Five Years of Personal History

My post on December 31, 2023, marked five years since I began sharing my personal history on this blog. After speaking in the Hearne Branch for Sacrament Meeting in the summer of 2018, I wrote my first two posts. 

Around Christmas time in 2018, I decided that one of my New Year's Resolutions would be to write in my blog once each week. I decided to post an article to the blog each Sunday at 3:30 p.m. (Central). I was successful that year in meeting my New Year's Resolution. I wrote and posted 48 stories in 2019. I missed two weeks in October and two weeks in November.

At the close of 2019, I reflected on my accomplishment in writing the blog. In my memory, this is the only New Year's Resolution that I have successfully completed throughout the entire year. I found an online store named Blookup that would publish my blog entries as a bound book and ordered a copy. I have published a copy of my blog entries every year. 

I created a set of labels or tags that I use for each blog post. First, I label each post with the decade from my life in which the story shared in the post occurred (e.g., 1960s, 1970s, 1980s, etc.). These tags allow me to order my memories chronologically. Second, I have labels for my family members (e.g., my wife, my parents, each of my siblings, each of my children, etc.). These labels allow me to collect stories about important individuals in my life. I also have labels for locations (e.g., Wyoming, Utah, Florida, etc.) and significant eras of my life (e.g., childhood, teenager, mission, marriage, etc.). 

2019 Edition of Blog Posts

2020 Edition of Blog Posts

2021 Edition of Blog Posts

2022 Edition of Blog Posts

Here are some interesting statistics from my collection of posts after five years. 

In addition to the missed posts in 2019 mentioned above, I also missed two weeks in October of 2021. In 2023, I missed all of October and one week of November. Apparently, October and November are my busy months as these are the months that I get behind in my blog posts. In December 2023, I post-dated some stories to backfill the weeks I missed in October and November. Thus, I have a post for every week of 2022 and 2023. 

In total, after five years of writing, I have posted 256 stories about my personal history. With a few exceptions, each story is unique. In the few times, that I posted twice about the same thing, my story is relatively consistent each time. I may have emphasized a slightly different part of the story for each telling. 

I wrote about Annette in 41 posts (see Table 1). Tanner is the child I have written about the most (18 posts). Truman is the child I have written about the least (5 posts) ... (sorry Truman, I will try to correct that over time).

Table 1

Family Member	Posts
Addison	7
Allyn	10
Annette	41
Ashton	9
Jamie	13
Jason	11
Tanner	18
Tate	8
Truman	5

As shown in Table 2, I wrote the most about my life in the 1980s (76 posts) and 1990s (70 posts). I only have two posts tagged as 1960s. I wrote the least about the 2010s (23 posts) and 2020s (24 posts). 

Table 2

Decade	Posts
1960s	2
1970s	53
1980s	76
1990s	70
2000s	54
2010s	23
2020s	24