Yesterday, the museum’s website passed the “one million views” milestone. I have decided to veer away from our usual type of post involving family research and take some time to give you a little history of our website and its blog.

First, let me provide a bit of general history about our historical society. The Perry County Lutheran Historical Society was established in 1910 when a group of people who had concerns about the condition of the historic building located in Altenburg, the Log Cabin College, which was showing signs of disrepair. Those folks decided to do something about preserving that structure for future generations and established the organization that is still called the Perry County Lutheran Historical Society. That organization is now 114 years old. The first major task of moving the Log Cabin College to its present location took place back in 1912, followed by constructing a protective roof over it in 1915. Over the years, this society went about the business of gathering artifacts that were considered important to preserving this place’s influential part in the history of the Lutheran church in America.

One of the presidents of the PCLHS, Vernon Meyr, had a dream of building a museum with the mission of telling the story of the German Lutheran immigration to East Perry County that took place in 1839 and how that initial colony developed into what it is today. Upon his death, his estate provided the funds to make this museum possible, and in 2005, the museum had its building dedicated.

One of the first things that was done when the museum’s building was being proposed was to hire a museum director. That is when Carla Jordan stepped onto the scene, and she remained our director for 17 years.

It was determined early on that the museum needed a website to help promote itself. The original website that was developed lasted until 2016. At that point, Carla and the board of directors determined that we needed a more effective website. That is when the board decided to use WordPress as the company that would host our new website. That company offers templates which include a page for a blog, among several other types of web pages that we considered important for promoting our museum.

At the end of January in 2017, this new website hit the internet. It was then that I decided to write articles to place on the blog which would tell the stories of people, mostly German Lutherans, who are tied to the history of this place. Now, a little over 7 years later, our website has reached the point of being blessed with over a million views. Early on, we decided to place a widget on our website that kept up with the number of “hits” we have accumulated. If you know where to look and you are interested, you can keep track of our viewership. I took a screenshot of what this place on our website looked like early this morning. It is in that location where you find instructions on subscribing to receive an email from the museum each time a new post appears on our page.

I continue to be one of the administrators of this website despite recently stepping down from our board of directors. As an administrator, I am able to view all kinds of stats about the activity that takes place on this site. I am going to share a few of the present-day statistics to give you an idea of the effectiveness of our presence on the internet.

First of all, I can look at a list of what are called referrers. Referrers are where people get their access to our website. This list usually includes Facebook, search engines like Google, and an app named Newsbreak. It has only been a year or two that we have started to get referrals from Newsbreak, and I do not know how we managed to get on their radar. I can tell you that Newsbreak will have more referrals on days when a city or town is mentioned, especially in the title of a blog post. In fact, we got a huge boost just a few days ago from the story we published about Ft. Smith, Arkansas. Normally, a blog post might get 60 or 70 views on the day it is published, but the Ft. Smith article had over a thousand views when it was published, and it helped get us to a million views before I anticipated. But that does not happen for every blog post. I am almost certain that this post I am writing today will not get us Newsbreak viewers. Facebook is usually the referrer that is found at the top of this list on a normal day. We have several thousand people who follow our museum’s Facebook page, and each day’s blog post is automatically shared onto that Facebook page.

The list below illustrates which pages and which posts have been viewed today (from 7 pm last evening until I took this screenshot this morning). You can see that the Ft. Smith story has a bunch a views, and yesterday’s post comes in 2nd.

A similar list can be seen which includes all of the data since our website began in 2016. Here is the top 10 list of posts and pages.

One of the stats that is especially interesting to me is the list of countries from which the views originated. Of course, most come from the United States, but our website reaches to many other countries around the world. Here are the top entries for countries that have viewed our website since the beginning of 2024. I am convinced that our blog is the best way for our museum to become known around the world.

On another note, let me says that I could not accomplish what I do on this blog without the work that Lynn Degenhardt has done for our museum’s research library. He is the creator and sustainer of the document known as the German Family Tree. I could never find a story nor research a story without the information included in that amazing document. I consider Lynn and I as a team. And you can add Gerard Fiehler to that team as well. His an incredible asset to me and the museum.

Another group of people that have contributed to our accomplishment of a million views are the folks who have become guest bloggers. I will just mention a few of them…Fred Eggers, Clayton Erdmann, and Faron Bartens. The guest bloggers and their stories have always been well-received by our readers. We would also welcome other folks who might want to volunteer their services to write for our blog in the future.

There is another team of people that inspires me every time I write a blog post. That is our team of faithful readers who have been the ones viewing our website for these past 7 years. I want to thank all of you for taking an interest in our museum and an interest in the people from our past and present who have become the characters in the stories written on our blog. You are the best.