My Favorite Genealogy Blogs
I freely admit that I’m a WordPress blogger and after 11+ years, my EmptyBranchesontheFamilyTree is my baby and I can’t leave it. There also aren’t enough hours in the day for me to publish daily there and on Substack. I do, however, like this platform and the growing genealogy community here. The family history stories are excellent.
My plan at the moment is to publish once a week on Saturday on Substack. I can’t promise that I’ll never repost something from my WP blog, but, if I do, it won’t be often. I can’t see why duplicating the exact same posts would be useful to anyone.
Also, my WP is totally ad-free and has links to lots of (mostly) free excellent genealogy resources. I sell nothing at all so I hope you’ll visit Empty Branches, too, and check it out. This Substack blog will also remain free to access.
I’m not a super techie person, but I would like to share one issue I’ve come across on Substack. I follow a LOT of genealogy blogs, and will share that list later in this post. Substack’s feature of subscribing to blogs is handy, but I quickly realized that my email was getting inundated with post notifications.
I use feedly to follow new blog posts online. If you aren’t familiar with feedly, it is basically an electronic file cabinet. I add websites to my feedly list and whenever a new post goes live, feedly collects the url and saves it for me in a list.
I can then go to feedly at my convenience and read all the genealogy stories and news and my email doesn’t get bogged down.
If you look at my blog list below, you will notice that there are many Substacks that I now follow using feedly. There are others that I would love to follow, but not at the expense of email notifications.
Feedly can find and add Substack sites to the list IF the writer is using the publication feature on Substack. Now, I don’t know enough to explain the dashboard end of things, but the visible clue is in the url.
If the blog address is substack with a name after it in the url, then feedly can’t find it and I have no idea how to build a feed.
However, if the Substack address is in this format with the identifier in front:
then feedly can find the site and add the RSS feed for me.
I would love to add more Substack genealogy blogs to my feedly. If your blog doesn’t have your name or a website name in the front of Substack, if you switch and use “publication” instead of “note,” I think it will adjust your url accordingly.
If I have described this process incorrectly, someone please correct me!
If you would like to find lots of other excellent genealogy blogs online here is a list of blogs I enjoy and whose authors publish regularly. I upgraded to feedly Pro, but there is a free plan (just sign up for an account) with which up to 100 websites can be followed.
A Genealogist's Path to History
Board for Certification of Genealogists
California Genealogy Society and Library Blog
DNAeXplained - Genetic Genealogy
Essex (England) Record Office Blog
Family History Across the Seas
Family History Research by Jody Lutter
Family History with Bill Moore
Find Lost Russian and Ukrainian Family
Genealogical Publishing Company
Genealogy Certification: My Personal Journal
Grapevine Public Library Genealogy Blog
Jana's Genealogy and Family History Blog
Jenny's Scrapbook of Family History Stories
Know Who Wears the Genes in Your Family
Loganology - Your Family Historian
MarieB's Genealogy Blog - Southeastern USA
Massachusetts and More Genealogy Blog
Mel's Genealogy Research Journal
Moments in Time, A Genealogy Blog
The History Interpreter - Janet Few
Wandering Around the Family Tree
Thanks Linda for including my blog in your long list. I understand why Substack gives people an opportunity to do long form posts direct from their account (a non-publication publication for want of better terminology). It makes things very simple for people who don't want to set up a Publication proper but, as you point out, it does create an issue when it comes to someone wanting to follow them via Feedly or similar tools.
@Linda Stufflebean, I know nothing about Feedly and after yesterday’s Office Hours, I had figuring it out on my to-do list. Would you consider writing a Tip for Mission Genealogy and explaining it to me?