Genealogy Blog: Choosing a Blog Title and Domain Name and URL

Deciding what your blog name and title should be might be easy for you. If your blog is about cats, then you can call it the “Cat Blog” or “About Cats Blog” and have the domain name/URL (address) be http://www.catblog.com or http://www.aboutcats.com. If your name is Sally Smith, you might want to call it http://www.sallysmith.com or sallysmithblog.com, but the odds are that Sally Smith already got that, so you might want to consider http://www.sally-smith.com or http://www.ssmithblog.com, or even go with initials like http://www.ss-blog.com, a fun play on words. There are a lot of options when choosing a domain name.

Genealogy blog domain names get more complicated. Names like “familysearch”, “myancestry”, “myfamily”, “myfamilyhistory”, “ancestry”, “familytree”, “mygenealogy”, “genealogyblog”, “genblog”, and such are taken.

The key to domain names is to come up with something that relates to what your blog is about. While names like cameraontheroad.com gives you a hint about the content of the site, genealogy sites can be a little more complicated and not always indicative of their content.

You can choose a family name, but which family name? I have hundreds of last names within my family tree, though I will probably talk about four to six core names on my blog. Which name do I choose?

I have a mother and father, and they both have different names. Immediately, I have two family names tracing back from just me. If your parents are Jones and Smith, you could have a domain name like jones-smith-family.com, or some other variation.

Now, take this a step farther. Each of your parents arrived with two parents. If your name hasn’t changed, you now have a minimum of four family names out of seven people. Add to this your great-grandparents, and the number of names goes up.

All your ancestral lines back to 1650 could involve as many as eight to twelve generations of ancestors before you. If eight generations separate you from 1650, you could have had 256 ancestors living then. A gap of twelve generations could mean you had more than 4,000 ancestors living in 1650.

Emily Anne Croom, “Unpuzzling Your Past”

This really complicates limiting your genealogy blog domain name to family names. If you choose to only research and discuss a specific family name or two, and spend little or no time on other family names, this makes sense. This is what a lot of people do, calling their genealogy blog “The Applebee Family Tree” (www.applebee-family.com) or “The Applebee-Smith Family Tree” (www.applebee-smith-family.com).

You can also choose to use an existing domain name and create a subdomain like smith.smith-jones.com, jones.smith-jones.com, or anderson.smith-jones.com, keeping family lines together as subdomains under the parent domain name.

Another method is to choose a generic domain name/URL and have the blog title be different. The URL might be http://www.generic-blog-name.com or http://www.intelligence-grand-central.com and the blog title would be “Anderson, Smith, and Jones Family History Blog”. The title is set in your blog’s web pages where search engines can find it and list it as the title. Thus, your URL is not totally dependent upon the domain name. Still, it’s nice and easy to remember if there is a connection between the name and the blog’s subject.

Take care to choose a domain name you don’t have to spell. For many years, our main website’s URL was vanfossenpro.com, as one of our company names is “VanFossen Productions”. VanFossen is much harder to spell than you might imagine. The letters V, F, and S are very problematic. V as in victor, F as in Frank, and S as in Sam – Sam (to get both S letters), and F sounds like S and V sounds like C so we’ve had some fun with that.

And vanfossenpro isn’t very memory-friendly. The moment we changed it to the more appropriate http://www.cameraontheroad.com, I’ve only been asked once in over 2 years how to spell that. All I say now is “all one word, no spaces”. Much easier.

A URL with numbers is also not very friendly. Something like http://www.blog43562.com just doesn’t work for me. What about you? A URL of http://www.smith-blog1.com works better, but it also doesn’t sound very imaginative.

You are not limited to only dot com. Since a genealogy blog is about information, you can now use the http://www.blogname.info. Or if you want to associate your blog with a region or county, you can use a country code like http://www.blogname.co.uk or http://www.blogname.us. That opens up the field a little more.

Think it through and experiment with friends and family with a variety of possibilities, researching them thoroughly before you commit. It is easier to change it now before you are committed to a name than to change it later.

Genealogy Blog: Building a Blog Series

• Starting With a Purpose and a Plan
• What’s the Difference Between a Genealogy Blog and a Normal Blog?
• Who, What, Where, and How Questions for the Plan
• Determining What Features I Want in My Blog
• The Blog Budget – How Much Does a Blog Cost?
• The Fast Method of Setting Up a Blog
• Choosing a Blog Title and Domain Name and URL
• Blog Contributors – Wanted Dead or Alive

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Copyright Lorelle VanFossen, member of the 9Rules Network