Modern Software Experience

2009-11-30

Genealogy Blog Awards

GeneaBlog Award

2009

When I created the GeneaBlog Awards last year, I did not make any promises about doing it again, yet here I present the second GeneaBlog Award winners, each and every one of them an original-content blog.

award design

The design of the GeneaBlog Award has not changed from last year. It remains the stylised capital letter G for Genealogy merged with the ubiquitous feed icon designed by Mozilla Corporation, which allowed me to create this copyrighted derived design. Winners are granted some usage permissions, as detailed on the copyright page.

categories

Now, if I were to stick to the same categories each year, I’d probably be highlighting much the same blogs every year, and that would be incredibly boring. So here is a brand new set of winners in new categories.

GeneaBlog Awards

Most Successful Genealogy Blog: The Graveyard Rabbit

The Graveyard Rabbit is the blog for The Association of Graveyard Rabbits. It was started late in 2008, and now there are more than eighty Graveyard Rabbit blogs already. Visit it for the regular blog posts, the Graveyard Rabbit Online Journal or the long list of Graveyard Rabbit blogs.

Best Genealogy Vendor Blog: Generation Maps’ The Chart Chick

Official genealogy company blogs should naturally be about the company, its products and services, but without becoming just a bunch of press releases, without ignoring problems users complain about, and without too many special offers (a.k.a. blog spam). Alas, many big companies put marketroids in charge of their blog, with predictably poor results.
No real surprise then that a small company wins this award. The Chart Chick is about all aspects of genealogy with a focus on charts, and just a few posts about contests and sales.

Citation Queen: footnoteMaven

A blog with personality - and footnotes. footnoteMaven writes what she wants to write about, which is mostly genealogy, history and local events but includes anything else that strikes her fancy. Many a blog post has footnotes that mention sources - and that includes the posts about source citations.

Geekiest Genealogy Blog: Me and My Database :: Geek Genealogy

Me and My Database :: Geek Genealogy is a blog by Leif Biberg Kristensen, someone who does not hesitate to state his opinion on matters such as GEDCOM or TMG. He blog about development of Exodus, an open-source genealogy application for Linux and the Apache web server, written in PHP and PostgreSQL, supported with Perl and Python scripts, and the typical blog post does include source code.

Honourable mention: The Gramps Project Blog.

Most Personal YouTube Genealogy Channel: Elyse Doerflinger

Elyse has a blog, but before she started blogging she was vlogging already. She has set up her own genealogy channel on YouTube, where you can view her videos. There are many more genealogy channels, but none so personal. She does not just discuss filing systems, she shows her own, complete with close-ups of colour-coded tabs and has another talk interrupted by her cat.

Honourable mention: Climb Your Tree by Lucy. She relates her personal research, including brick walls, and does not mind sharing which paid-to-use resources she found must useful.

Most Challenging Blog: Forensic Genealogy

Forensic Genealogy is a blog by Colleen Fitzpatrick, an expert in forensic genealogy. The Orange County Register did a three-part article series about her this year, but you do not need to leave her own site to read about of some of the interesting cases she’s solved.
She posts a weekly Photo Quiz; usually a single photo with three questions you need to answer. Sometimes I happen to know the answer immediately, sometimes I have no idea how to start searching for an answer. Ever since I have alerted Colleen how easy it is to find photos using TinEye, most quizzes can no longer be solved that way.

Best looking Magazine: Shades of the Departed Magazine

Shades of the Departed is a blog about photographs, again by photofootnoteMaven, about scanning photographs and analysing them. It features a Photo of the Week, it has several unique weekly features and spawned the Smile for the Camera blog and carnival. As if all that was not enough, November saw the first issue of the Shades of the Departed Magazine, which looks better than any other genealogy related magazine I’ve seen. You can view the magazine on Issuu, complete with silly page-turning effect, or download it in PDF format.

links

 

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