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Annual Review 2020 |
~ Comparative Minerd.com Performance in 2020 vs. 2019 ~ |
105,449 Page impressions |
35,959 Total visitors |
27,966 New visitors |
3,104 New images Up from 1,192 |
20,499 Total images |
59 New biographies |
1,851 Total bios |
12 Photos of the month 247 total since inception |
20 Minerd.com Blog posts |
73 Military casualties Up 9 |
53 Accidental work deaths in mining/metals all time - up 4 |
40 Cousins/spouses, Class of 1972, Connellsville High School |
135 Known dousin deaths occurring in 2020 - Up from 89 |
3,181 Known cousin deaths since July 1, 2000 - Up 701 |
646 Facebook page members Up from 449 |
The worldwide coronavirus pandemic and lockdown – mixed with an embattled presidential election season, inflamed racial tensions and social media overload – shaped the quality of connection and respite in 2020 that Minerd.com and our Facebook page and blog are intended to be. These online properties document a social history of old Pennsylvania German families to the current time. Today the clan is made up of a very wide range of cousins who racially and culturally are White and Black and richly mixed with everything else. Politically, they are Blue, Red, indifferent and expatriate. What binds us all together despite the breadth of diversity, culture and opinions is the family bond. It’s an absolute thing. The year 2020 was to have been a much more pronounced celebration of Minerd.com’s 20th anniversary. The Covid-19 lockdown also slowed traditional research and reunion travel activity. But on the flip side, more time was freed up for online exploration and writing which greatly expanded Minerd.com’s already vast library of biographies, features and historic images. More content was brought forth to be shared for publication by cousins at large than ever before, and more cousins joined the dialogue on our private Facebook page. The numbers bear out the public response to the work. Total Minerd.com page impressions increased 2.9 percent, and total visitors were up 11.3 percent, as compared with 2019. Our member-only Facebook page added 197 new members, up 44 percent. Discovering new interpersonal connections are at the heart of this initiative. As one example the past year, with help from cousins Joe McKnight, Jill (Channing) Aird and Peggy (Grimm) Mansberry, a new study identified 40 cousins and spouses in the 1972 graduating class of Connellsville Area High School in the county where our pioneer ancestors settled in 1791. Six more are being studied for possible inclusion. The total class size was 598, meaning our cousins comprised 6.7 percent. Most if not all of these cousins alive today did not realize that they were related to so many whom they had known for such a long time. At least one cousin from Pennsylvania likes to print out Minerd.com pages for reference. She wrote that “I have a whole binder of family stuff taken from that website lol.” Another cousin from Kentucky, formerly of Southern California, wrote of our social media page that “This is one of the most interesting sites on Facebook.” |
~ Select New and Updated Minerd.com Feature Pages ~ |
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The Family's Private Facebook Page – Launched on April 20, 2019, the page has grown to 646 members, up from 449 at the end of 2019. It has become a wide-ranging forum for sharing Minerd.com updates as well as cousins’ own individual postings of joys, sorrows, questions, vintage photographs and nostalgia. Some cousins comment, others click “like,” and many just lurk quietly. We’re happy to have them all, and welcome the range of different voices. Facebook analytics show that our most frequent contributor is author Tom Beck, who writes about his growing-up years as the grandson of Raymond and Rebecca (Rugg) Miner of Indian Head, PA. The top cities where members live are Canton, OH (42), Uniontown and Connellsville, PA (26), Columbus, OH (12) and Pittsburgh (9). The charts that follow provide some additional insight about our user community of cousins who engage with the page. |
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The popular family Facebook page. |
~ Facebook Page Performance in 2020 ~ |
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Number of daily Facebook posts/comments during the second half of 2020 |
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Range of ages and gender of our Facebook page family. Most are age 65-plus, followed by 55 to 64. |
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Most popular days of the week and times of day to post on our Facebook page. The highest days of activity in order are Saturdays, Thursdays and Mondays, at the times of 10 a.m. and then 11 a.m. to 1 p.m.
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Minerd.com Blog – The blog was launched in 2015, hosted by WordPress, as an additional online outlet for content from our website and as a way to reach audiences we would never have access to otherwise. Over the ensuing years, it has in fact generated comments and inquiries from cousins and friends of the family with whom we have no other connection. In 2020, some 20 posts were made on the blog, including 12 “photos of the month” plus eight other features reflecting new research discoveries, analysis and more. Some of the features in 2020 included Newly Discovered WWII Casualty Thomas "Glenn" Burnworth - Visualizing the Generations - Award-Winning Minerd.com Family Website Marks 20th Anniversary - and Minerd.com’s Recommended News Stories and Blog Posts Since Jan. 2020. Over the six years the blog has existed, I've made 129 posts in total. |
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| In August, I spent two glorious days photographing graves of long-lost cousins at a host of old country churchyards in Bedford and Somerset Counties, PA. |
2020 Research Travel - In February, I spent a marvelous day in Somerset County, PA. My primary mission was to plumb the genealogy archives of the Historical and Genealogical Society of Somerset County to see what their files tell us about cousins of our family bearing other surnames. That day, I also enjoyed a tour of the Rockwood (PA) Historical Society, which hardworking cousins Linda Marker and Kristi (Gross) Brant are helping to reinvigorate and make more of a treasured asset in the community. The Society contains very special, one-of-a-kind antique artifacts of some of our branches. It also has for sale copies of my book Well At This Time: The Civil War Diaries of Ephraim Miner. In August, I spent two extraordinary days photographing family grave markers in nine cemeteries in Bedford and Somerset Counties, PA, many in picturesque old country church graveyards. I came home with 260 images, of which many are now posted on Minerd.com as illustrations. Among the more notable graves captured in images were Abraham Younkin, an early member of the Church of Christ movement in Somerset County, whose alcoholism drove him from the congregation -- Civil War soldiers George W. Geller, Jesse Gomer, Daniel H. May, John L. May, Marcus "Mark" May, Samuel May, William Frederick Weller and William Meyers Schrock -- MPam (Lambert) Doak, whose husband had a bit part in the 1968 zombie horror film Night of the Living Dead and who was the mother of Pulitzer Prize-winning author Annie Dillard –– and Harvey May, shot and killed after a night of drinking who was twice buried in the same grave. |
~ Just How Many of Us Are "Out There?" ~ |
At year-end 2020, the “In Lasting Memory” webpage listed the names of 3,000 cousins and spouses who have passed since the date of beginning of counting, July 1, 2000. As 7,488 days had elapsed over that time period, it translates to the loss of one cousin every 2.5 days. But in some pockets of time, the rate has been much higher, more than 100 known in some select six-month periods. That suggests that we could lose a cousin/spouse as frequently as every 1.82 days. And on some particularly deadly dates, including Oct. 14, 2007 – May 31, 2008 – and April 12, 2013 – we lost four cousins on a single day. Our counts admittedly are very incomplete, based on data we have on hand now, with only limited channels of knowledge, meaning many others who should be added have not yet been identified. These rates lead to larger questions. Could they tell us more about the size of our family’s overall population? The headcount of the United States of America in 2020 was estimated to be 331 million people. And the number of deaths during the year was predicted by the Center for Disease Control at 3.2 million. If my math is correct, about one in 100 Americans died the past year, actually 0.967 percent of the population. If on average our family loses an estimated 200-plus cousins a year, and if our cousins are dying at the same pace as the rest of the nation, could that suggest there are at minimum 20,000 cousins/spouses alive today? Looking at the upper extreme, if we truly lose an average of four cousins every day, or 1,460 a year, our total population could be as high as 146,000. My hunch is that the true number is somewhere in between. |
~ Maintaining a Public-Facing Profile ~ |
Minerd.com continued to maintain a public-facing profile in 2020, with its story and content shared in other forums. To mark the milestone two-decade anniversary, the Somerset (PA) Daily American printed "Award-winning Minerd.com family website marks 20th anniversary." As well, the Connellsville (PA) Daily Courier published "Minerd.com family website marks 20th anniversary." |
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Above: Somerset Daily American article, Sept. 1, 2020. Below: 2020 Junghen Family Newsletter pages featuring Minerd.com content |
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In the medium of television, a producer for the WQED-TV public television station in Pittsburgh requested consent to use our vintage "Braddock's Grave and Fort Necessity” images for a future documentary about the French and Indian War battles in southwestern Pennsylvania. Keep your fingers crossed. In June, the 2020 edition of the annual Junghen Family Newsletter, compiled and published by Linda Marker of the family of Frederick J. and Delilah (Faidley) Younkin, is published and distributed to the Younkin-Younken-Youngkin Reunion group. The issue features a number of Minerd.com photographs from the 2019 reunion in Somerset County, PA in addition to excerpts from the script of the Rockwood Odd Fellows Cemetery tour of 2019 led by the founder of this website. Among the Minerd.com bios featured in the newsletter are of John M. and Gertrude (Younkin) Weaver - Lloyd Clive and Rebecca Elizabeth (Schultz) Younkin - and Henry and Barbara Jean (Younkin) Swarner. Also re-published is the May 2020 Photo of the Month highlighting Alfred Arthur Younkin and the Casselman Cornet Band. View the entire issue>>>
Mark Terry Youngkin, of the family of John Harrison and Eliza Jane (Coble) Youngkin, published an updated edition of his masterwork Youngkin Ancestry - Genealogy and History of the Jesse Herbert Youngkin Family. Minerd.com content and research are cited on 17 different pages. The 456-page work of authorship is solely distributed in Portable Document Format (PDF) from the digital library called the Internet Archive in San Francisco, CA, which contains the latest book version. Included in the book are citations to these feature pages and biographies -- the Younkin Homecoming Reunion 1934-1940 - Charles Arthur “Charleroi Charley" and Saloma (Hall) Younkin - Younkin Family News Bulletin newspaper - John J. and Mary "Polly" (Hartzell) Younkin - and Jacob and Catherine (Younkin) Minerd Jr. View/download the web-optimized version of Youngkin Ancestry on DropBox [60MB in size] or the full, high-resolution version on the Internet Archive [360MB]. Our e-newsletter is emailed periodically to more than 500 cousins and friends. |
~ 2020 Photo
of the Month Recap (click to view larger) ~ |
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| January | February | March | April |
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| May | June | July | August |
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| September | October | November | December |
A Look Ahead – An M-M-M-M Reunion for 2021 is unlikely. While the reunion committee has not yet made a decision as of this writing, no one has even hinted at a suggestion that we move ahead to hold the event. Watch our Facebook page for updates. In terms of continued development and expansion of content for Minerd.com, research, writing, image procurement and publishing will continue to be the hallmark in 2021. One of the most enjoyable aspects of the research is a deep focus on the Civil War experiences of the soldiers in the Minerd-Minard-Miner-Minor and Younkin-Younken-Youngkin families. A vast bulk of individual stories may be found in each veteran’s pension records housed today in the National Archives in Washington, DC. Once the Covid-19 restrictions are lifted, I plan to return to the Archives to examine theese records which often contain details available nowhere else. As many cousin-veterans of many eras rest for eternity in Arlington National Cemetery, I also plan to return to photograph their markers as illustrations for their biographies. The list for 2021 includes Elwyn Reed Burke, Franklin Lewis Gaumer, Erma Leman Graver, James Willard McCartney, Albert Myron Miner and Sidney Vezie as well as civilian Clair George. |
~ Civil War Soldiers to Research in Washington, DC ~ |
Minerd/Gaumer Soldiers Philemon Armstrong – 18th U.S. Infantry, Co. F and 27th U.S. Infantry, Co. F William Devan – 14th Pennsylvania Cavalry, Co. F? Adam Diehl - 82nd Pennsylvania Infantry, Co. C? Alfred Gaumer – 81st Pennsylvania Infantry, Co. G Firmin James – 88th Illinois Infantry, Co. D and the 21st Illinois Infantry, Co. F Henry B. Meyers – 5th Pennsylvania Heavy Artillery Irvin R. Nicklow – 77th Pennsylvania Inf., Co. F Joseph Troxel – 3rd Pennsylvania Heavy Art'y, Company H |
Younkin Soldiers Henry Bouscher – 81st Illinois Infantry, Co. D Joseph Kantner – 149th Pennsylvania Infantry, Co. H Freeman Nicola – 12th Pennsylvania Cavalry, Co. M (113th Pennsylvania Volunteers) Capt. William Meyers Schrock – Ramsey's Battalion, Pennsylvania Infantry and 5th Pennsylvania Heavy Artillery Lyman Wright – 1st Iowa Infantry, 35th Iowa Infantry and 15th Veteran Reserve Corps |
In Closing - As I've said in years past, keeping the site going over more than two decades has been a never-ending. eye-opening voyage of adventure ino Americana. Thank you again to everyone who has contributed your special part from your own family's trove of family heritage. This site is for you, and would not be possible without you. Sincerely, Mark A. Miner, Founder, Minerd.com |
~ For the Record: What Was New on Minerd.com in 2020 ~ |
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