Most Viewed MWM Posts December 2012

Once again it's time for the monthly popularity contest, listing the most-viewed blog posts made here during December.

And once again the top finisher ran well ahead of the pack: "We still need to understand that no single record is automatically correct or even trustworthy; they all need corroboration from other independently created records if we can possibly find them. We still need to understand how to analyze a single record and correlate it with other types. From this point of view 2013 looks very much like 1993 -- or, for that matter, 1893."

1. What Does It Mean to Be "Out of Date"? (December 13)

2. Perfectionism: Is The Best the Enemy? (December 31)

3. Overcommitted and Underperforming (December 7)

4.  Don't Ask Your 1820s Ancestor What His "Job" Was (December 27)

5.  Was That a Deadline I Just Missed? (December 28)


Least viewed:

Gems from New England (December 18)



Harold Henderson, "Most Viewed MWM Posts December 2012," Midwestern Microhistory: A Genealogy Blog, posted 4 February 2013 (http://midwesternmicrohistory.blogspot.com : accessed [access date]). [Please feel free to link to the specific post if you prefer.]

Gems from New England

Two must-read articles (IMO) in the fall 2012 issue of the New England Historic Genealogical Society's popular magazine American Ancestors: New England, New York, and Beyond:

Susan Lukesh offers an amazingly sensible view of long-term data preservation in an uncertain digital age. Can you say paper? PDF? Internet Archive?

Henry B. Hoff reveals that your poverty-stricken 19th-century New York state ancestor may have better vital records than anyone else. Town and county records of poorhouse residents may exist from 1824 and were required 1875-1920.

Other high spots include an excerpt from Robert Charles Anderson's microhistorical introduction to his new book The Winthrop Fleet; Stephen H. Case on Benedict Arnold's wife Peggy Shippen (subject of a new book), and Karin Wulf on family histories from the 1700s, which are few but can be unusual.



Susan Lukesh, "Personal Archiving and the Genealogist," American Ancestors, vol. 13 no. 4 (Fall 2012): 28-30.

Henry B. Hoff, "Records of the Poor in New York State," American Ancestors, vol. 13 no. 4 (Fall 2012):53-54, 57.


Harold Henderson, "Gems from New England," Midwestern Microhistory: A Genealogy Blog, posted 18 December 2012 (http://midwesternmicrohistory.blogspot.com : accessed [access date]). [Please feel free to link to the specific post if you prefer.]