Linkpendium

One of the great unsung genealogy resources on the Web is Linkpendium. It is a compendium of links to U.S. genealogy-related information on the World Wide Web. Its home page proclaims that it presently contains links to 4,987,236 genealogy sites.

Linkpendium was developed by Karen Isaacson and Brian Leverich, the same two people who created RootsWeb some years ago. RootsWeb was eventually acquired by MyFamily.com, the same company that operates Ancestry.com and Genealogy.com. Obviously, Karen and Brian have not been sitting on their hands since their RootsWeb days. They seem to be indexing all sorts of genealogy information on the Internet. Linkpendium has been online for close to three years now but doesn't seem to receive much publicity.

At first glance, Linkpendium would appear to be a competitor of Cyndi's List (which I love and use often). However, once you enter Linkpendium, you quickly realize that it is a very different kind of service. Cyndi's List contains 150 different categories, including Beginners, Biographies, Births & Baptisms, Calendars, CD-ROM disks, Clothing & Costumes, Family Bibles, Famous People and many, many more categories. On the other hand, Linkpendium focuses on U.S. state, county, and local resources as well as surnames. Linkpendium doesn't have links to genealogy software or to calendars. As a comparison, I would suggest that Cyndi's List contains a broad range of categories whereas Linkpendium is much more focused. In addition, Linkpendium seems to go much deeper into those areas of its interests.

The Linkpendium links to family surnames are extensive. All the links point to other web sites, and the quality of those other web sites obviously varies. I found that quite a few of the links that I tried led to message boards that seem to be inactive. A few led to very active messages boards on RootsWeb, GenCircles, and Genealogy.com.

Linkpendium's real strength is its pointers to resources at the county level of all U.S. states. I suspect that is where the majority of links are to be found. Indeed, I looked at Penobscot County, Maine, as it is one county where I have significant expertise. I was pleasantly surprised at the number of links there, including many that I had never seen before. The list included links to many cemetery transcriptions as well as to city directories, published town histories, buildings listed in the National Register of Historic Places, land records, libraries, museums, mailing lists, maps, online obituaries, genealogy and historical societies, and quite a bit more. In my casual perusal of several other counties in other states, I saw similar lists.

Linkpendium also has excellent lists at the state level in addition to those listed under each county. However, the site seems to focus heavily on county resources. I found no information for locations outside the U.S.

In short, if you are looking for U.S. genealogy or history web sites and resources, Linkpendium should be on your checklist of places to look. You will find many links there. In fact, you will find more than two million of them.

To see for yourself, go to http://www.linkpendium.com

Comments

[William Braxton]

Very good site for genealogical search.

[Gary Mokotoff]

The claim of 4,987,236 genealogy sites is an exaggeration. For example, they extracted every surname in Ancestral File and declared every surname to be a "genealogy site." The surnames Mokotoff, Mokotov, Mokotow and Mokotowski are four of the 4,987,236 sites. They exist only in Ancestral File.

Still the site has value.

[Terry Foenander.]

Linkpendium may be considered as a great site, but it contains material from some web sites that are obviously inaccurate, incorrect and containing many assumptions. One web site, in particular, titled CIVIL WAR VETERANS IN AUSTRALIA, has been found to contain so much inaccurate data, that it will be a lifetime and more before any of this data will ever be corrected fully. Some of the persons, credited at the web site, with being Civil War veterans, have been shown, after thorough research, by others, to have never even served in the Civil War. Unfortunately, it would seem that Linkpendium has judged such material, from other web sites, to be totally accurate, without even bothering to verify this data. And, unfortunately, many of those who do their research work from material at Linkpendium and these associated web sites, will be led astray, unless they decide to verify this through proper documentation.

[Terry Foenander]

It seems that Linkpendium is unconcerned if details are correct or not, as they continue to include entries that have been removed from the CIVIL WAR VETERANS IN AUSTRALIA (created by Jim Gray) web site, thanks to our investigations that showed that at least eight (the ones already removed) and about two dozen others (still under investigative research) were not Civil War veterans at all, but assumptions made by Gray. He had no choice but to remove these eight, since our evidence showed that it was impossible that they could be Civil War veterans. Gray is notorious for taking a name, assuming it is the same name shown on Civil War rosters, and then claiming they are one and the same, and goes no further on proper research to prove his claims. Yet many persons, and web sites, such as Linkpendium, seem to place some reliance on his grossly inaccurate claims. I guess the names will remain online for many others, who do not know the facts, to assume that they were indeed Civil War veterans. I do hope some action is taken to remove all these inaccurate entries.