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
