Happy New Year! - Blog Update

Here's wishing all of you a very Happy New Year! May it be an improvement on the last year in every way conceivable - more peaceful, healthier, and so on and so forth. On the family history front, I hope that you all find the relevant sledge hammers for your individual brick walls.

I felt that today would be a suitable time to review the Saddington One Name Study, this blog and the Saddington DNA Project, and to set myself some objectives for 2008.

The Saddington One Name Study has only been official since 2006, but I feel that significant progress has been made over this last year with the help of this blog. Like most of you, family history has to take its place alongside work, study and my commitments to my own family, so research and the inputting of information into the database has to be done as and when.

This blog has been running now for six and a half months, in which time there have been 1006 page loads, 446 unique visitors and 65 returning visitors. As might be expected, the majority (84.58%) of those visitors have come from the UK. But 6.25% are from the USA, 4.79% from Australia and 1.25% from New Zealand. The remaining visitors came from Germany, Canada, Argentina, Jamaica, Poland, Netherlands, Bulgaria, Ireland, Japan and Malaysia. Not bad for a blog dedicated to a very minority interest!

I have written 24 posts in that time, an average of 3.69 posts per month. As a result, I have been contacted by a number of people with Saddington connections, and have provided information and suggestions for research as appropriate, as well as receiving valuable information on a number of branches of the family.

The newest element of the Saddington One Name Study is the Saddington DNA Project, which now has two members. One member is the senior representative of my own branch of the Saddington family, and will be the initial guideline for the Foxton/Market Harborough Saddingtons. The other member is based in the USA and I believe that he may be a descendant of the Appleby Magna Saddingtons. All interested parties are invited to contact me via email (saddington@one-name.org).

So, for 2008, the aim is an average of 4 posts per month from me, and also attempting to get the piles of information that I already have input into the Saddington ONS database. From you, I would be grateful for more comments and feedback, either on the blog or via email. This would help me to improve the content of the blog, which will hopefully attract the attention of your second cousin twice removed, who you haven't seen or heard of in 40 years :-)

All the best,
Rowan