John Rankin weren’t related). But I CAN respond to ideas. Specifically, I AM ASKING FOR FEEDBACK AND SUGGESTIONS. WHAT KINDS OF ARTICLES DO YOU LIKE? WHAT FAMILIES DO YOU WANT TO READ ABOUT? WHAT BRINGS YOU TO THIS BLOG, ANYWAY?

Thanks for reading! See you on down the road.

Robin