A to Z Reflections

I’m a compulsive volunteerer and joiner-inner so when I saw that quite a few of my Genimates were participating in the Blogging from A-Z Challenge I joined up at the last minute. I therefore had no time to prepare and think about what I had let myself in for so I made some newbie mistakes.

Yes, I will do it again but I won’t repeat the mistakes I made this year. I liked my theme but it also caused me problems as each of my posts required me to devote between 1-4 hours to research and writing up. As I was concerned about some unforeseen event occurring that would prevent me completing the challenge I put a lot of pressure on myself to get ahead of the challenge calendar. When I completed all the posts about ten days ahead of time there was an enormous sense of relief.

My topic was rather dull and dry and not of great appeal to a general audience. Next time I will probably choose one of my other blogs and a topic that will allow my voice and personalty to come through in the posts. I’ll also choose a topic that will allow me to share some of the thousands of photos I have taken on my travels. As I was not aiming for immediate gratification this wasn’t a huge problem. I was wanting to get my stories out into the blogisphere  where they can act as Cousin Bait for folk who in the future may be searching  for their Curry ancestors in Australia. The challenge gave me the impetus to write some of those stories.

I chose my CurryAus blog for the challenge as it is the least known of my blogs and I thought it would benefit from some extra exposure. Although it did not have a huge number of visitors I was quite pleased that the challenge brought me new genealogy contacts in Australia and further afield. I had a few visitors who were disappointed to find that it wasn’t a food blog about Curry cooking downunder.

As my interest is genealogy and family history I enjoyed finding new geneablogs to follow. This would be made easier if the organisers could create a category for genealogy/family history blogs. As it is hard to identify  a blog’s content from its title it took me until nearly the end of the challenge to find some of these blogs (and I’m sure I missed others).

I loved reading the posts from other bloggers on all manner of topics but found that I just didn’t have time to comment on as many blogs as I would have wished. It was also interesting to find that one of my genealogy contacts was also a passionate blogger, it took the challenge to let me know about her blogging activity.

As a result of the challenge, I have made some new contacts, learnt lots from the posts of Genimates , given my Surname Study some exposure, had many trips down memory lane, encouraged a fellow blogger to research her family history and seen some awful and  some awesome blogging.

Roll on April 2017…. I’ll be prepared next time.