Are you more active in researching your family history stimulated by family gatherings at Christmas? John Grenham's writes in his latest Irish Roots column "Immediately after Christmas, traffic to genealogical websites spikes and for five or six weeks thereafter the number of research inquiries and of visitors to archives and libraries grows and grows."
He doesn't state where the statistics on which he bases this opinion come from - just that when "traffic to a genealogy site quadruples over 48 hours, the same 48 hours year-in year-out, it becomes crystal clear that Christmas is the spur."
Or is it?
James Tanner commented in a post Seasonal Changes in Genealogy Interest on his Genealogy's Star blog in May 2013 that "Interest in genealogy peaks in about February or March and then slides downhill until August. With Fall and back to school, interest begins to pick up again and the cycle starts over."
The nearly ten years of stats for my blog show rather low activity immediately after Christmas with visits per day growing through January and reaching a peak in early March. Could it be that family history is a more comfortable indoor occupation with less competition from gardening, golf and other outdoor recreational activities during the Northern hemisphere winter.
11 January 2016
Why genealogy is seasonal
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The climate in the northern hemisphere is such that I am sure many of us are doing our active Genealogy work from May to October. I feel it is a mad dash to visit cemeteries, drive on country roads and visit people to gather information. At a family gathering in the summer I was urged to take photos and papers from my 90 year old aunt. My cousins in Ireland and England say they have had record rains and there are fewer hours of daylight there than here.Although people may be more amenable to visits in the winter, we have more viruses circulating at that time of year.
So,we are just doing different Genealogy activities in the different seasons.
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