Happy 20th Birthday to Cyndi’s List!

So many things can hinge on a simple decision. For all of us in the genealogy world it was a decision that changed things for the better for all of us.

The decision to collect the known at that time online links to sites useful to genealogists and then putting the whole 1125 of them on a website because “somebody might find that list of links useful”

This led to a site beloved and essential to many genealogists and family historians worldwide.

That decision was made 20 years ago! So it is Happy Birthday to Cyndi’s List!!!!!

That 20 years has seen the list of useful sites to the genealogist grow from 1025 to over 330 788+ links!

If you went to each and every link and spent just one hour at that link you would need to spend 24 hours a day for the next 37.76 years!

That is 330 788 links that have been checked and categorised for us to use. This is not a one-time job. Links constantly change and need to be repaired. Categories need to be expanded and new categories developed, indeed it is a never ending job.

A never ending job for a site that is totally free, yes that is correct, free for all to use.

What is even more amazing is that this is not being done by the very large team of people you would expect. Instead, apart from some limited help from a family member a number of years ago, all this work was done and is being done by one very amazing lady!

The amazing Cyndi Ingle, the lady who never sleeps!

Cyndi’s List is a gateway site and we still need these sites even with the search engines we use today such as Google.  The reason we still need gateway sites such as Cyndi’s List is that search engines don’t search the deeper sections of websites, they don’t index the “Deep Web”.

Cyndi’s List however indexes the genealogy and history pages which can, on a company site particularly, be quite a number of pages deep in the site. The genealogy community send interesting links to be included.

Other gateway sites of interest are Cora Num’s website which has many Australian links and GenUKI which has many United Kingdom and Ireland links.

Our thanks to all those who maintain these gateway sites that are such a useful aid in our research.