I have changed the theme to “Twenty Nineteen” which is last year’s default WordPress theme. I mostly like it – clean and crisp. It also has two of the widgets that I most wanted – an “Archives” widget so that you can go as far back as you want and a “Search” widget so you can search for a post with a particular topic. Try them – then are located at the bottom so you have to scroll down.
Things that are still missing or need to be fixed: (1) the “Recent Posts” list is actually a list of pages, not posts and (2) there is no way to filter by category. I will figure these out, I am sure. In the meantime I will leave this new theme active and look forward to any feedback.
UPDATE: Got the list of pages to be properly labeled as “Pages” and eliminated all but the Search and Archives widgets. Still can’t filter by Category, though.
UPDATE: I am considering the “Adventure Journal” theme. It restores the graphic banners that were lost years ago. I like having the banner. I also have the list of Pages in a right-side column and an Archives drop-down. All good. But I haven’t gotten Search, Categories or Tags filters to work yet.
UPDATE: I got Search back. No Categories or Tags, but I am happy for now. And I have started to upload some more recent banner photos. All of the existing ones were from 2012.
UPDATE[28 Apr 2020]: I found a widget for Categories. That filter now appears as a dropdown in the sidebar. It is single-selection which is not as good as a multi-select dropdown and it seems that the only way to undo a selection is to backtrack, but I am happy that it is now possible to filter by Category. Never had that functionality before.