This Year In Substack

I wrote 279 “In My Opinion” Substack essays in 2025 – a little more than five essays per week. My original plan was to write Monday-Friday, but in the fall, I began to write what I called a “Sunday Sermonette” – an essay about how religion intersected with the news I generally wrote about. My Tuesday essays focused on the looming 250^th anniversary of the Declaration of Independence; in those essays I wrote about what happened 250 years ago (ish) on the day the essay appeared. There were 52 Tuesdays in 2025, so I wrote 52 of these essays (I may have missed a Tuesday somewhere along the line, but I don’t think so.) This has come to a total of around 1,000 pages. As I’ve done in previous years, I’ll pull some of my favorites out to publish a book that will amount to 250-300 pages.

At the beginning of the year I had 214 subscribers and 1,011 followers. Subscribers receive an email each time I post an essay; followers see my essays in their Substack feeds (a social media type feed) each time I post an essay. Today I have 373 subscribers and 5,155 followers. I had a surge in followers and subscribers in October, when Jack Hopkins, a Substacker with more than 59,000 subscribers, recommended my Substack on the landing page for new subscribers to his Substack. I get a handful of new followers every day who come to me through his recommendation, and another handful of subscribers every week or so.

I used to write essays about genealogy one day a week, but early in 2025 I migrated my genealogy essays to a different Substack, “I Seek Dead People.” I’ve posted 48 essays there – most of them before May, because my summer and fall got very busy. I’ve begun posting there again over the past month. Those essays focus on two major projects:

• A Day in the Life focuses on the April 4, 1944 issue of the Tucson Daily Star, a major newspaper in the town where my parents met in 1938. I developed this project after I got a hint from Ancestry.com about a mention of my father’s name in that newspaper. When I opened that hint, I saw that it was a routine notice of people whose names were submitted to the draft board on that day. My father’s name was in the list. I had known generally about this event in my father’s life, but the newspaper article made it more real to me. But then I noticed a photo in the next column – a picture of Churchill and Eisenhower reviewing a paratrooper exercise “somewhere in England” on the previous day. You and I know what happened two months later, on June 6, 1944. But the people who saw that photo in the paper that day didn’t know what was going to happen. I thought about that a bit, and decided to write about everything that as in that day’s paper. I’m almost finished with page two (of 14). This project will take me most of next year to finish.

• Born in the USA focuses on the first generation of my ancestors born after July 4, 1776 – when the United States of America came into existence. I’m writing about my ancestors (generally my 4^th or 5^th great-grandparents) who grew up with parents and grandparents (and probably uncles and cousins) who served in the Revolution. The United States changed dramatically in the decades after the revolution, and my ancestors who were born and grew up in that era faced challenges their ancestors would not have understood. That Substack has garnered much less attention; I have 24 subscribers there and 20 followers.

Back to my main Substack, “In My Opinion.”

I don’t charge for my Substack, although many writers do. I subscribed to the free version of Jack Hopkins' Substack until he recommended it to me, and I decided to pay him back by subscribing at the monthly rate. It seemed like the right thing to do.

Substack provides insights into how engaged subscribers are. I have 45 subscribers who have 5 stars. This means these subscribers interact with my essays most often – either by opening the full email to read the essay, by reacting (“liking”) or commenting on it, or by sharing it with someone else. One-third of my subscribers – 116 – get no stars in the Substack rating system. Substack doesn’t provide specific information about what level of interaction earns a star. Zero stars does not equal zero interaction, but I’m not sure what moves someone from a zero-star to a one-star rating. About 1/3 of my “audience” opens my email on any given day.

My top commenters are all people I know in real life: Anne, Ann, Win, Penny, Gayla, and Vicki. Thank you.

Not surprisingly, the largest number of my subscribers live in Virginia. I was a little surprised that they made up only 18% of my readers, however.

I also have subscribers from other parts of the world. This surprised me a bit. Who’s reading my stuff in Russia or Nigeria?

My subscribers read the same Substacks I do. No surprise there.

This year, my essays have tended to focus on American politics, economics, and international relations. The name “Trump” appeared 673 times, even though I dislike typing it and prefer to refer to him as “the current Republican President” or similar (and sometimes vulgar) substitutes.

I have academic training in three areas – Economics, Political Science, and History – so I write a lot about these topics as they relate to what’s going on around me. I have a deep experiential and practical background in genealogy, so I also write about it. These topics comprise probably 95% of my essays, in one form or another.

I write these essays primarily because this process has become the way I understand what’s going on around me. My readers will learn something about these topics, I hope, but they will also understand me. All of you should know that I deeply appreciate your support as we trudge through things together.

I keep thinking I’ll run out of things to write about. After all, I’ve been doing this for almost five years and have published 1,020 essays. That’s a lot of writing. But things keep happening, so I always find something to write about.

Thanks for being along for the ride.