Empty Branches on the Family Tree is 6 years old and I can’t believe it! I have learned so much about so many things during the past six years.

My original intent was to share family history and researching tips, which remains my goal. However, while writing posts, I’ve been spurred on to take new looks at old research, venture into new websites and record sets and to continually add to my genealogical (and technological) education.

I also hope that you’ve found new resources in the “genealogy toolbox” – the tabs underneath the header photo on the home page. I try to keep those links updated and add to the lists when I find new resource treasures.

I have to admit I’ve loved every single minute of it!

I rarely pay attention to my stats anymore, but a quick look shows that I’ve had over 245,000 views and have published more than 2,000 posts – one a day every day since 14 September 2014, (but intermittently before that back to 16 January 2014>)

I’d like to thank my readers for reading my stories and especially for those who leave comments. There have been over 2,000 since my first post in 2014 and that’s with my replies removed from the total count.

Thank you, too, to all the distant cousins on both my and my husband’s side of the family who have taken the time to leave a comment or email me directly. I’ve virtually met descendants of many of those family branches, which has been very gratifying. Cousin bait is a big part of the reason to blog.

Lastly, I mentioned a couple of weeks ago that I had been working on the back side of my blog. I’ve learned a lot about blogging technology during these six years (apart from coding, about which I know nothing). Recently, I tried to install a couple of plug-ins (Plug-ins enable certain features on a blog that aren’t built into Word Press.) I had trouble with both and support help indicated that website size could be an issue.

A call to my hosting company confirmed that my blog was indeed big – it had gotten huge at over 22 GB. I guess happily blogging away for six years adding posts heavy with images (the images are the space hogs) will create a big website.

Therefore, my immediate goal was to decrease the amount of space my blog was taking up on the host server. Since images were the issue, I spent a couple of weeks reviewing my earliest posts from January 2014 up to July 2016 and removed quite a few images. Not all of them, but many.

If you happen to search out a post written before 1 July 2016, you may find there are no images at all and that is the reason why. The text is all still intact, but where a post might previously have had 3 or 4 (or more) images, now there might be none or just one.

Posts dating from 1 July 2016 remain as I originally wrote them. I will have to be mindful of future posts and images that I choose. One change that might not even be noticed is that Friday’s Family History Finds will no longer have a bookshelf image under the home page photo. That’s an easy way to eliminate 52 images per year!

Thank you, again, for reading my blog. I hope you’ve not only enjoyed my family history stories, but you’ve learned about new resources and methods to crack open your own brick walls.

Now I’m all fired up to write some more and need to get busy working on my posts for year 7. 🙂