Award-Winning Minerd.com Family Website Marks 20th Anniversary

 

Aug. 26, 2020 - Two decades after the Minerd-Minard-Miner-Minor family of southwestern Pennsylvania launched the Minerd.com website to expand its information-sharing network, the site is marking its 20th anniversary this year.

Minerd.com has a national following averaging 30,000 visitors a year and twice has been named by Family Tree Magazine as a “top 10 family website” in the nation. Over two decades, it has attracted more than 3 million visitors, generated award-winning research and been cited in scores of books, magazine articles and news stories.

"The website proves the case of how vastly inter-connected we all are and tries to be a unifying presence in an era of harsh political, racial and spiritual divisiveness in our nation," said website founder Mark A. Miner, 59, of Beaver, Pa. "It tangibly links our families to the broader backdrop of Americana over time and educates tens of thousands of our extended cousins and friends that their ancestral roots are in Fayette and Somerset Counties here in regional Pittsburgh."

A private, related “National Minerd-Minard-Miner-Minor” Facebook page was launched last year and has grown to more than 580 cousin-members in the United States and as far away as Costa Rica. Another project, the Minerd.com Blog, was created in 2015 to more widely share the latest family history research for the online community and educate the public about how families have influenced the culture and history of American communities.

Minerd.com’s primary feature is a biographical archive preserving the stories of a sprawling number of descendants of Jacob and Maria (Nein) Minerd Sr. who settled on the border of Fayette/Somerset Counties in 1791, and related Younkin, Harbaugh, Ream, Gaumer and other Pennsylvania German families. It also promotes the Minerds’ every-other-year national reunion and highlights the family’s diversity through feature stories, reunion archives, charts and 17,000 images.

Among the more popular pages are the “Photo of the Month” and “In Lasting Memory” which documents more than 2,800 deaths of cousins and their spouses since 2000. The site’s encyclopedic “Civil War Guide” tells the detailed stories of hundreds of Civil War veterans along with their battles and casualties.

Miner originally envisioned Minerd.com after developing several generations of websites in the 1990s in his professional employment. Today he is self-employed as the CEO of marketing consulting and publishing firms.