Cyndi's List was first published on March 4, 1996. I have a hard time believing that was 15 years ago. One of the questions I get asked a lot is how Cyndi's List got started. Each fall our local society meets to share what we did over the summer. In the summer of 1995 I bought a new computer with a blazing fast 9600 baud modem, preloaded with AOL software. I immediately started looking for genealogy resources online. I took what I had found to our society meeting in September 1995—one printed page of everything I found online. I had ten copies to hand out just in case someone else ...

Recently, on the Cyndi's List Facebook page, on an unrelated topic, the following two statements were made:"Be careful with the LDS thing. Very little documentation."

"Yes, my ancestors on one side joined when the church first began - lots of wrong, wrong, wrong info on them on the LDS site!!! No verification of information at all. It's like going on Ancestry and just grabbing family trees without documenting the info!"

I was disappointed with the very general, broadly condemning, generic statements that were made about an invaluable resource to ...

The Internet Archive's Wayback Machine gives us snapshots of web sites as they were on previous dates. This can be a very useful tool for people who are looking for web sites that they visited in the past. For genealogy, the archived web pages can serve as both good and bad research tools. A person's genealogical research naturally evolves over time. New information is found, mistakes are corrected, and data is edited. In theory, a person's genealogy web site should also evolve over time. So, a glimpse at an archived copy of a web page can help you see how the evolution of a web ...

Last Tuesday a reader on Facebook asked this question: "Cyndi: Can you put forth some suggestions on how to use Facebook for genealogical purposes/research? Thanks."Here's a quick run-through of ideas based on my knowledge of the features available with Facebook. Obviously, Facebook is a great way to network with other genealogists. You can make friends with fellow genealogists, learn from one another, and expand your genealogical horizons. When all else fails, you can always get a pick-me-up from your Facebook friends. Facebook is just one more way to publish information online. It gives ...

Visitors to Cyndi's List can submit new links to be added to the site (http://www.cynd...inewlink.htm). Links are automatically added to the "What's New" section on the site (http://www.cynd...whatsnew.htm) and sent out to subscribers of the Cyndi's List Mailing List (http://www.cynd...maillist.htm). In doing so, links are also found to be included in the Google databases quicker because Google regularly spiders both Cyndi's List and the mailing list archives at RootsWeb. And all of this is free. So, there is a lot of good motivation for people to submit their ...

I started a new category this week: Social Networking for Genealogy. I am still building and tweaking it. It has taken me a while to create this new category because I had a hard time determining how to catalogue the links I was finding. Defining and categorizing "social networking" for genealogy isn't easy. Social networking online takes advantage of the latest technologies to offer interactive methods of sharing and publishing on the Internet. Genealogists have always been social-networking pros, since the early days of the Internet. We've used bulletin boards, newsgroups, chat, mailing ...

GeoCities, owned by Yahoo!, will be closing later this year. Genealogists have been using the free web hosting service for many years now. This means it is time to look for new homes for tens of thousands of genealogy web sites out there. I went through my links for Personal Home Pages and made a list of the free web hosts that I see used most often by genealogists. I can"t make personal recommendations on any of these hosts, because I haven"t used them myself. But these seem to be the most commonly used: RootsWebTribal PagesGoogle Sites TripodAngelfire Bravenet WebspawnerSo, you all get ...

I"ve got a dilemma. Something I can"t seem to make a decision on. Whether or not I should link to archived links within the Wayback Machine Internet archives. I"ll elaborate more on my dilemma in a moment. First, visit the Wayback Machine (part of the Internet Archive) to see what I"m referring to. It was founded in 1996 with the mission to archive all web pages on the Internet. There are many pros and cons to the idea of archiving web pages. You can find conversations on this topic throughout the message boards on the Internet Archive web site. Briefly--once a web page has disappeared ...

For the past few months I"ve had some invaluable help from a new friend online. I want to publicly thank Jeffery Mance, of Canada, for his consistent and unflagging attention to detail in reporting broken links to me for Cyndi"s List. He has been methodically going through the pages for the United Kingdom, sending me the broken link reports and supplying updated URLs for the links whenever possible. He has also pointed out errors in link placement so that I could fix those as well. I"m working my way through all of these reports and extremely thankful that Jeffery has already done half of ...

Become a fan of Cyndi's List on Facebook: http://www.face.../37581918950

I put a new category online tonight: Wikis for Genealogy http://www.Cynd...om/wikis.htm

I broke up the old Hispanic page into three: The Caribbean / The West Indies http://www.Cynd...aribbean.htm Central & South America http://www.Cynd...hamerica.htm Mexico http://www.Cynd...m/mexico.htm

http://rootstel...d=2474692001

Four new categories on Cyndi's List: Free Stuff http://www.cynd...reestuff.htm The Mayflower, Pilgrims & The Plymouth Colony http://www.cynd...ayflower.htm U.S. - Presidents http://www.cynd...esidents.htm U.S. - Puerto Rico http://www.cynd...ertorico.htm