A New Cousin!

One of the benefits of being a family researcher and a geneablogger is finding new cousins.  In my case, this new cousin, also a geneablogger, found me. Our common link is that each of us is descended from the Pettus family of Virginia. We have already exchanged emails and look forward to following each other's blogs.  It really is a small world, isn't it?

Blog Traffic and New Cousins

This week has been the week for finding new cousins. Technology continues to make our world a much smaller one, and blogging makes it even smaller.

Many of my recent postings have been about my mother's ancestors, including the surnames of Coggins, Pettus, Trigleth, Killebrew, and Neatherlin/Neatherland/Netherland. One of these posts caught the attention this week of a Killebrew descendant who grew up in South Texas and now lives in South Carolina. Interestingly, our great-great-grandmothers were sisters.

According to statistics provided by Google Analytics for the past year, approximately 75% of my blog readership originates from surname searches made using various search engines. This means that my older posts are still being read. One of these searches brought another cousin to this blog....this time a Branch cousin who already lives in Mississippi.

And just last month, thanks to this blog, a Netherland descendant who lives near San Antonio, Texas, found information here about some of our common ancestors who lived in Mississippi almost a hundred years ago. Her email to me and my subsequent phone call to her enabled both of us to engage in a lively and amazing discussion about our families that would not have happened otherwise.

Thank you, cousins, for reading this blog! I hope you will visit often.