One of my favorite colleagues is Cyndi Ingle, the grand web-mistress behind the ever invaluable Cyndi’s List. She is also one of the co-founders for one of the best genealogical Facebook Groups out there, The Genealogy Squad (last year they asked me to join their ranks as one of the administrators). She also teaches classes, webinars, institute course, etc. on technology topics, how to utilized websites better, how to organize your computer, how to use some cool technology tools to make your life easier, and so on. She has also become a discussion group leader for the study groups I offer after demand got larger and my time got smaller.

Cyndi is a powerhouse in the genealogy field, always helpful and generous with her time and knowledge.

Her website, Cyndi’s List, is turning 25 today, March 4, 2021. She has been providing this free service to genealogists for a quarter of a century! I remember when I first heard about Cyndi’s List. It was from my friend and mentor, Birdie Holsclaw. She was a huge fan of Cyndi and her list. She pointed me to using Cyndi’s List quite early in my genealogical life and I’m so grateful.

Why should you use Cyndi’s List when you can simply use Google these days?

For one thing, Google only indexes about 4-5% of the internet. The little Google bots that crawl the web to index it for their search engine, only drill down a few levels into a website. So, if you have a deep and complicated site, like a University for example, Google isn’t going to crawl all the way down into those layers and index the items you are probably looking for. For example, if you are looking for a digitized record on a University library website, the layers may look like this: University > Libraries > That Particular Library > Digital Collections > History/Genealogy > County/State/City or whatever identifying layer > Digitized Marriage Collection. That is at least seven layers on my hypothetical scenario here, and I’ve been on sites where it’s more. Google typically goes maybe four levels deep.

A second reason, you don’t always know what to Google for! Cyndi’s site is broken up into categories. If you start by browsing her categories, you will find something valuable that you didn’t know you should Google for! You will get keywords and phrases you hadn’t thought to use for your searches.

A third reason, Cyndi has hand-picked these links, vetted them as useful for genealogists before including them on her site. So the links you find are applicable. With Google you get all kinds of links and have to wade through a lot before you might find something that applies to your research.

I have a concrete example that happened just last week. I was on a Zoom with Cyndi and telling her I was having a hard time reading the name of an Irish town that was listed on a birth record. On Google, if you type in a place “close enough” Google will ask “Did you mean…?” and give you some results that may or may not be correct. I have had this help me many times when trying to decipher handwriting when it comes to old town names. However, this Irish town name was not coming up. And in fact, Google kept separating it so that it would become a celebrity’s name. (“Did you mean Tony Shaloub?” No Google. I certainly did not.)

While I was Googling, Cyndi was pulling up Cyndi’s List, going to her Irish category, pulling up an Irish atlas database that would show you all of the towns in a county alphabetically, and she came up with the answer in no time!

I just did the same at Cyndi’s List to write this blog post and found a broken link. Oh no! Cyndi depends on her users to help keep the site up-to-date. She has thousands of links to keep track of and can’t do it alone. On the left side of the page is a “report a broken link” button that will allow you to quickly let her know something has moved or is just missing. Do this. It takes a few seconds and helps her out tremendously!

We have to get out of the habit of Googling. Or only Googling. Sometimes Google is the right tool. However, Cyndi has provided us this fantastic free resource of genealogy-related links! AND she is a one-woman operation.

I have two requests:

1. Visit Cyndi’s List. Examine her categories. Discover what you didn’t know you needed! Or find something to help answer your mysteries. (If you find a broken link, click that report button.)
2. Send her a donation. Any amount is appreciated, I’m sure. Every penny helps her keep the site up and running! She foots the bill for all of the web costs (design, hosting, security) and puts hours and hours into maintaining those links!

Happy Birthday, Cyndi’s List! I for one appreciate you very much!