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Cindy Ingle talks about her creation and maintenance of Cyndislist.com, a comprehensive categorised list of genealogical resources on the internet. The Genealogy Guy and Cyndi emphasise the importance of human curation in genealogical research, Cyndi also highlights the value of delving into the lives of our ancestors beyond basic facts. They also discuss various methodologies and resources for preserving family history and genealogy, including local newspapers, oral histories, and interviews. Cyndi Ingle is the creator and innovator behind the award-winning and globally recognized CyndisList.com a genealogist for more than 44 years of expertise in using technology for genealogy.
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What is Armchair Genealogy - Family Tree & History?
Explore genealogy with "The Genealogy Guy" on Armchair Genealogy, one of the latest genealogy podcasts produced in the UK. Tune in as expert genealogists and diverse practitioners share their knowledge, helping you uncover your roots, build your family tree, and learn about your ancestors' fascinating stories. Whether you are a beginner or a seasoned researcher, the podcast aims to help you connect with your family's past and discover long-lost relatives. Subscribe to Armchair Genealogy today and start your journey into your family's history!
Podcast ident 0:04
The Genealogy Guy podcast, demystifying technology, and exploring family tree research. Please remember to subscribe and share the podcast with family and friends.
Mell 0:18
And once again welcome to another episode of Armchair Genealogy with me the Genealogy Guy with tech support from Broadcast Media UK. As always, if you enjoy this episode, remember you can find all past episodes of armchair genealogy at armchairgenealogy.com. I'm now speaking to Cyndi Ingel, the genealogist writer, and a person behind the award winning Cyndi's list. So, Cyndi to start us off in the in the style of a short elevator pitch. How would you describe Cyndis list?
Cyndi Ingle 0:51
Well, it's a categorised and crossed reference list of links for everything that I can find online for genealogical research.
Mell 0:58
So before we started chatting about Cyndis list, when did you first get into doing your own personal genealogy?
Speaker 1 1:06
I started in high school it was 44 years ago now. We, I had a class project and I, it was a social studies class. And I think the purpose of the assignment was to try to figure out, you know, how diverse was your ethnicity, I was very interested in it. And it kind of had me hooked from that point forward. That same year, my aunt had gone back and visited a bunch of cousins on the East Coast and came home with a whole stack full of family group sheets and pedigree charts and things prior to computers, obviously, and brought them home and shared them with me. And I from that point forward, I was I was hooked entirely.
Mell 1:41
What made you decide to actually set up Cyndis List, what was the driving force behind it?
Cyndi Ingle 1:46
In the summer of 95, I got a new computer. And it was it came with AOL software preloaded in the 9600 baud modem. It was screaming fast. I went online for the first time and I went through AOL because it came loaded with it. And there was this internet thing that you could leave AOL and go out and look at it and find things. And I wondered what I could find for genealogy, I was curious. Up to that point, I probably was a genealogist in a vacuum. I live in Washington state up in the upper left corner of the United States. And all of my people came from back in the Midwest and the East Coast and so, going anywhere to do any research was hard. So the internet having things available for me was really kind of cool and interesting. And so that summer, I spent my whole time doing that. And then in the fall, we get back together at our local Genealogical Society and have a meeting and we had like a share and, tell sort of thing. What did you do over the summer? And so I took a sheet a whole page of all the bookmarks I could find for everything I could find online for genealogy. The quarterly editor came up to me afterwards, because everybody at the meeting was very excited about it. They all wanted to copy I had to go upstairs and make more copies, I think I made 20 copies of that thing. Quarterly editor came up said, Hey, do you think you could expand that? Turn it into an article? For the quarterly and I thought, yeah, how many pages she said, five or six pages. And I thought, Well, I'm gonna have to categorise them if it's gonna be that long. So it started off as an article where I categorised everything I can look for. And I found more to fill out this five to six page article. That was in the September of 95. And then in January of the following year, I taught myself HTML, and made a really rudimentary, ugly looking website,
Mell 3:27
As we all did.
Cyndi Ingle 3:28
Yeah, exactly. I mean, it's funny when I see copies of it now, it looks very 1995 when I taught myself how to do it, all that and then it was a personal site, and I thought, I'll do my genealogy. I published my genealogy, you'll meet cousins. And that was kind of the purpose, right? And then I had this list of links. And I thought, well, maybe somebody else would find this useful if my society liked it. It was a stupid name that I gave it Cindy's list of genealogical sites on the Internet. I put it like little side project there. Everything was very collaborative early on on the internet, and I got people immediately Oh, we link to my site, I'll link to yours and vice versa, and back and forth. And it was officially online March 4 of 1996. And it started becoming like a snowball heading downhill. It just grew and grew and grew. So that by the end of the year, I can't I started off with 1000 links on one web page. By the end of the year, I was splitting it up into separate web pages. I don't even remember how quick it grew 12,000 At the end of the year, and so on and so forth. Today, there's over 320 Almost 330,000 links
Mell T 4:28
Wow.
Cyndi Ingle 4:28
Over 250 I forgot I lost track of counting the categories.
Mell 4:33
So with search engine engines like Google and Bing, you must get asked an awful lot by people just going so why do you need Cyndis List I love I love the way you explain why you need to have Cyndis list and not rely on just a search engine.
Cyndi Ingle 4:49
It even amazes me still today that there's a need for it and a desire for it. First of all straight up if you must be I have had people say Oh, I used to use it. I don't use And where I just use Google. And so I say to them, okay, so if you don't know something exists in the first place, how do you know to Google for it? And there's usually a pause. Oh, the whole point here is that I've been doing genealogy for 44 years. And I've been doing this for 28 years. And I'm really good at finding stuff online. And a lot of what I do a lecture called the hidden web. And we talk about that a lot of what we need for genealogical research is hidden behind a search engines, it's hidden behind databases, it's hidden behind membership walls, or subscription walls or library catalogues. You know, so it's not Google-able, but it's not going to come to the top of the Google hits, or it's buried so far deep within University Library, special manuscript collection, and you've got to dig around. Sometimes it's hard for me to find some of these things I'll dig around in the University Library and Archive websites forever, and locate, you know, the personal diaries of some doctors in an area or obituaries, or just a variety of things that, again, if you didn't know how to go looking for them, or where to go looking for them? How would you know to go Google what it is you need? It was straight up looking for death certificates are looking for birth registration certificates, or looking for cemeteries and things. Some of that can be done that way, but not everything. Because not everything is Google able, is what it comes down to. We still have to use our human brain to try to think, well, you know, if you're doing good research, you're thinking, What is my research plan? What is my focused research question? today? I'm trying to figure out, you know, what unit in the military, great granddad served in? And you're gonna go looking? Well, where do you go find that? Where do you find those answers? A genealogist thinks through all of that things through what kinds of repositories would have those records today? Where are they? Where did those records originate? Originally? Where would they be if they're still at a governmental office? And where would they be archived, et cetera. And that's not stuff that's easily Google trouble without multistep research planning. And that's where Cyndi's list comes in. I mean, I go in, and I find the things that I know we need. And I try to put them in categories that make sense for everybody. And cross referenced them in as many places as possible. So the whole point is, the whole point then was we didn't have great search engines. And the whole point, today's is pretty much still the same, you've got a human being that's curating links for you. She knows you need that aren't going to be easily Google able.
Mell 4:49
It's quite interesting, because I remember back in the days when Yahoo was king, and that was being done curated by people that specialized in particular areas. And what people don't realize now is Google is just working on what what are the most popular sites where people go to, and it doesn't always mean, they are the best sites, that just means they're popular sites, because they get listed the most.
Cyndi Ingle 7:50
That's right. So we have a Facebook group, that genealogy squad, which is a global genealogy group, and we're focused on quality research methodology. And you'll get people asked that question all the time. And they're any other Facebook group group, really? Which one should I subscribe to? And the answer is the one that has what you need. And they kind of confused when you answer it that way. But it's, you need to figure out where do your ancestors live, where you know, in what areas and so you know, you might find things that you need, at all four of the major places Ancestry, Find My Past, My Heritage, Family Search, I would always send people to Family Search first, because it's free, and then go, you know, beyond that, there's going to be certain websites that can help you greatly for one line in your family, and they do nothing for another line and your family, etc, that the whole point here is to try to bring, I also try to spend a lot of time trying to highlight, again, libraries and archives and genealogical and family history societies, historical societies, because they're the ones out there preserving the records that we need, and doing digitisation projects to put these things online. And so I really tried to focus on a lot of that stuff. There's so much we can do without having to first subscribe to something else.
Mell 8:58
Absolutely. The family history groups without them the internet would be, we'd just be bored.
Cyndi Ingle 9:04
Where did they think all these these commercial entities got this stuff to begin with? It was all the volunteer efforts of genealogical societies, family history societies around the world that started doing these kinds of things way back when
Mell 9:14
The first one that was set up, because of the members of the Tacoma Pierce County genealogical?
Cyndi Ingle 9:20
Yes. Tacoma, Tacoma Pierce County. Yes, I was on the board. And I was a member of that. And so went to the meeting. And like I said, I had that that one sheet of paper that I shared, and they asked me to do the article. And for me, it just was, it was not ever anything that I thought would become what it is today. It's a full time more than a full time job. And I've been very fortunate that it turned out to be something I could turn into an occupation. So I can work from home. I've got a son that I raised at home, that sort of thing. So it was wonderful that it started its meant to be helpful to everyone and it turned into something that was then helpful for me too.
Mell 9:59
So do you have a team? Is there people around you, supporting you, and how many roughly,
Cyndi Ingle 10:04
I just kicked the team out of my office when we started this interview that my team Boston terriers that sleep under my desk. That's that's pretty much it. It's me. It's just me.
Mell 10:12
Wow that's incredible.
Cyndi Ingle 10:15
I've had some volunteers through the years that have helped here and there and had somebody that was employed for a few years, way back at the beginning. But no, it's just, it's just me.
Mell 10:27
Trying to get my head around that, because that would take so much commitment to be able to be focused on helping other people. You did a stunning job over the years.
Cyndi Ingle 10:37
Thank you, Mell. Thank you. Yeah, yeah, I mean, either it's either amazing or I'm insane. I'm not sure which.
Mell 10:43
Everybody that studies genealogy ends up going crazy. We all know that.
Cyndi Ingle 10:47
Yeah.
Mell 10:47
And just a short break from chatting with Cindy Ingle from the stunning work she does on CYndislist.com. And I just wanted to ask two things before we continue. One. If you enjoy the podcasts, then please do subscribe to know when new episodes are published. And please do share with family and friends. If they too, are also interested in any form of genealogy. The second thing I wanted to ask is do drop an email to info@armchairgenealogy.com If you want to suggest either future topics to explore in future episodes, or if you want to suggest someone that we should speak to, and hear their genealogical tips. And now back to Cindy Ingle, chatting about her work on Cyndislist.com and her own passions when it comes to genealogy research.
What are your passions? When it comes to genealogy? What is it that you like to find out the sort of the nitty gritty part of it because we all go through the just wanting the names and numbers and dates.
Cyndi Ingle 11:50
I can remember going to a lecture at the Tacoma Pierce County group by a local genealogist who did a column. And she was talking about putting flesh on the bones. And you know, in other words, we can just do dry genealogy names, dates and places, but that's not interesting. These are people, these were people that had lives and had sadnesses and happinesses. And all sorts of things in their lives that made them who they were. And so, really connecting and trying to figure out who they were, in addition to just when and where they were, I think is really important. Right now, we've got in the United States, a lot of people who, and maybe it's in the UK, too, when when someone says, you know, what was what did your ancestor do? Who were they Oh, they were just farmers, like just farmers meant they didn't have lives, or they didn't have anything important going on that made them who they were. And so, my partner in crime, Cari Taplin, and I, and Paula Stewart-Warren are putting this together. And Cari's idea was originally it was her idea that we do a profile on our farming ancestors and try to draw a story of their life and what it would have been like. So we're, we're looking at things like I've got a whole lecture that I'm working on today, that's all about the education, agricultural education, and what they had to learn. I finished working on one last night that was about how they went to market and the kinds of things that drove them to decide where they might purchase land and where they might farm and where they that what kinds of products they had, what kind of farmer they were, were they successful, were they not so really digging into social history and local history, but also what was the science of the time that led them to start to grow a certain crop and be successful or not successful? For me, my ancestry, my Nash line, and a couple other lines are from England, but early on very early on in the 1600s, coming over into Connecticut. And then my my personal direct line is the one that kept going west Connecticut, to New York, into Wisconsin, into Minnesota into the Dakotas, and finally hitting Washington State and California and we hit the ocean, we couldn't go any further west. What drove my personal family lines to leave to leave the family behind and keep going and try to make a better life? What was their life like? And I've learned a lot, just and this is something the other passion of mine is genealogical education. I think that none of us can move forward in our research unless we're actively getting education we need to learn how to do do better, or do more with it. And so in this as I'm writing these lectures and trying to help others find this kind of information, I'm looking for examples from my own family, and finding actually learning more about my own family in the process of preparing to teach others I hadn't really thought about it before but my my, my grandpa, my dad's father came from North Dakota, his parents went to North Dakota to homestead it's in the middle of nowhere. It's flat, it's ugly. It's it's a hard hard life and they went there because they got free land. That that was my great grandparents. But yeah, my great grandfather didn't seem to farm once he got the land and got there and then then I started thinking about it and realising my grandpa was not a farmer. They came from farming people. But when opportunities arose, and in this case with both my great grandfather and his dad, a second great grandfather, and even my grandpa, they all worked on the railroad at different times, when the railroad started coming through, and they could find work and what have you. They went for that that was better money. And it was hard back breaking work. But they did that more than the farming. I learned a little bit about people that I thought I already knew well enough as I was preparing this. And I think that's very telling of, there's a lot more that you can learn. If you start looking into where they lived, when they live, what was happening around them, what were the things driving their decisions, et cetera. My grandpa Ingle deciding to leave North Dakota and come to Washington State during the Depression, because he was looking for work. I'm grateful every day that he brought the family out this way. So it's all of that is putting their lives in context and making them real life people with dreams and hopes and that kind of thing. But in the flesh on the bones.
Mell 16:04
What I always find fascinating myself is is you realise how little, you know, about just general history. As soon as you look at it, you realise you don't know enough about the history of that time period. So you have to go and go away and research, as you say, to find out why they moved. Was there something going on? Was there a war? Was there a change in circumstances? Was it a financial crash? Whatever it was, it would have caused a knock on effect. And that part, it always constantly reminds me, you don't know as much as you think, do you?
Cyndi Ingle 16:37
Exactly, exactly. We are family historians, but we are historians as well, because they didn't just you know, they weren't just born and then got married and then had kids and died. They had lives just like you and I do today, Mell and the stuff that we struggle with. They struggled with that, you know, just for their time period in their their place, whether it was during, you know, periods of like the Great Depression or during wars or during some of these other events that happened. And so because like one of my lectures for next week is about disasters, and how they, how they pivoted from the Dust Bowl, and how they pivoted from, you know, tornadoes and hurricanes and the plague and locusts. I was studying locusts Mell. And it was fascinating some of the things I was reading, but like going back in the newspapers, old newspapers and reading accounts of what was going on right then, and realising these are real life people. This is affecting them.
Mell 17:30
Yeah, I was talking to Brad Argent from Ancestry. And he's really pushing on the fact of how which information is just in local newspapers, to find out what's going on with families. And what was going on in the area who was buying, what plans, it's a fantastic different angle.
Cyndi Ingle 17:49
Because sometimes we get stuck on one of our people, you know, there's a brick wall, and we can't get past that we find no records, we don't know what happened to him. When you start studying the history of the area and the time in which they lived. And you see what other people were doing in there. And they're they're all deciding, you know what we're leaving, we're, we're having a hard time making it financially. Have you heard there's some good land out in Oregon, or have you heard there's, like, we're all going to head to wherever it happens to be. And they go. So if you follow because people didn't do these things in a vacuum. You know, they went with neighbors they went with, with siblings and family groups and cousins. And I've got several instances of that, where I see that the cousins all went as a group. It wasn't just my great grandfather going off into the great beyond it was him and a whole bunch of other people that went at the same time. And so that's the other thing is that when you're stuck on your your guy, look at the people around them. This is referred to generally the FAN club, the friends, associates and neighbors. Sometimes people call this cluster genealogy. But looking at at the activities of all the people in the village or the activities of all the people in that place in time and see what are they doing. It's very likely your guy was doing that too.
Mell 18:56
One of my my personal passions is I'm constantly telling people to record the oldest people that they can find in their families that are still alive, and just record them when they just start reminiscing because they'll mention it and it will be years later. And you'll think Oh yes, I mentioned something about that. But you won't remember any details. But if you've got a recording with a mobile phone, it's just so easy now.
Cyndi Ingle 19:19
My mum lives with me now. And she's she's 83 she's getting up there. But every once in a while she'll start telling me something and so I'll just turn my phone recording on. I haven't even asked her I probably should ask her. But everyone so often she'll say talking about some something like when the 1950 US Census came out. I showed her the page that she was on. And she started telling me when I started naming off neighbors she start telling me all these stories. So I just hit record to try to remember some of the things that she was saying because it was things some stuff I knew and some stuff I hadn't heard. I also I miss my uncle so much but every time my uncle was over for Christmas dinner, I got out this picture that was of his grandparents and my his Mother as a child, and the homestead, they're in North Dakota, and I get out and sit on the table. And he would just start talking, I show it to me. He goes, Oh, that's my grandparents house like, Yeah, I know. And then he, you know, he would tell me something, and it would be slightly different story every time like, one summer when he did this, or what have you. So get out the photos, get out the recording equipment and do that that's so important.
Mell 20:22
You're absolutely right. Because people sort of say, well, when you start, some people feel very awkward if you start interviewing them. So you've got the right thing. You pull out a picture or an artifact, something that's like, been in the family for a long time. And you just say, what's the history with this? Or who are these people? What day was this? What, what were you celebrating? And it gives them a leeway to just start talking.
Cyndi Ingle 20:44
I miss being able to talk to him? And they have done a lot of questions now to the questions keep coming as you go.
Mell 20:51
Absolutely. They they become more when you realise what you should have asked here. Ohh Why didn't I ask that at the time?
Cyndi Ingle 20:57
The older we get, the more we come up with those things? That's for sure.
Mell 21:00
So what plans? What have you got any plans for Cyndis list? Is there any developments that you think you know, you're just going to try and keep it growing?
Cyndi Ingle 21:08
I am the coyote and it is the roadrunner. It constantly is dropping an anvil on my head and laughing at me, you know, it's a lot of work. I'm behind on some of my requests right at the moment, because I took on a new job last September, I'm the executive, genealogical and historical research, or genealogy and historical research, IGHR Exec Director ( Institute of Genealogy and Historical Research) https://ighr.gagensociety.org/ . Our courses are at the end of July, and I'm teaching in another institute at the end of June. So my focus for the last month or two has been really on education and all of that some little bit little behind on some of my requests. And I'm just plugging away, I keep going, I keep getting ideas. Well, for example, this, this farming topic led me to create a farming category on Cyndis List. And so I've got a ton of stuff that I want to add in that category. And it's for anything having to do with with farming anywhere in the world. And so like that's an example, and I'll attend a lecture that somebody is giving a webinar or whatever it is, and they'll mention something and I'll go off and add the links to that. There's not enough time in the day, I wish I could do nothing but Cyndis list. But I also wish I could do nothing but genealogical education, because I love all of it. And I think it's important. So I'm just going to keep going as much as I can, I probably need to move it on to it, it hasn't been redesigned in a while, it's probably something I'm gonna have to eventually move on to WordPress, but I don't personally have the technical capabilities to do that. So I got to figure out how to do that sometime in the next year. So that's about it, just keep going.
Mell 22:41
I can recommend WordPress, it is good, but it is time consuming to get your head around it. But once you've once you've set up the basic mainframe, it's it's quite a good system. And it's quite easy to actually getting and edit pages. So like yourself, I've built web pages over the years. And whatever subject you're doing it on, you end up finding all these other subjects that you then go on into category for this, I can't just do a whole list of links. So you keep creating categories, I was doing ones on folklore, English folklore, and you just spend ages finding all these folklore stories again, right. So this, this needs to be in an area he can't just be UK you need to work through breaking into areas so you know, the subcategories. Just goes on
Cyndi Ingle 22:41
You just name the last 28 years of my life, every time I come up with something and then decide it needs to be broken into new new topics. I've got a lot of occupational topics, for example, and categories for different occupations. And every time I turn around, there's something else that maybe I want to focus on a category I started for Anglican Church for and because I've started sorting out all the different religions. And over here, it's Episcopalian. And so we've got Church of England, Anglican Church, Episcopalian sort of all together in a in a category, because they're all related to one another. But I'm working on that right now.
Mell 23:57
Well, all I can say is, please do continue. Because I can highly recommend to anybody that's either been doing it for years, but never come across your site, or just starting, it's just a fantastic place just to start getting your head around how varied the subject.
Cyndi Ingle 24:12
I would emphasise on that, as you say that don't use a search engine on Cyndis List, because again, if you don't know what to search for, you don't know what to search for. Instead, browse the whole point is browse the categories. I think this is important. And most websites we go to for our research, but browse the categories page and look to see what kinds of how have I broken it down is by by record type, by locality, by ethnicity, by occupation by religion, et cetera, et cetera. So go looking to see is there something that covers the area or the topic you're working on and then browse? That's the whole point what I do.
Mell 24:46
Thats a very good tip. Thank you very much Cyndi, so Cindy's list.com
Cyndi Ingle 24:51
It's free. And we mentioned that it is free.
Mell 24:54
I know it's and that's what makes it even more stuning. It's like it's free and it's so big And it's it's been put together by somebody that's into genealogy. It's not. It's not an algorithm. Well, I'll leave you to get on with, because your days just starting mine's just finishing. So I'll leave to crack on with the day and try and catch up with your backlog that you've already mentioned.
Cyndi Ingle 25:13
Thank you, Mell, thank you for having me today.
Mell 25:15
No, it's been an absolute pleasure. It's always I always enjoy talking to people that work within genealogy because they've all got fantastic stories and bits of information, and just different ways of looking at things so, a very huge thank you there to Cindy Ingle, for taking some time out to chat about her Highly rated Cyndislist.com. A real must see if you're into any form of family history, and genealogical research. Until the next episode, happy and productive research.
Jingle 25:46
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Transcribed by https://otter.ai