Patrick Comerford
Yet again I am overwhelmed by the viewing and reading figures for this blog. These figures reached a total of 50 million before dawn early this morning (4 September 2026). This comes soon after reaching the 49 million mark four days ago (31 August 2026), and passing the million mark on three other days last month: 48 million (24 August), 47 million (17 August) and 46 million (9 August).
I continue to find these viewing and reading figures overpowering at times, and this blog continues to reach volumes of readers I never expected when I first started blogging 16 years ago. At the end of last year, this blog had 21 million hits (31 December 2025). So far this year, there have been more than 29 million hits or visitors in 2026 alone.
Half of all hits or reader figures have been in little more than six months, with 25 million hits since 28 February 2026. I first began blogging in 2010, and it took almost two years until July 2012 to reach half a million readers. Throughout this year and last, the daily figures are overwhelming on many occasions. Of the 10 days of busiest traffic on this blog, one was this month (1 September 2026), three were in May (1, 6 and 14 May 2026), three were the previous month (26, 29 and 30 April 2026), two in March, and one in February:
• 1,124,925 (1 May 2026)
• 525,719 (14 May 2026)
• 509,644 (29 April 2026)
• 356,335 (1 September 2026)
• 344,003 (30 April 2026)
• 323,156 (27 March 2026)
• 322,038 (26 April 2026)
• 318,835 (6 May 2026)
• 318,307 (1 March 2026)
• 314,018 (28 February 2026)
The daily average was about 118,700 hits a day throughout August. Yet, I recall how 10 years ago, back in 2016, the daily average was around 1,000, or 30,000 a month.
To put this new figure of 50 million into context:
Modern slavery entraps 50 million people on any given day: about 28 million people are working under duress in private economies, state projects or commercial exploitation, 22 million are living in forced marriages without consent, and one in four victims of modern slavery is a child.
Around 50 million people worldwide have epilepsy, making it one of the most common neurological diseases globally.
The UK government has set an official target to welcome 50 million international visitors annually by the year 2030. Greece too aims to attract 50 million annual tourist arrivals by 2030, according to a strategic target set by the Greek Tourism Confederation.
There are 29 countries with a population of more than 50 million. The population of the UK reached 50 million by 1948 and has been growing ever since: the population was 40 million in 1898, it reached 50 million by 1948 and 60 million by 2005, and is probably at 70 million this year (2026).
The Black Death killed 50 million people, or 60 per cent of Europe’s entire population, between 1346 and 1353. As a proportion of the population that lost their lives, the Black Death caused unrivalled mortality. It overshadows the horrors of World War II, and is twice the number murdered by Stalin’s regime in the Soviet Union.
In the year 1000, Europe had a population of ~50 million. Some simple maths shows that everyone who was alive in Europe around the year 1000 is either an ancestor of everyone in Europe today, or the ancestor of no one. This means that someone in Sweden, Norway or Italy has the same set of ancestors as someone who thinks their family is 100% British, Irish, French or Spanish.
At times I have used mathematical projections to help my genealogical projects, and the maths are quite simple. Every person has two parents, four grandparents and so on. Going just 30 generations back, say around 1066, that means I have one billion direct ancestors (2 to the power of 30), even though there were not one billion humans alive at that time.
A white paper published by FamilyTreeDNA used an example of a Swedish man with 8.5 billion genealogical ancestors (2^33) living in the year 1000. ‘Genealogical ancestors’ does not mean actual ancestors, as there were not even one billion living humans alive at that time, meaning many ancestors will appear multiple times across various branches.
The paper notes: ‘Think about that for a moment. If you have a single European ancestor, you are genealogically descended from every European from the year 1000 who has living descendants now.’
The population of ~50 million people in Europe in the year 1000 means we are all related in more ways than we imagine.
50 million minutes is 95 years, 24 days, 4 hours and 22 minutes. This means that if this blog was receiving just one hit a minute, I would need to have started blogging back in late September 1931.
I retired from active parish ministry about 4½ years ago, on 31 March 2022. These days, though, about 150 people on average are reading my daily prayer diary posted on this blog each morning, or more than 1,000 people each week.
This evening, as this blog passees 50 million hits, I am truly grateful to the real readers among those 50 million hits. In particular I am thankful for the faithful core group of people who join me in prayer, scripture reading and reflections each day.
