AnceStories Presents the 2009 iGene Awards!

It's that time of year! It's Academy Awards time... time for the Academy of Genealogy and Family History, a.k.a. AGFH, to honor their best blog posts of 2009 in the following 5 categories:

• Best Picture - Best old family photo that appeared on your blog in 2009. Tell us which you liked best and why.
• Best Screen Play - Which family story that you shared in 2009 would make the best movie? Who would you cast as your family members?
• Best Documentary - Which was the best informational article you wrote about a place, thing, or event involving your family's history in 2009?
• Best Biography - Which was the best biographical article you wrote in 2009?
• Best Comedy - Which was the best funny story, poem, joke, photo, or video that you shared on your blog in 2009? 

 And the envelopes, please...


Best Picture: "Who Are You? A CROTHERS Family Member?" featured a unlabeled photograph from a collection of CROTHERS family photos that had been shared with me by a distant relative. Using books written to help those like myself identify historical photos, I came to my own conclusion. Check out the scrapbook page I created, too!

Best Screen Play: "Fire!" is the best family drama...and probably the only one...that I wrote about in 2009. Dakota Fanning would play my great-grandmother Lillian as a girl, Taylor Lautner would be brother Ed, Kirsten Dunst would play sister Ethel, and Haley Joel Osment would be brother Frank. Ma and Pa would be played by Meryl Streep and Russell Crowe, respectively.

Best Documentary: This is very difficult for me to choose. I probably wrote more informational articles in 2009 than I did in other years, mostly because I did not have access to my computer files for most of the year. The five main documentaries that I created were "Who Are Our Brickwall Ancestors, and Why Aren't We Blogging About Them Regularly?" (which led to Madness Monday); the nine-part series, "Getting More Traffic to Your Blog"; a requested article by Evelyn Thierault of the "Festival of Postcards" carnival, "A Beginner's Guide to Scanning Postcards"; the highly-acclaimed "State Census Records," which was noted by Dick Eastman and sent the most readers to my blog EVER; and "Citing Those Christmas Cards, Holiday E-mails, and Family Photos," a tongue-in-cheek look at citations derived from holiday correspondence.

And the winner is: "Who Are Our Brickwall Ancestors..."! Why? This is what genealogy blogging is all about...getting the information about those brickwall ancestors to the world via the Internet in the hope of another researcher finding the information, connecting with you, and breaking down the brick wall!

Best Biography: "My Brickwall Ancestor: Berber 'Barbara' J. (DeJONG) VALK (1854 - 1934)" not only was my first brickwall post, it was a finely detailed and cited analysis of my records and research for this ancestor. I'm proud of my work on this article and hope to eventually break through this obstacle!


Best Comedy: As mentioned before, "Citing Those Christmas Cards, Holiday E-mails, and Family Photos," was a tongue-in-cheek post, and probably my only comedic one in 2009.

There you have it, folks! Tune in next February for the 2010 iGene Awards...posts are already being published in anticipation of being mentioned in 2011 as the Best of the Best for this year!