Building a Community for Genealogy on Substack

Start here to learn about our mission to create a community for genealogy and family history that's a viable alternative to the noise and bravado of social media.

With this post, we’re launching “Mission: Genealogy,” a not-for-profit newsletter, podcast, and event series to encourage community conversations among family historians and genealogists here on Substack.

The two of us discovered each other among the relatively few family historians on Substack. We’d both been searching for a better platform for discussions, blogging, and newsletters. Substack delivered on all those in a bundle with recommendations and payment engines. It also created a viable alternative to social media’s noise, drama, and ads.

The feature combination allowed each of us to design newsletters (or, in the parlance of the platform, “substacks”) that fulfill distinct roles in our shared Genealogy category:

• Robin’s CuZens Genealogy Matters empowers family historians to build organized research records and preserve their family histories while supporting the community of writers.¹

• Barbara’s Projectkin Community Forum inspires family historians with ideas and encouragement to turn their discoveries into storytelling projects for their families.²

We know family historians thrive in a collaborative environment. Many of us already had independent sites, blogs, and social media accounts, but the environment has changed. Advertisers and algorithms combine with nefarious fraudsters to make us continuously play defense. A changing landscape for search makes it difficult to attract an audience with your own website. With a payments-funded business model that supports both hosting and email, we realized that Substack could provide a safe, affordable setting where this community might grow.³

We’ve seen our substacks at GenealogyMatters and Projectkin grow steadily since joining less than a year ago. We’ve each noticed from our subscriber data that most of our new members have just discovered the platform. That tells us that we’re still in the pioneering stages here, and there’s a lot we can do to help each other and newcomers. While it’s always hard getting started, it’s usually much easier with friends.

So we created Mission: Genealogy.

By collaborating, we knew we could spotlight what’s happening here and create a gathering place where like-minded family historians might share insights, collaborate, and inspire each other.

As Mission: Genealogy, we’ll start with recommendations, podcast episodes, roundtables, and office hours. We’ll use these tools to find each other, celebrate the work of family historians and genealogists, and welcome new additions. We want to become the best way for newcomers to enter the family history community on Substack.

We’re considering elements to reinforce a budding spirit of collaboration, like guided conversations and a place for resource archives. We’re also constraining the production values so that we can afford to keep it casual and free. We want to actively invite new contributors to participate.

Our effort will initially center around four elements…

1. Monthly Podcast Episodes

   Robin Stewart
   is interviewing genealogy researchers, storytellers, and creatives in the Substack community to create a podcast series that not only explores our guests’ journey into family history it also highlights their contributions to the genealogy community. The podcast will be available in video or audio streams hosted on the Substack platform without advertising.⁴ Subscribers can view episodes from the web without creating a Substack username/password. An easy-to-use mobile app is also available for viewing on the go.

2. Roundtable Discussions

   We’ll also host casual roundtable discussions each month to create a space for community dialogue and explore topics raised in the podcasts. Each session will be casual and give participants a chance to share what they’re working on or the challenges they’re struggling with. Roundtables will be moderated by

   Barbara Tien
   .

3. Office Hours: Using Substack in Family History

   Using the platform, family historians and genealogists are developing creative ways to connect with collaborators and cousins. Best practices are still fluid, however. To help each other, we will host casual office hours over Zoom each month, with convenient options for our Atlantic and Pacific community members. These programs will be moderated by

   Barbara Tien
   .

4. Recommendations: Family Historians and Genealogists on Substack

   Finding fellow travelers on the genealogy journey can be tricky. Social platforms offer groups and hashtags, but Substack’s human-powered recommendation engine doesn’t work that way. We’ve set about jump-starting the engine by asking family history pioneers on Substack to share their recommendations at MissionGenealogy.org/community. Explore the profiles and follow their subscription recommendations.

5. Substack Articles, Chat threads, and Notes

   Barbara, Robin, and guest authors from around the community will also share new ideas and resources in guest posts, chat threads, and notes.

How does this community pencil out for free?

Since Substack doesn’t charge us and we can leverage the resources of our Substack-based businesses, we can afford to make Mission: Genealogy a free resource that works like a commons or town hall.⁵

That means subscribing to Mission: Genealogy doesn’t cost you anything. If you subscribe, you’ll get our newsletters via email. If you join our events, you’ll get a link to join. That’s it. We won’t sell, swap, or share your email address or any data about you. We derive our operational funding through our substacks. We know our modest operational needs will balance out if we do our part to invest in this growing community. As the saying goes,

A rising tide lifts all boats.

We’re doing this to help grow the community—not hoover your personal information. We’re confident that if you share our interest in family history and genealogy, you’ll want to explore our Projectkin projects and GenealogyMatters productivity tools.

Why Substack

Here’s more about what we found so interesting in the Substack platform:

Here’s how to get started now

Are you ready to explore our podcast episodes?

We’ll also be scheduling our live roundtable discussions about once a month. Our first program will be held…

<Register here>

Our Office Hours events will also be held monthly to start and our first program will be held…

Subscribe to get our podcasts as they’re released, updates when our members chat, plus notices when our roundtables are scheduled.

1. You may already know

Robin Stewart

’s Genstack, a newsletter that created a way to highlight posts and events throughout the community.

2. With the Projectkin Member’s Corner,

Barbara Tien

created a simple way for family historians to share their stories and recordings with new audiences.

3. Though we’re bullish on Substack as a platform, we maintain independence as a core principle. Learn more about why we see an essential role for Substack in family history here.

4. Initially, podcasts will be available exclusively on Substack. Later, we anticipate adding major podcasting platforms.

5. If time constraints make it difficult, we can find ways to ask for compensation for our time.