This is the 7th year I have participated in the A-Z. As usual, I did not prewrite. Although I had all the records on hand and was familiar with them, I didn’t actually choose which I would use until the weekend before the challenge. I did change a few as I went along. Most of the testimonies and documents spoke for themselves and I did not have to do a lot of writing aside for an introduction or concluding paragraph.
In the past year I have done two series on my blog that consisted of over 40 posts each. I didn’t do them in alphabetical order, but did post them daily. Maybe that made this year easier, although at first I found it a challenge to have to skip around to different people instead of doing one person’s story in order. It did get me to look closely at 26 testimonies and during the next year I will probably post the stories of the various people featured in those posts in more depth.
It seemed to me that comments were down this year, so I decided to check my comments from all the years. They were actually pretty consistent. I visited back everyone who visited me. I checked out some new people from the list and some from comments on pages I visited. I didn’t look at the fb links this year and probably missed some interesting posts that way. My favorite new blog this year was Sonia’s Musings about the nerve wracking process of entering her three year old in a new school.
Other blogs I followed were:
Anne’s Family History “Visiting England, Scotland & Wales”
The Old Trunk in the Attic “Ancestors in Newspaper Clippings”
The Multicolored Diary “Fruit Folktales theme”
Anne E. G. Nydam’s “Fantastical Creatures”
Sarah Zama‘s “Berlin Cabaret”
Nilanjana Bose‘s “Bengali history and music”
Tell Me Another “Migrants, Refugees, and Exiles”
Tasha’s Thinkings “Ghost Stories”
Jollett Etc. “Family Heirlooms”
I’ll probably do A-Z next year and it will undoubtedly be connected to my family history research. Thanks to all those who make it happen!
You can find links to all my 2019 A to Z posts at A to Z Challenge 2019
The series I wrote this year outside of the challenge were: Katie Cleage’s story told through her pension file and My Grandmother Pearl’s Letters 1903-1905. In the coming year I plan to write a series of posts about finding my great great grandmother Susan Rice Ragan and what her life was like.
