Our Blog Activity

Blog hosting sites provide statistics on how many visits the blog is attracting and from where. These are interesting statistics even if it is hard to figure out why or how people from all over the world stumbled upon your blog.

As of March 1, 2014, we have had over 33,000 "page views" on this site. We began very quietly and modestly in 2008 and there had been 12,000 as of October, 2012.

Certainly the bulk of our visits come from the U.S. - about 21,500 as of March, 2014. But there have been over a thousand page views from Germany and China. Russia, Canada, the U.K., France and Ukraine are next followed by Malaysia (380 visits?) and The Netherlands.

We can offer some explanations for these visits. Sutton has a large population with connections to the Germans from Russia with about a half of those from villages near Odessa in Ukraine. Certain related searches will lead to this site. And well, China has a large population and will logically show up on a list almost anywhere I suppose.

We see stats for the day, week, month and all-time so the shorter intervals reveal individual visitors from less common locations. This week's visits include folks from Brazil, Indonesia, Indonesia, Poland and Spain.

We hope that our postings about the history of the Sutton community communicate an interesting and useful picture of rural America over the past several decades. The relatively recent (a century and a half) of settlement and development of the Great Plains while not unique (Canada, Australia, South America and parts of Africa are not dissimilar) this story does contrast with the millennia of history in Europe and Asia. Just as Americans are struck by standing in the Pantheon with its 2,000+ years of history we can try to appreciate the reaction of someone from Rome to cities and towns located where small isolated American Indian villages stood fewer than 130 years ago.