GenealogyWise (now Genealogy Social) and the Curious Descendants Club: verdict for a Welsh family-history e-book
Read 31 Oct 2026 (skills harvest). Read-only study. Joining, posting or creating a profile anywhere here is a proposal that needs the project lead's GO.
What each one is now (read today)
GenealogyWise → Genealogy Social. genealogywise.com now redirects (HTTP 200) to genealogysocial.com. It's a Ning network run by the International Institute of Genealogical Studies (IIGS), which also sells genealogy courses. - Surname and place groups are gone. /groups returns 404. The only sections left are Member Blogs, GS News (staff posts selling IIGS courses), Photos and an empty Events page with 0 upcoming events. Member lists are behind sign-in. - Member Blogs: 3,182 posts in total. The newest member post is from 14 Aug 2025. Views on the 12 newest posts: 40, 67, 57, 67, 60, 73, 235, 119, 150, 103, 78 and 77, with 0 to 7 comments each. - The "Most Popular" posts all date from 2009 to 2011. Top view counts: 3,086, 1,518, 1,162, 1,080 and 1,040. The network's audience peaked at launch and has not come back. - Community Guidelines (updated 15 Jul 2025): posts must stay on genealogy; "spam or excessive promotional content" is prohibited; members must cite sources, acknowledge unchecked information and respect the privacy of living people. Moderation runs from a friendly reminder up to removal.
Curious Descendants Club. This is a paid online membership run by Natalie Pithers in Somerset. It teaches people to write ancestor stories through lessons, workbooks, live workshops and peer support. It is not a directory of descendants of a place. - Its home page states "THE CLUB IS CURRENTLY CLOSED TO NEW MEMBERS". - The founder's other site, genealogystories.co.uk, did not resolve from this box today. - I found no public member count and no public forum to read.
Verdict
- Genealogy Social: NO as a discovery route. Groups are gone, there is about one member post a month, and a new post gets roughly 40 to 235 views. At most, one cited member-blog post could be a backlink, and only with the project lead's GO. One hour is better spent on RootsChat or the Glamorgan FHS forum (both already covered).
- Curious Descendants Club: NO. It's paid, closed to new members, and it's a writing school, not a reader pool. Zero spend rules it out even when it reopens.
- The lesson that does transfer: both are writing communities for family historians. Readers in that world respond to a story told from the records ("what life was like"), not to a list of facts or a sales pitch. That matches the existing cousin-bait and first-person narration skills.
Checklist if either is ever revisited (only on the project lead's GO)
- Genealogy Social: re-check /groups and the newest member post date. Revisit only if groups come back or a member post from the last 30 days has more than 300 views.
- Write any post as a record-led story: the catalogue ID, the verbatim line, then the context. Put one internal link at the end. Follow the guidelines' rules on cites and on unchecked information.
- Curious Descendants: re-check the "closed" line once a quarter. Even if it reopens, membership costs money, so the answer stays no.
How we apply it to Cedwyn
- Put no time into either. Log both as checked and not taken, so future harvests do not re-seed them.
- Keep the useful idea: the e-book's sample chapter and its social cards should open on one record line and one human moment (who stood where, when), with the catalogue ID beside it. A "dry dull facts" opener is what this audience states it skips.
- Kill rule: if a Genealogy Social post is ever made on the project lead's GO, stop when it gets under 100 views in 14 days.
Sources
- genealogywise.com (redirects to genealogysocial.com read 31 Oct 2026)
- genealogysocial.com (read)
- genealogysocial.com and ?sort=mostPopular (read; view and comment counts taken from the page)
- genealogysocial.com (404) ; genealogysocial.com (0 events)
- cruwys.blogspot.com (2009 launch context; search snippet only)
- curiousdescendants.co.uk (read: paid membership, closed to new members)
- podcasts.apple.com (search snippet only)
Raw Markdown: genealogy-social-networks-genealogywise-curious-descendants-verdict.md · version and changes: changelog · machine index: agents.json