When you think of genealogy websites, which ones come to mind? You probably thought of Ancestry.com and FamilySearch. There is a one called Linkpendium that genealogists should check out. As you might expect, it is filled with a plethora of useful genealogy links.
Can’t find what you are looking for through your favorite genealogy website? This is a good reason for a genealogist to try something new. Another good reason to try out a genealogy website that you are unfamiliar with is plain old curiosity. Once in a while, a “change of venue”, so to speak, is all it takes for you to get past your current “brick wall”.
Linkpendium is a genealogy website that was founded by genealogists Karen Issacson and Brian Leverich. The name may be new to you, but the website has been around for quite a few years now. In short, Linkpendium is a website that puts tons of links to genealogy websites onto one, easy to scroll through, resource.
It is similar, in some ways, to Cyndi’s List, except that Linkpendium is easier to navigate through. Linkpendium indexex more than 10 million sources of genealogical information. It also has a logo that reminds me of a tomato plant.
The founders of Linkpendium aren’t new to genealogy, or to websites that focus on it. Karen Issacson and Brian Leverich are also the founders of RootsWeb. A merger took place between Ancestry.com and RootsWeb in June of 2000. At that time, RootsWeb had around 600,000 people who were registered users.
Genealogists can use the search engine at Linkpendium to search up to 2,648,502 pages of free genealogical data with a single query. Just to test it out, I put in the name of one of my relatives. I didn’t get a successful result, but it is entirely possible that you will end up with a success if you try the search engine. I intend to try Linkpendium again, when I’m not in the midst of writing a blog.
Even though Linkpendium has been around for years, I had not heard of the website until recently. It turns out that the company has established itself in Cal Poly’s Technology Park. Cal Poly is a shortened name for California Polytechnic State University, which is located in San Luis Obispo, California.
The purpose is for Linkpendium to be able to use some of the resources available at Cal Poly to learn more about how to maintain a large database, categorize large volumes of textual information, and to incorporate areas of natural language processing. Cal Poly isn’t far from where I live, so I learned of Linkpendium through an article in my local newspaper.
Image by Teresa Boardman on Flickr