I have spent the past couple of days trying to figure out how to say something about the MyHeritage Top 100 Genealogy Sites without coming off as ungrateful and ungracious. I'm probably not going to succeed but one of the perks of having a blog is that it's a platform to express your opinions so here goes anyway.
I was surprised to see that Documenting the Details made this list because there is one thing I know for sure - this blog is not one of the top 100 genealogy sites, it's not even one of the top 100 genealogy blogs. I've only been around for a few months and certainly don't have anything near the body of work that hundreds of other bloggers have. Even more surprising is that many of the most well known and respected genealogy blogs aren't on this list. So what is this award really?
According to MyHeritage: . . . we've been scanning the web, evaluating content, and identifying some of the best genealogy sites on the internet right now. We put focus on finding hidden gems in the community, so there's a good chance that some of these sites you won't have seen before." They further commented ". . . we decided that we wanted to go with some of less well-known sites with this." Well, "less well-known" and "sites you won't have seen before" sort of explains how this blog might have made the list but is that really the definition of the "Top 100 Genealogy Sites"? Based on their criteria, I have to agree with Randy Seaver (Genea-Musings) who commented to MyHeritage that "Top 100 Genealogy Sites You Might Want To Visit" would have been a better title. Frankly, if that had been the title I would have immediately written a post about how honored I was to be mentioned.
Don't get me wrong, there are many fine blogs on this list and I don't mean to diminish any of them at all. I read and enjoy over 30 of them on a regular basis and I recommend you take a look at the list for yourself. It's just when they put this blog on the list they made the "award" questionable to me considering the title. My skepticism is compounded because I received an e-mail from this company in January (less than one month after I started this blog) complementing my "beautiful blog" and asking if I would be interested in writing a post about their site. They offered to write the post for me in case I was too busy to do it myself. I took that to be a blatant attempt to take advantage of a newbie to get some free advertising for their company. I hope this "award" was just poorly named and was not simply another ploy to use the genealogy blogging community to promote their site.
