Almost every family history website, including The Family History Guide, has links to other helpful sites and resources. Based on the number of those links, you could categorize a “link” site as small, medium, large, or extra large. Although The Family History Guide is not primarily a link site, it would likely fall into the “medium” class, with a few thousand links in all.

Let’s take a look at a few of the best-known link sites, and then we’ll compare and contrast them with The Family History Guide.

Cyndi’s List

Cyndi’s List is perhaps the best-known link site for family history. According to Wikipedia, the  website was founded by Cyndi Howell in 1996 and has been growing ever since. It has numerous categories of links, including Ethnic Groups, Immigration, Localities, Military, Records, and many more. On Cyndi’s List, The Family History Guide appears in the Tutorials and Guides section, and The Family History Guide has numerous references to Cyndi’s list, notably in country and U.S. state pages.

There are currently over 330,000 links to family history resources on Cyndi’s list, making it an “extra large” links site.

Kindred Trails

Kindred Trails is smaller in scope than Cyndi’s List, but it’s well-organized and easy to navigate (let’s put it in the “large” category). Where Cyndi’s List is divided into more separate pages with a larger font size, Kindred Trails goes with a smaller font and more vertical scrolling. It has useful categories for Resources, Databases, and “Freebies”.  The Family History Guide points to Kindred Trails primarily for Location resources, such as country and U.S. state pages.

Linkpendium

Linkpendium is being developed by Karen Isaacson and Brian (Wolf) Leverich, founders of the RootsWeb genealogical community site. In operation since about 2000, the site claims an astonishing 10 million links to genealogical resources, making it a truly colossal link site. It also has a very effective search engine for other genealogy sites and materials. There is an interesting overview of Linkpendium on one of Amy Johnson Crow’s blog sites—”A Surprising Source to Find Millions of Genealogy Websites“. The Family History Guide references Linkpendium in a number of places, especially for county research in U.S. states.

The Family History Guide

So is The Family History Guide a link site? Not really, in the traditional sense. While it does have several thousand links, most of them are not collected into categories as with Cyndi’s List and Linkpendium. Instead, they are woven into a comprehensive learning system for family history. Here’s a summary of how links are used in The Family History Guide:

• Most website links are inside learning steps, which in turn are part of Goals and Choices.
• There are actually more links to published articles and videos than to websites, which makes The Family History Guide fundamentally different from most Link sites.
• The Vault more closely resembles the layout of a links site, but all its entries are links to articles and videos, not to websites.
• Rather than arranging links on pages by categories, The Family History Guide introduces “just-in-time-learning,: where links are presented when the learner needs them to accomplish instructional tasks.

Be sure to check out the link sites mentioned in this article, either by reference from The Family History Guide or by going directly to their sites.

Editor’s Note: We neglected to mention one of our go-to link sites for The Family History Guide— LDSGenealogy.com. It’s important to note that the links there are of interest to everyone, not just the LDS audience. For example, you can find a great collection of U.S. record links there. Thanks to Jeniann Nielsen for the great work she does with the site.