Skybridges Connect Communities Across Platforms
When Projectkin first launched on Substack, family historians and genealogists were rare finds. Now that we’ve become a vibrant community, it’s time to stretch beyond our roots and build “Skybridges!”
As we enter 2026, this thriving family history and genealogy community is ready to go beyond Substack. Since arriving on Substack as Projectkin, I’ve actively encouraged both casual family historians and serious genealogists to join us.
And look at us now! Though still small, we’ve achieved a critical mass. We’ve developed an ethos of generosity, kindness, and creativity. You continually inspire me with your energy and openness to new ideas.
On the occasion of the new year, I think it’s precisely the right time to shift gears and more actively create pathways for collaboration across platforms. I see no reason why we can’t welcome family historians and genealogists to participate in this community without asking them to move their work to Substack. Bridges between platforms can be pretty natural. In fact, several of you have already been showing us how.
This post will celebrate examples of cross-platform “skybridges” and explain why I think they are essential to the community's vitality.
When we brought Projectkin to Substack,1 I committed to keeping it platform-independent. As a former startup founder, I knew a lot about the incentives for platforms.2 Whatever their ambitions, investors reliably push well-meaning entrepreneurs to maximize returns by finding ways to bind subscribers’ digital work to their platform. Photo, video, and other file formats are a baseline approach.3 Strategies that close subscriber lists and comment histories are also widely deployed.4
Substack isn’t perfect, but engagement features and exit options, such as downloadable content and subscriber lists, make it a compelling alternative.
Level Set with a Definition
The term “platform” has meanings in a range of fields from sport to science. In consumer software, a digital platform is an online infrastructure that allows people to communicate, collaborate, and often pay each other. Early web logs started as news summaries as chronological views of website changes, but soon added technical features such as CMS, syndication, and email for distribution. By the late ’90s and early 2000s, the category’s success inspired startups like LiveJournal, Blogger, and WordPress to build on it, adding commenting, authentication, and email notifications. Facebook’s walled-garden approach wasn’t far behind.
Over the years, blogs have been transformed with a range of media and distribution features. Their success has spawned new business categories like podcasting, webinars, and video sharing. As these services and their variations added payment processing and/or advertising, they became new platform categories serving both customers (e.g., podcasters) and their customers’ subscribers (readers, viewers, and other consumers).
Substack’s entry was quite late in 2017; as a result, they had to take a distinctly different approach to stand out from blogging platforms like WordPress. As they add media features, they’re reinventing the category.
Genealogy on Substack was Lonely
When I joined Substack as Projectkin’s publisher, I found a warm and generous community of fellow-travelers. The combination of writing, media, and citation features suits us as storytellers. The recommendation engine5 helped us find each other, and a payment system gave us the option to ditch advertising by adding paywalls and exclusive fee-based content.
Unfortunately, when I joined a little over two years ago, there just weren’t very many of us. Worse, most of our visitors were unfamiliar with Substack. They came from social sites like Facebook and Bluesky and found the interface confusing. Subscription nudges, while effective in converting new subscribers, were also annoying.
Without a critical mass, we lacked credibility. Visitors wandered away almost as readily as they arrived.
And yet, we persisted.
By my estimate, there were at least a few hundred genealogy and genealogy-adjacent publications here before me. I remember being particularly touched by the generosity of Lisa Maguire of Ancestory, K.J. Wilsdon of New Coats for Old Tales6 and GenStack’s Robin Stewart. Robin had arrived shortly before me and shared my background as an entrepreneur, though had much more experience as a genealogist. We soon realized that we shared a common goal in growing the community.
By August 2024, we’d decided to create a focus that would help give the genealogy community a sense of belonging. That was the basis behind MissionGenealogy. Though Robin has since moved on to focus on family history content creators with GenealogyMatters, our Mission continues to welcome new community members with monthly roundtables. In 2025, Deborah Carl stepped up to add a series of weekly tips to help everyone get comfortable here.
2025 Was the Quickening
During 2025, we saw luminaries in the Genealogy blogosphere enter the tent. DearMYRTLE, Linda Stufflebean, Maureen Taylor, Randy Seaver, Geneaholic, and Paul Chiddicks, to name a few. The stalwart GeneaBloggers joined both as an account and community leader, expanding the invitation to the membership of Geneabloggers. In April, a researcher and platform pioneer, Daniel Loftus, presented a talk for FamilyTreeWebinars about getting the most out of the platform. Just six months earlier, the Substack development team recognized both the growth and the potential for this segment by adding Genealogy as a Category visible in the Explore mode.7
It’s hard to say how big the Genealogy and Family History community is today (estimates range from hundreds to tens of thousands of publications)8, but it’s certainly no longer lonely. As J. Curtis described, the quickening of a community starts…
“Quietly at first. A comment here. An email there. Then the conversations got longer. The stories started tugging at each other, like they knew they belonged on the same shelf.”
A Twist on the Success Story
Instead of bragging about our success, let's accept that what we’ve accomplished so far establishes our credibility. Now it’s time to focus on building connections to other platforms.
Crowing about why Substack is a better platform is a waste of my time. It may be true, but it’s not our job. Let Substack do that.
That made me realize that if my objective for Projectkin is to encourage more families to tell their stories,9 then I should focus on reaching more families. I don’t need to teach people to use Substack; it’s just one platform among many. As I’ve said many times, I believe it’s a good one, particularly for its support of standards-based media features.
So, let’s channel our energy into new and compelling ways to connect across boundaries. If we’re not proprietary about any one platform, we’re more likely to focus on our storytelling. I want to keep exploring bridges between platforms.
Connecting Platforms with “Skybridges”
The boundaries that separate platforms aren’t a bad thing; they’re natural, as each platform protects its interests. Our interests, however, extend across these boundaries. If platforms allow entry without paywalls and barriers, why not build skybridges between them so that we can more readily explore posts, recordings, and other stories?
A Simple Example
Substack, as a platform, has every interest in helping you find content within the platform. To do that, they’ve added the explore function on your home page. From there, you can see categories that allow you to search for others who share your interests. When you paste a link to another Substack in a post, the platform elegantly embeds the post. A link to another writer (using the “@” handle) embeds their name and tells them that you’ve mentioned them.
Those are elegant and powerful features, but they are not the only ways to link to external content. At Projectkin, I create my own visual links to external content to present it seamlessly. This is why I use screenshots of my calendar or event tiles to suggest you explore my calendar for events in your local time. Like this 👇 (Please excuse the shameless plug.)
Substack has nothing to do with either Zoom or the Tockify tool I use for events. Add a picture, put a link in the caption, that’s all there is to it. Why should integrations matter to readers?
Learning from the Best
We’ve seen some outstanding examples of hybrid platform strategies in 2025 as several experienced bloggers waded into Substack. They each have their own way to get the most out of the Substack community without giving up on their established sites and mailing lists. These are examples to learn from.
Here are a few that combine Substack with WordPress, YouTube, Blogger, Facebook, WeAre.xyz and more:
Jane Chapman who joined Jennifer Jones and me in January 2025 for “The Push & Pull of Platforms,” a special event for Projectkin.
In the talk, Jane described how she was integrating links to public pages on her WeAre.xyz blog and One-Place Study for her publications: Kyeburn Diggings One-Place Study and BJNL's Genealogy.
In contrast, Jennifer talked about how she had begun transitioning from a WordPress blog she’d managed for years to a Substack installation for TrackingDowntheFamily. Her Sunday Snippets posts create a weekly index of posts she enjoys on Substack and elsewhere. It also helps gain visibility for the posts she mentions.
When Paul Chiddicks joined Substack, he was already very well known at ChiddicksFamilyTree.com, on social media as @chiddickstree, and the voice behind the “Dear Paul” column for the UK’s Family Tree Magazine.
It would make no sense for Paul to walk away from his digital presence on these platforms. Instead, he complements his WordPress blog with occasional posts on Substack with links back to his WordPress and publishes a weekly newsletter, “The Chiddicks Observer,” that highlights posts deserving added attention.
With experience dating back to pre-internet bulletin boards and extending into a well-respected Facebook group, DearMYRTLE was very careful as she researched and then entered Substack, immediately establishing herself and transferring her credibility.
You’ll see her today with posts for DearMYRTLE’s Village Square where she highlights work from her bi-monthly live programs on YouTube: Mondays with Myrt and Myrt’s Book Club.
She also hosts Genea-Quilters with the same gusto, combining her posts with YouTube integrations.
Finally, DearMYRTLE also maintains an active role in Geneabloggers as an organization. With her guidance, the team is migrating its strategy for shoutouts and support to member bloggers.
One of Substack’s most prolific writers also has the deepest roots of all: Randy Seaver, Geneaholic.
His arrival on the platform this Spring signaled a new phase for our multi-platform community. Not only has he produced near-daily posts directly on his Geneaholic publication and podcast, but he also continues to post on Blogger at Genea-Musings. I have no explanation for how he does it, but suspect Hermione’s time turner, 😉.
In a post in October this year, Linda Stufflebean, who has been dropping one post a day to her blog Empty Branches on the Family Tree for years, shared a change in her own strategy.
In the post “Making Choices,” she described how she’ll stay on Substack but focus on her WordPress blog. She uses Feedly to manage incoming emails and occasionally comments or posts here. An example of her posts is “The Revolutionary War Experience of John Stufflebean,” one of her contributions to Stories250.
Supporting this multi-platform approach from the beginning has been GenealogyMatters’ Robin Stewart, whose weekly newsletter, GenStack has scoured the internet each week for genealogy or family history blogs, newsletters, podcasts, videos, and books.
For this nascent Substack community, her tireless work compiling this list has created a reliable train of visibility that is potent for new writers and contributors.
I’d be remiss to skip over one of our most generous and early contributors to the community, Tad Callin of Mightier Acorns.
His work for his Substack publication of the same name in early 2024 inspired a flurry of posts on the “My Sixteen” theme. In the process, he demonstrated ways to combine Substack with WikiTree. He created a terrific example where you can see the original post on Substack and the variation now on WordPress.
He inspired me to create a “My Sixteen” post, which in turn started a chain of connections that, through SEO and a Rolling Ball of Hay, introduced me to two cousins and over 400 years of genealogical connections. An amazing chain of connections.
These giants of the genealogy community humble me — and there are many more. Consistently, each has gone out of their way to support others and extend the reach of their posts across platforms.
When I launched my publication, I brought my experience in technology as the co-founder of a software platform. When I saw others struggling with the counterintuitive Substack interface, I jumped in to help. I put my energy into encouraging fellow travelers with tips, and learned more as I explained features.
Candidly, my guidance gave way to cheerleading. That’s not what I’m here for.
Reflecting on this cross-platform emphasis, you should see less of that in the coming year. I’m still enthusiastic, but I’ll be devoting less time to “Substack how-to” posts.10 This community has matured; you don’t need that from me. Substack’s own support pages at support.substack.com (and the widget at substack.com/support) are quite good. If you’re stuck, I’m always happy to help. The little product manager in my heart is always curious about new challenges, so please don’t hesitate to ask.
How We Tell Our Stories
Online platforms are only part of it. As Projectkin, I’ll be refining our programming to make it less Substack-specific. It should spark your creative mind and support you with strategies, inspiration, and resources you might not already have considered:
Strategizing on techniques for managing your artifacts with Kathy Stone’s Kathy’s Corner.
Then there’s our professional genealogist, Emma Cox, whose Emma Explores series will inspire you with thematic views, techniques, and research strategies.
You can also count on us for a few specials like Taneya Koonce’s special “Junk Journals” program in February.
We’ll continue sharing your stories in video using both Zoom and Substack Live in Jennifer Jones’ Speakers’ Corner, and the American Revolution Stories250 series. In fact, on Sunday (or Monday in Asia/Pac), Jennifer will host the first Projectkin Live discussion of the year with two of our speakers next week:
This week, we’re highlighting stories from Xanthe Hall of X-Factored and Marian Beaman of Marian’s News. To join the livestream, please visit open.substack.com/live-stream/94209. I’ll also revisit popular multi-day events like the RootsTech Ride Along and our the All About That Place series in collaboration with the UK’s Society of Genealogists, the Society for One-Place Studies, and the British Association of Local History.
Substack Live? Yes, please.
I’ve now explored the desktop version and have an idea about how to add a chat stream to recordings. There’s more to come (and of course, I’ll share what I learn.)
And yes, I have a few new ideas for 2026. Subscribe and stay tuned.
My approach has been to focus on live, community-building events. They are free and give us a way to get to know each other in conversations and personal connections. Our video recordings and commentaries give us the flexibility to time-shift across a diverse audience. I hope you can join us.
Our schedule is always available (and updated) at Projectkin.org/events.
Even as Substack’s support improves, we still need a safe place to ask each other questions about platforms — and genealogy. MissionGenealogy is here for you. With tips now contributed by so many of you, the publication11 has become the clubhouse we always intended it to be.
Join us in roundtable conversations this month — or next. Sessions are not recorded to ensure everyone feels comfortable asking even the seemingly basic questions. You’re not alone here. See MissionGenealogy.org/events.
It’s a Team Sport, and Everyone Plays a Role
However disciplined we are, the inertia of switching between platforms will still affect each of us differently. One person might stay on Blogger, for example, because they value familiarity over media features. Another person might export their posts from WordPress and jump to Substack because they value the integration of livestreamed videos. Still another may never publish a public blog post. That’s totally fine.
You be you, I’m delighted to welcome and celebrate you, your creativity, and your storytelling on any platform: public or private.
I like to think that online communities can offer guidance without the complexities of social encumbrances. Family history projects can spark battles over politics and procedures, only to crumble under the weight of family feelings. In a supportive environment, the nudges, tips, and even corrections community members share can be very helpful. That virtual hug, bit of inspiration, or “huzzah!” can make all the difference. As a community, we’re here for each other.
I’m delighted to be part of this dynamic gyre of activity. I hope you’ll join in on the fun from any platform.
Though I founded Projectkin.org from the remnants of a startup, it’s been a collaboration of individual contributors. Kathy Stone helped me make Projectkin a new home for Kathy’s Corner. Since then, we’ve found our voice with the addition of Emma Cox for Emma Explores, Jennifer Jones for our Speakers’ Corner, and dozens of supporters for other specials.
I’d learned too much about platform incentives and, on a generational timeline, didn’t want to add to the “Enshittification” that Cory Doctorow describes in his new book about modern software. More at Projectkin.org/about.
Consider, for example, how photos and videos you upload to platforms like Instagram or TikTok are difficult to extract at full resolution.
Though Facebook wasn’t the first to prevent users from downloading subscriber and follower lists or comment streams, it’s a solid strategy. Other than printing comment threads, Substack still doesn’t offer a good way to capture them.
More about how to make the most of recommendations in Deborah Carl’s tip for our sister publication, MissionGenealogy.org.
Though at the time Kate was publishing under Your Motley Stories.
Most people don’t even realize it’s there. Finding it is one of those curiosities of the interface that reminds you that this platform is still expanding with new features.
To see it, you’ll to configure “Genealogy” as one of your “Interests.” Even trickier, Genealogy is a subset of History. (Go to your profile, see tap Manage Interests. Now, tap History. Genealogy will be there as an option to “👍” in the drop-down.)
Unfortunately, “genealogy” won’t be seen by people outside the platform, even if you share a link to the category.
While it’s hard to estimate the overall size of the community, there are a few genealogy-adjacent publications on Substack with more than 2,000 subscribers.
For context, Katherine R. Willson, who compiled the longest-running list of Facebook genealogy groups, estimated in 2021 that there were nearly 22,000 groups then. (Cyndi’s List has since taken over management of the list.) Many Facebook genealogy groups have 50,000 or more members. Most, however, have few active daily users.
By the way, I say it this way instead of “share their stories” because I believe there is value for them in the telling. Platforms will phrase this idea in terms of “sharing” because they are driving on the network effects of people sharing their stories. I’m explicitly not interested in that.
In fact, I think many stories have been deeply distorted by performative behaviors encouraged by social media and other platforms. I want to encourage more families to talk to each other. Telling stories privately may not benefit platforms, but it can be incredibly valuable to individual growth, mental health, and confidence.
I’m always happy to share techniques. They shouldn’t be secrets. I want us all to have access to the best of this and every storytelling platform.
If you have a question, ask in Notes. Any number of talented genealogists, writers, and storytellers will chime in to help.
If you have a tip that fits better as a post, share the idea, draft, or post with Deborah Carl of YourFamilyQuest. She has created an editing and illustration workflow for adding tips to MissionGenealogy that can be shared with all subscribers. It not only shares what you know, but adds visibility for you among fellow travelers on Substack.
By the way, should you wonder, though I control the publication at missiongenealogy.substack.com, I don’t log in using that account, so this publication may be followed and subscribed to, but it won’t reciprocate. I do the best I can from Projectkin to welcome and encourage new community members, but frankly, I can’t handle more identities than I already have. 🤭 I’m more than happy to answer questions about that.
I love the skybridges metaphor Barbara. I came to Substack for my Lifestyle newsletter and never expected to find this wonderful genealogy community here. It's been a huge highlight and even a life changer for me. Exciting times ahead for Projectkin!
I love the idea of skybridges Barbara. I came to Substack with you for a home for Kathy's Corner, and found a place to interact with others with the same love of family stories and photos. Then I found a home for my "retirement" gig launching Kathy's Coaching to build on Kathy's Corner helping people organize and archive the visual parts of their stories and history. Opening doors to other places where my new friends also hang out is a brilliant idea. It will save the effort of blindly searching for like minded folks with great stories to tell - to use an old prairie expression "separating the wheat from the chaff".